George Joffe writes:

Libya is essentially a desert, with the only areas that can support intensive residence located in the Jefara Plain, around Tripoli in Tripolitania, and the Jabal al-Akhdar behind Benghazi in Cyrenaica.

The result has been that Libya’s six million-strong population, as a result of oil-fired economic development in the rentier state that emerged at the end of the 1960s, is now highly urbanised and largely concentrated in these two cities and the satellite towns around them.

This means that any regime which loses control of them has lost control of the country, even if it controls all outlying areas, such as the oil fields in the Gulf of Sirt between them, which is also the home base of the Qadhadhfa, or the Fezzan that still seems to be loyal to the Gaddafi regime.

It is this that explains how, once the army in Benghazi changed sides, the regime lost control of Eastern Libya and why its hold on Tripoli, the capital, has been so rapidly contested.

Nor should the nature of the regime or the Gaddafi family be ignored as a factor for the collapse. The regime has, in recent years, benefited from growing foreign investment in Libya, alongside its massive oil revenues, after sanctions in connection with the Lockerbie affairs were removed in 1999.

As foreign economic interest grew, so did corruption and, although Colonel Gaddafi himself may not have been corrupt, his seven sons and one daughter certainly were, drawing their fortunes from commissions and income streams siphoned off from the oil-and-gas sector.

Libyans themselves have been excluded from the benefits of oil wealth for decades, so the blatant corruption inflamed their resentment in recent years.

In addition, the Libyan leader, who had no formal role inside the jamahiriyah but made sure that the Revolutionary Committee Movement answered only to him, has played on the aspirations of his sons to succeed him, pitting one against the other to ensure that none of them could amass sufficient power to threaten his position.

In such an atmosphere of eternal mistrust and suspicion, it is hardly surprising that the ultimate bastion of the regime has been the “foreign mercenaries” that have terrified Libyans with their indiscriminate violence during the country’s latest revolution.

Yet, they too form part of the leader’s conception of the state. In the 1980s, Libya opened its borders to all who were Muslim, as part of its vision of Arab nationalism and Islamic radicalism.

The regime also recruited an “Islamic Legion” to aid it in its foreign adventures, particularly in Africa, as Chad, Uganda and Tanzania were to discover.

In 1997, Libya also renounced its self-image as an Arab state, prioritising its African destiny instead, opening its borders to sub-Saharan Africa, despite the intense domestic tensions that the inflow of migrants generated, which resulted in riots and deaths in September 2000.

Now, apart from using African migrants as a tool to coerce European states such as Italy with the threat of uncontrolled migration, it has also recruited them into its elite forces around the “Deterrent Battalion” (the 32nd Brigade) which are used solely for internal repression.

They have no loyalty to Libyans who hate them and they are the forces on which Colonel Gaddafi relies to ensure that his regime ends in a bloodbath to punish Libyans for their disloyalty to his political vision.

Whatever the Colonel thinks – and it is what he thinks that determines the struggle inside Libya today – there are objective factors that will determine the outcome.

Unrest in Western Libya has already led to towns in the Jefara Plain falling to the widening anti-regime movement. Zuwara is said to have been taken over by them and major struggles are taking place between armed forces loyal to the Gaddafi regime and the inchoate movement opposed to it in Misurata and Zawiya, where helicopter gunships seem to have been used.

Even if Tripoli is still under regime control, the towns surrounding it seem to be slipping away. Eventually, the leader will control only the capital and nothing else.

Teenagers high on drugs, incited by Osama bin Laden — this is Muammar Gaddafi’s explanation gives for the current challenge to his rule.

What is happening now in Libya is not people’s power, it’s international terrorism led by al-Qaeda … All they want is to kill your kids, that’s what Bin Laden wants, he should be happy now, that’s what he wants.

The Guardian reports:

Rebels are increasing their hold on Muammar Gaddafi’s ailing regime, by shutting down oil exports and mobilising rebel groups in the west of the country as the revolution rapidly spreads. Gaddafi’s hold on power appears confined to parts of Tripoli and perhaps several regions in the centre of the country. Towns to the west of the capital have fallen or are being fought over. Gun battles are taking place between forces loyal to Gaddafi and his opponents in the town of Az-Zawiyah, 30 miles west of Tripoli, according to witnesses. Order is returning to the sacked second city of Benghazi after days of fierce fighting that saw the military defect en masse and virtually all government buildings razed and looted. Gaddafi was expected to make a statement at some point soon…

Nato says it will not intervene in Libya. Its secretary-general, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, says the alliance has received no such requests and that in any case any intervention must be based on a UN mandate. Rasmussen says the turmoil in Libya does not threaten any Nato members, but the conflict could spark a mass refugee crisis.

Gaddafi will commit suicide as Adolf Hitler did at the end of the Second World War rather than surrender or flee, according to a former Libyan cabinet minister.

The claim comes in an interview with former justice minister Mustafa Mohamed Abud Al Jeleil in the Swedish newspaper Expressen:

“Gaddafi’s days are numbered. He will do what Hitler did – he will take his own life.”

Al Jeleil earlier claimed that Gaddafi had ordered the Lockerbie bombing.

When Gaddafi said bin Laden must be happy now, he spoke with an air of resignation — much of his tone of defiance from yesterday having dissipated.

Denial, bargaining, anger, depression — most of the stages of dying are already evident. Al Jeleil may well be right and what we are witnessing now is a tyrant in dialogue with his own death. Acceptance comes as he pulls the trigger.

Asli Bali and Ziad Abu-Rish write:

The first test of any would-be interventionist is this: do no harm. And there is very little evidence that direct intervention in the Libyan case could meet this test. For instance, calls for a no-fly zone by Libya’s Deputy Ambassador to the U.N. (drawing on the Iraqi precedent of the 1990s) and an air campaign by others (drawing on the Kosovo precedent from 1999) would surely fail this test. Neither option would shield the Libyan civilian population from the regime’s coercive apparatus (which is not principally aerial) and both options may entail serious costs to civilians by freezing or exacerbating the situation on the ground. Beyond raising questions of enforcement (would international forces fire on Libyan aircraft?), a no-fly zone might well block one method of escape for Libyan civilians or close an avenue for defections by members of the air force, such as the four pilots that are known to have flown out and defected in disobedience of direct orders to bomb civilians. Alternatively, air strikes run the risk of serious damage to both the civilian population and infrastructure. In short, any intervention must be crafted to offer real support to the civilian population of Libya, which direct forms of coercive intervention like no-fly zones or air strikes would not. But are there other forms of intervention that would be better suited to the task? Given limited knowledge of Libya’s internal dynamics at present and the heavy-handed interventionist toolkit developed to date by the international community any such option must be approached with caution.

Coercive options should be taken off the table. Absent the political will to commit ground forces to serve as a meaningful buffer between the regime and the population, any coercive intervention will do more damage (particularly to civilians) than good. Further, even if the political will existed for forceful intervention to offer direct protection to Libyan civilians, history suggests that the ultimate outcome of such intervention would still be harmful. Aside from the obvious potential threats to the civilian populations from the presence of foreign troops on their soil, including risks from a ground conflict and risks associated with the possibility of a prolonged presence, there are additional considerations that weigh against such intervention. At a time when the regime appears to be crumbling from within, as a result of the courageous mobilization of its own people, to engage in an eleventh hour intervention runs the very serious risk of depriving the Libyan people of their control over the hard-won transition they have initiated. To rebrand the Libyan uprising with the last minute trappings of international liberation (read: “Made in the West”) would do a serious disservice to the achievements of the protesters. Of course, none of this is to absolve the international community of its obligation to support Libyan civilians. Rather, we seek to identify a principled course of action that speaks to the dire situation, our responsibilities towards it, and the power relations that frame it.

In the immediate context, the most appropriate role for the international community is in providing humanitarian assistance and desisting from any further support to the regime. In addition to condemning the regime’s resort to violence, there are at least five modalities for the provision of such assistance, all of which should be employed immediately, with the support of the Security Council. First, all borders should be opened and appropriate facilities created to allow Libyan civilians to flee regime violence. If various governments are going to create exit routes through charter flights and land crossings for their own citizens, they also need to create a mechanism for Libyans to get out. Second, all available means for providing direct humanitarian assistance on the ground to the Libyan population should be utilized, including aid convoys to eastern Libya through Egypt and to western Libya through Tunisia. Third, al-Qaddafi’s assets and those of remaining elements of the regime should be frozen and kept in safe keeping to be given to whatever post-Qaddafi system emerges. Fourth, governments with ties to Libya should immediately sever all military ties, withholding delivery of materiel and cancelling all outstanding contracts. Finally, an arms embargo should be imposed preventing the sale or delivery of military equipment or personnel (including foreign mercenaries) to the Libyan state security forces. Sanctions that target military materiel, services and the movement of reinforcements from among foreign mercenaries are essential. Sanctions that go beyond these aims would run the risk of causing more harm to civilians than to the regime.

The first foreign dispatch from Libya’s blood-soaked capital:

Up to 15,000 men, women and children besieged Tripoli’s international airport last night, shouting and screaming for seats on the few airliners still prepared to fly to Muammar Gaddafi’s rump state, paying Libyan police bribe after bribe to reach the ticket desks in a rain-soaked mob of hungry, desperate families. Many were trampled as Libyan security men savagely beat those who pushed their way to the front.

Among them were Gaddafi’s fellow Arabs, thousands of them Egyptians, some of whom had been living at the airport for two days without food or sanitation. The place stank of faeces and urine and fear. Yet a 45-minute visit into the city for a new airline ticket to another destination is the only chance to see Gaddafi’s capital if you are a “dog” of the international press.

There was little sign of opposition to the Great Leader. Squads of young men with Kalashnikov rifles stood on the side roads next to barricades of upturned chairs and wooden doors. But these were pro-Gaddafi vigilantes – a faint echo of the armed Egyptian “neighbourhood guard” I saw in Cairo a month ago – and had pinned photographs of their leader’s infamous Green Book to their checkpoint signs.

There is little food in Tripoli, and over the city there fell a blanket of drab, sullen rain. It guttered onto an empty Green Square and down the Italianate streets of the old capital of Tripolitania. But there were no tanks, no armoured personnel carriers, no soldiers, not a fighter plane in the air; just a few police and elderly men and women walking the pavements – a numbed populous. Sadly for the West and for the people of the free city of Benghazi, Libya’s capital appeared as quiet as any dictator would wish.

But this is an illusion. Petrol and food prices have trebled; entire towns outside Tripoli have been torn apart by fighting between pro- and anti-Gaddafi forces. In the suburbs of the city, especially in the Noufreen district, militias fought for 24 hours on Sunday with machine guns and pistols, a battle the Gadaffi forces won. In the end, the exodus of expatriates will do far more than street warfare to bring down the regime.

The Guardian reports:

Muammar Gaddafi was looking increasingly isolated after damaging defections by senior regime figures and key military commanders and units as the uprising spread closer to Tripoli.

Malta denied a report that Gaddafi’s daughter, Aisha, was on board a Libyan plane refused permission to land on the island on Wednesday. But Menas, a respected London Middle East consultancy, said the leader’s wife, daughter, daughters-in-law and grandchildren had left Libya for an unknown destination.

Mass protests erupted in Misurata, a Mediterranean port and the country’s third-largest city, and violence was reported in Sebrata and Zawiya, which are also in western Libya and closer to Tripoli.

Benghazi and much of the east of the country have now been lost to the government. Misurata is near Sirte, the leader’s home town, where a key tribe has reportedly come out in support of what is being called the 17 February revolution.

Al-Jazeera TV reported that tribes in the Azzintan and Nalut areas, also in the west, had come out against Gaddafi. Oil facilities were now under their protection.

Libyan and Arab sources said the biggest blow to Gaddafi so far had been the defection of his interior minister and veteran loyalist, Abdel-Fatah Younes al-Obeidi, who called on the army on Tuesday to “serve the people and support the revolution and its legitimate demands”.

But the whereabouts of other senior comrades remains unclear. Mustafa al-Kharroubi, a leading figure in the regime’s old guard, is rumoured to have left Tripoli. There are question marks too about another loyalist, Khweildi al-Hmeidi, whose daughter is married to the leader’s wayward son Sa’adi.

In another blow to the Libyan leader, his former justice minister, Mustafa Abdel-Jalil, who stepped down this week, was quoted as saying today that Gaddafi personally ordered the Lockerbie bombing, in which 270 people were killed.

Another departure was of Youssef Sawan, who quit as director of the Gaddafi International Charitable Foundation run by the leader’s son, the supposedly reformist-minded Saif al-Islam.

Libyan exile sources also confirmed the defection of a senior figure in the revolutionary committees, Ali al-Sahouli, who warned that Gaddafi would sabotage the country’s infrastructure including oil installations, power stations and banks.

The International Criminal Court has issued a statement that it cannot investigate war crimes occurring in Libya unless the issue is referred to the court by the UN Security Council. It seems unlikely that the UNSC will take this step unless it is also willing to take actions (not simply issue condemnations) in an effort to prevent more war crimes taking place.

Tom Malinowski from Human Rights Watch challenges the claim that the US and its allies lack the leverage required to halt Gaddafi.

There are numerous steps the United States and its allies can take today to affect the immediate calculations of the Qaddafi regime. Europe buys 85 percent of Libya’s oil, after all. And the West largely controls the international financial system through which the Libyan leadership moves its money — and could block transactions with one word from the Treasury Department or other finance ministries. And there’s more: Western governments could say today that they will seek international investigations and prosecutions of Libyan officials who murder their people. And they could offer to provide humanitarian assistance to parts of Libya that have fallen to the opposition.

Qaddafi may rail endlessly about foreign meddling, but the reaction of Western governments clearly matters to his regime. Why else would it have gone to such lengths to hide what it is doing by shutting down the Internet and communications with the outside world?

We should be under no illusion that Qaddafi himself will give in to international pressure at this point. As his brutal tactics show, he is fighting for his life. But Libya’s fate is not in Qaddafi’s hands; it is in the hands of those who must decide, today and tomorrow, whether to follow his orders. Every psychological blow to Qaddafi’s government — whether it is a Libyan official who defects to the opposition or a forceful repudiation of his government by the international community — gives them another reason to refuse to commit further outrages on their leader’s behalf, for which they may be held accountable when the crisis is over.

“Our leverage is limited” is a phrase diplomats use to absolve themselves from responsibility. It is both true — after all, U.S. influence is never unlimited — and utterly irrelevant. The only question the United States and other countries should be asking now is how to use the leverage they have to bring the calamity unfolding in Libya to an end.

Ranj Alaaldin argues in favor of the creation of a no-zone across Libya.

A no-fly zone will ensure Libyan helicopter gunships are not used to dreadful effect against indiscriminate targets like they were during the 1991 uprising in Iraq. It will deprive the regime of the ability to enforce extraordinarily brutal countermeasures from the air, like the bombardment of heavily populated residential areas and the destroying of homes.

As the regime becomes more and more desperate, so too will its response become more brutal. Can the international community depend and pin their hopes on further defections and pilots refusing to carry out such orders, like the two that yesterday sought asylum in Malta? Maybe. But the prudent person would argue that is a risk too grave to take and one that effectively gambles with the lives of thousands. The city of Benghazi, reportedly under the control of the regime’s opponents, has a population of 600,000. It will be the first to be hit and the international community will be unable to do anything but disgracefully watch.

Failure to prevent genocides and massacres around the world has put the international community on the wrong side of history. Yet, this is a chance to prevent another mass atrocity from taking place, a chance for us to take a responsible measure rather than a reactionary one that comes too late. The international community has the capacity to limit Gaddafi’s capacity for mass murder by keeping his bombers grounded.

Frank Gardner describes the “murky network of paramilitary brigades, ‘revolutionary committees’ of trusted followers, tribal leaders and imported foreign mercenaries, who are allowing Gaddafi to retain his grip on power.

Martin Chulov is the first foreign journalist to have reached Benghazi.

Libya’s second city, Benghazi, appears to have fallen beyond the control of Muammar Gaddafi, with the local military defying his regime and monarchy-era flags flying from government buildings.

As the first foreign news organisation to report from so-called Free Benghazi, the Guardian witnessed defecting troops pouring into the courtyard of a ransacked police station carrying tonnes of weaponry and ammunition looted from a military armoury to stop it being seized by forces loyal to the Libyan dictator.

Soldiers brought rockets and heavy weapons which had been used in an assault on citizens in central Benghazi on Saturday as Gaddafi tried to keep control of the city. Doctors in Benghazi said that at least 230 people were killed, with a further 30 critically injured.

There was also the clearest confirmation yet that Gaddafi’s regime used outside mercenaries to try to suppress the rebellion. Adjoining the police station a large crowd gathered in another courtyard. Upstairs, the Guardian saw a number of mercenaries, allegedly flown in the previous week, being interrogated by lawyers and army officials.

An air force officer, Major Rajib Faytouni, said he personally witnessed up to 4,000 mercenaries arrive on Libyan transport planes over a period of three days starting from 14 February. He said: “That’s why we turned against the government. That and the fact there was an order to use planes to attack the people.”