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PDFTwo of Col. Muammar Qaddafi’s sons “want to move toward change for the country” without their quixotic father, a person close to the two brothers said.
“They have hit so many brick walls with the old guard, and if they have the go-ahead, they will bring the country up quickly.” One son has often said that “the wishes of the rebellion were his own.”
The proposals may signal that the Qaddafi regime is fracturing or seeking to negotiate a solution to the current conflict.
Italy today became the latest government to recognize the opposition National Transitional Council as the legitimate representative of the Libyan people.
The politically inchoate opposition has been plagued by growing internal divisions within its leadership, but the transitional council recently published its blueprint for a democratic Libya and a small cadre of activists is diligently preparing for a transition.
Benghazi-based law professor Ahmed Sadek El Gehani “represents the mainstreaming of the revolt,” according to a New York Times report. He and his colleagues have been drafting a temporary constitution for the country, along with three colleagues, has been quietly helping to create a temporary constitution for the country, “a reminder that away from the drama in the upper echelons of the leadership, a core of activists is still protecting the aims of the uprising, including a new constitution and greater freedoms.”
It is also a reminder that Libya’s democracy movement is home-grown and not the result of a foreign conspiracy – the regional autocrats’ reflex claim when challenged by popular protests.
“For despots who have come to power through military coups and wars, and bribed, plotted and killed to stay there, how could politics not be a conspiracy theory when its leading practitioners compulsively conspire?” notes Mideast analyst David Gardner.
“So pervasive is this discourse that one might think there is something in the local water,” he writes. “It was an Egyptian official who, after deadly attacks at Red Sea resorts, hypothesized that Mossad, Israeli’s external intelligence agency, had planted killer sharks.
Former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak blamed his downfall on a strange alliance of Israel and Hamas; Yemen’s beleaguered President Ali Abdullah Saleh claimed that Washington was orchestrating the regional upsurge from “an operations room in Tel Aviv with the aim of destabilizing the Arab world” and Qaddafi insists that Libya’s rebels are being manipulated by led by al-Qaeda jihadis who spiked their coffee with hallucinogenic drugs.
But it seems that Youssef Shakeir didn’t get the memo. A pro-Qaddafi pundit on the state-run al-Jamahiriya TV channel, he claims the rebel “conspiracy” is orchestrated by Libyan activists funded and trained by the National Endowment for Democracy, the Washington-based democracy assistance group.
A NED spokeswoman said there was “no truth” to his suggestion.
