Tripoli, 27 October:
Russia has demanded that “war crimes” in Libya committed since the fall of the Qaddafi regime be investigated by the International Criminal Court.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Thursday that Moscow believed that all those responsible for killing civilians had to be held accountable.
Referring to last year’s decision by the Security Council to refer Libya to the ICC, he said: “All the decisions were made that those responsible for bloodshed, murders of civilians, violation of the laws of war and international humanitarian rights must be punished. We don’t hear any news on how this has been doing upon the crisis in Libya.”
He was speaking at a press conference with visiting Swiss Foreign Minister Didier Burkhalter.
Explaining Moscow’s position, Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Alexander Lukashevich later said that such a probe had to focus on crimes committed since end of the Qaddafi regime in October last year.
The call follows a move by Russia in the UN Security Council on Tuesday to table a motion about the crisis in Bani Walid. The draft, which was blocked by the US, would have expressed “grave concern” about the situation in the town and what it called the growth of violence towards the civilian population, and called on the Libyan government to take urgent action to resolve the situation by peaceful negotiations.
Western diplomats accused Russia of duplicity in promoting the draft. They claimed that Moscow wanted to show that Libya was in a mess because of the revolution (and NATO’s role in it), and that it should never have happened. Russia was a key supporter of Qaddafi, having brokered arms contracts with the former regime worth billions of dollars.
Russian media have been claiming a massacre in Bani Walid in which as many 600 people have been killed and over 1,00 injured. [/restrict]
