Libyan President Muammar Gaddafi has vowed on national television that he will not step down from the country’s leadership, and was ready “to die a martyr.”
Speaking in the third person, Gaddafi said “I am not going to leave this land. I shall remain, defiant. Muammar is leader of the revolution until the end of time.”
The leader of the 42 year-old autocracy has reportedly used African mercenaries, snipers and even anti-aircraft missiles to target increasingly fractious demonstrators, with reports of 200-300 killed.
Referring to his green copy of the Libyan penal code, Gaddafi stated that anyone Libyan who “uses weapons against Libya will be sentenced to death.”
The public speech, he said, was intended to refute earlier reports in the international media that he had escaped to Venezuela.
A New York Times journalist in the country reported that much of the east appeared to now be under opposition control. Many of the protesters were armed, she observed.
The UN Security Council has meanwhile called for Gaddafi to cease his campaign of violence against his own people, deploring “the repression of peaceful demonstrators.”
Libya’s Deputy Ambassador to the UN, Ibrahim al-Dabashi, defected from Gaddafi’s regime and confirmed that the east of the country was no longer under government control. He said he had received reports of “genocide” occurring in the country’s west.
The UN Security Council’s message to Gaddafi was “not strong enough. But any message to the Libyan government at this stage is good,” he said.
As well as losing the UN delegation, Gaddafi has lost at least one military battalion and two air force colonels, who flew to Malta in their jets and requested asylum after refusing to bomb protesters.
The Maldives has meanwhile joined Jordan and Qatar among Muslim nations called for an emergency session of the UN Human Rights Council, on which Libya also sits.
Maldivian President Mohamed Nasheed called on the international community to “strengthen measures to realise the aspirations of the Libyan people to fundamental rights and freedoms.”
“The right not to be tortured, the freedom to speak your mind, the ability to choose your own government… these liberties are not the preserve of Western nations but universal values to which everyone aspires,” Nasheed said. “These are the forces that are being played out on the streets of Libya and other countries of the Middle East.”
Established democracies had a responsibility to assist those who aspired to democracy and basic freedoms, he said.
Retired British MP Robert Key, who is currently visiting the Maldives for the first time since taking its case for democracy to the British parliament, said earlier this week that the Maldives had led “blazed a trail in promoting democracy and empowerment of the citizen, with all the difficulties that presents”, and could “hold its head high”.
“There will be leaders in North Africa who will be wishing they had listened to the Maldives, had done what the Maldives chose to do in 2008,” he said.
Oil prices spiked to US$106 a barrel on the back of ongoing unrest in the region.
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Could someone at the minivan news crew PLEASE slap that British Member of Parliament awake?
The Maldivian government today is a chimera, an abomination with two heads that want to tear the nation apart with squabbles.
Gaddafi is not a Muslim. He is not even a human being. He is a brute; a disgrace both to the Arab and the Muslim world. The sooner he goes, the better for us all.
The Maldives deprives at least one right that President Nasheed failed to list. So why does he pick on Colonel Gaddafi?
Can someone slap aliased to wake him up, may be he is still in maumoonism.its 2011
Britain in its neo-colonial form is not interested in the domestic issues plaguing our country.
We are a mere showcase for the Western powers to display to an ill-defined "muslim world". Our sudden elevation to a seat on the UNHRC, our new President's astonishing popularity abroad, the scattered hints found in cables leaked by Julian Assange & C0 - all of this serves to make us, the Maldivian people, suspicious of recent events in the Middle East.
This sudden explosion of democratic fervor is mostly initiated, funded and spurred by the West as any fool can guess. Why? One can only speculate.
The well-being of the natives was never the imperative in the development of infrastructure in India & Sri Lanka. Rather it was the relative abundance of resources in those countries.
Our tiny economy which almost exclusively rests on foreign-operated resort hotels are not vital enough for Britain to give a fig about our brainwashed, repressed and economically crippled society.
It can be argued that a severely mismanaged economy and poorly trained populace forces us to depend solely on Western handouts - which is the cause for our President's reduction to a jester for Western amusement. However, concrete steps have not been taken as of yet to rectify our situation.
Education has been cheapened to the level where the students in our so-called "National Top Ten" have the general knowledge of forest-dwelling pygmies. Our social fabric has been torn asunder leaving generations of youths who do not follow any moral code whatsoever. Our new government has however found ways to benefit from the credulity of the masses and begin their way to becoming those they made loud and empty declarations against in the past.
Why so mad, black?.
You do know that as long as the previous regime has any trace of power left, the Maldivian citizens will always be the ones to suffer?
And tsk tsk, the forest pygmies find great offense at your biased statements. 😛