Pack up, US tells Gaddafi Cops join people's uprising
Source: The Sangai Express / (Agencies)

Tripoli, February 27 2011: Muammar Gaddafi's grip on Libya looked ever more tenuous on Saturday, as his police abandoned parts of the capital Tripoli to a popular revolt that has swept the country and the United States bluntly told him he must go.

In the oil-rich east around the second city of Benghazi, freed a week ago by a disparate coalition of people power and defecting military units, a former minister of Gaddafi announced the formation of an "interim government" to reunite the country.

At Tripoli in the west, the 68-year-old Brother Leader's redoubt was shrinking.

Reuters correspondents found residents in some neighborhoods of the capital barricading their streets and proclaiming open defiance after security forces melted away.

Western leaders, their rhetoric emboldened by evacuations that have sharply reduced the number of their citizens stranded in the oilfields and cities of the sprawling desert state, spoke out more clearly to say Gaddafi's 41-year rule must now end.

"When a leader's only means of staying in power is to use mass violence against his own people, he has lost the legitimacy to rule and needs to do what is right for his country by leaving now," aides to President Barack Obama said in describing a call on Libya he had with German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton also showed a harder tone from Washington, which lately warmed to Gaddafi in recent years after decades of sanctions: "(He) has lost the confidence of his people and he should go without further bloodshed and violence" .

A vote in the United Nations Security Council was imminent.

It may impose sanctions and say Gaddafi should face war crimes charges over deaths, estimated by diplomats at some 2,000, during his 10 days of efforts to stem the tide of revolution.

Talk of possible military action by foreign Govts remained vague, however.

It was unclear how long Gaddafi, with some thousands of loyalistsincluding his tribesmen and military units commanded by his sonsmight hold out against rebel forces comprised .

London-based Algerian lawyer Saad Djebbar, who knows a large number of Gaddafi's top officials, says that for Gaddafi staying in power had become impossible.

"It's about staying alive" .

"(Gaddafi's) time is over," he added.

"But how much damage he will cause before leaving is the question" .

One key element in the opposition's efforts to unseat him may be tribal loyalties, always a factor in the desert nation of six million and one which Gaddafi, despite official rhetoric to the contrary, tended to reinforce down the years.

His former justice minister Mustafa Mohamed Abud Ajleil, now gone over to the opposition in Benghazi, was quoted by the online edition of the Quryna newspaper as saying that an interim government, whose status remained unclear, would "forgive" his large Gaddadfa tribe for "crimes" committed by the leader.

Such declarations may be intended to erode Gaddafi's efforts to rally supporters into a do-or-die defense of the old guard.

Some of those closest to Gaddafi have been deserting him and joining the opposition.

On Saturday, Libya's envoy to the United States told Reuters he backed Abud Ajleil's caretaker teamthough it was unclear how much popular support that would have.

One of Gaddafi's sons, the London-educated Saif al-Islam, again appeared on television on Saturday to deny that much of Libya was in revolt.

But he also warned: "What the Libyan nation is going through has opened the door to all options, and now the signs of civil war and foreign interference have started" .

Gaddafi, once branded a "mad dog" by Washington for his support of militant groups worldwide, has been embraced by the West in recent years in return for renouncing some weapons programs and, critically, for opening up Libya's 1oilfields.While money has flowed into Libya, many people, especially in the long-restive and oil-rich east, have seen little benefit and, inspired by the popular overthrow of veteran strongmen in Tunisia and Egypt, on either side of their country, they rose up to demand better conditions and political freedoms last week.

Particular condemnation has been reserved for aerial bombing by government forces and for reported indiscriminate attacks by Gaddafi loyalists and mercenaries on unarmed protesters.

"Gaddafi is the enemy of God!" a crowd chanted on Saturday in Tajoura, a poor neighborhood of Tripoli, at the funeral of a man they said was shot down by Gaddafi loyalists the day before.

Now, residents said, those security forces had disappeared.

Locals had erected barricades of rocks and palm trees across rubbish-strewn streets, and graffiti covered many walls.

Bullet holes in the walls of the houses bore testimony to the violence.

The residents, still unwilling to be identified for fear of reprisals, said troops fired on demonstrators who tried to march from Tajoura to central Green Square overnight, killing at least five people.

The number could not be independently confirmed.

"We will demonstrate again and again, today, tomorrow, the day after tomorrow until they change," one protester said.

Libyan state television again showed a crowd chanting their loyalty to Gaddafi in Tripoli's Green Square on Saturday.

But journalists there estimated their number at scarcely 200 .

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