Gadhafi vows to fight ‘to the last man, the last woman’

TRIPOLI—Libyan strongman Moammar Gadhafi vowed Wednesday to fight an uprising against his 41-year rule to “the last man, the last woman,” as rebels repulsed an attack by his forces on an eastern town.

His speech at a ceremony of loyalists in the capital Tripoli came as the UN refugee agency made a plea for hundreds of planes to end a gridlock at the Tunisia border with Libya, where “acres of people” fleeing the violence are still waiting to cross in freezing conditions.

As two US warships steamed through the Suez Canal toward the Mediterranean and Western nations began flexing their military muscle, Arab League chief Amr Mussa told a Cairo meeting that the situation in Libya was “catastrophic.”

Gadhafi has warned “thousands of Libyans” will die if the United States or NATO intervenes in his country.

The United States is moving naval and air forces closer to Libyan shores and is calling for Gadhafi to give up power immediately.

Blaming Al-Qaida

Gadhafi, in a speech broadcast live on state television, blamed Al-Qaida for the uprising which has seen him lose control of most of Libya’s east, including its main oil fields.

“Sleeper cells from Al-Qaida, its elements, infiltrated gradually … They believe the world is theirs, they fight everywhere, the intelligence services know them by name,” Gadhafi told the ceremony, which was to mark the anniversary of the launch of the People’s Committees.

“Suddenly it started in (the eastern town of) Al-Baida … The sleeping cell was told to attack the battalion … and it took arms from police stations,” said Gadhafi.

“The soldiers went home and left their battalion” while the Al-Qaida cells “took the weapons and control of the town.

“The women fled … bullets were everywhere. It was the same situation in Benghazi,” he said of the main eastern city under the control of the rebel forces.

But he said “we will fight to the end, to the last man, the last woman … with God’s help.”

The ceremony was aired live shortly after rebels said they had repelled an attack by Gadhafi’s forces in the eastern town of Brega on Wednesday, with witnesses reporting two civilians killed.

The counterattack was one of the biggest yet since the uprising against Gadhafi’s rule erupted on Feb. 15.

Residents of Brega, 200 kilometers southwest of Benghazi, said by telephone that Gadhafi’s men had stormed the town with tanks and heavy artillery and that violent fighting had erupted at the port.

“Brega is now under the full control of the revolution,” a police general in Ajdabiya said on condition of anonymity.

Air strikes

Libyan warplanes bombed on Wednesday an ammunition depot on the outskirts of the rebel-held eastern town of Ajdabiya, 140 km south of Benghazi. The air force has launched repeated air strikes during the two-week revolt, but all of them appear to have targeted weapons depots in areas controlled by the rebellion.

Rebels forced Gadhafi’s forces to withdraw after fighting in which witnesses said two people were killed, opposition leaders in the rebel-held town of Ajdabiya told AFP.

UNHCR spokesperson Sybella Wilkes told AFP in Geneva that the situation on the Libya-Tunisia border was dire.

“My colleague on the ground say that acres of people, as far as you can see, are waiting to cross,” she said.

“They are outdoors in the freezing cold, under the rain, many of them have spent three or four nights outside already,” said the spokesperson.

More than 100,000 people have already left Libya to escape a vicious crackdown by Gadhafi loyalists which has left at least 1,000 dead, according to conservative UN estimates.

The USS Kearsarge and the USS Ponce carrying marines and equipment entered the Suez Canal early Wednesday, an Egyptian canal authority official said. The warships are expected to enter the Mediterranean by evening.

No-fly zones

Some NATO countries are drawing up contingency plans modeled on the no-fly zones over the Balkans in the 1990s in case the international community decides to impose an air embargo over Libya, diplomats said Wednesday.

NATO has already said that any such move would require a clear mandate from the UN Security Council. This is unlikely because Russia, which has veto power in the council, has already rejected the idea.

Still, diplomats at NATO and the European Union said some countries, including United States and Britain, are already drawing up contingency plans to prevent Gadhafi’s air force from carrying out air strikes against the rebels.

British Prime Minister David Cameron, a leading advocate of the no-fly option, said it was unacceptable for Gadhafi to “be murdering his own people, using aeroplanes and helicopter gunships and the like.”

London said a no-fly zone did not necessarily require UN approval, but new French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe ruled out military action without a clear UN mandate, and Russia appears skeptical.

“There is no unanimity within NATO for the use of armed forces,” US Defense Secretary Robert Gates said in Washington.

Winning a UN mandate could prove difficult, with the foreign minister of Russia, a veto-wielding member of the Security Council, dismissing talk of a no-fly zone as “superfluous.”

“We also have to think about frankly the use of the US military in another country in the Middle East,” US Defense Secretary Robert Gates said.

The diplomats, who could not be named due to the sensitivity of the issue, said the options being looked into are modeled on the no-fly zone which the Western military alliance imposed over Bosnia in 1993 that had a UN mandate.

They also cited NATO’s aerial offensive against Yugoslavia in 1999—which did not have the UN Security Council mandate—in response to the crackdown on ethnic Albanian nationalists in Kosovo. The onslaught ended after 78 days with Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic agreeing to withdraw his forces from Kosovo.

But an EU official noted that taking control of the airspace over Libya would more likely be modeled on Operation Deny Flight, a 1993-95 NATO mission in which its warplanes patrolled the skies over Bosnia as a civil war raged between government forces and Serb secessionists.

“I believe it could be successful also in Libya, because it would prevent bombing … areas taken from Gadhafi’s control,” Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini told the Il Messaggero newspaper in Rome.

Mussa described the situation in Libya as “catastrophic” as foreign ministers meeting in Cairo prepared to reject foreign military intervention against Gadhafi’s regime.

The Libya crisis is an internal Arab affair and foreign powers should refrain from any intervention, Iraq’s foreign minister said at meeting of the Arab League, which has suspended Gadhafi’s government. Reports from Agence France-Presse and Associated Press