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By Ahmed Elumami.
Tripoli, 24, August 2013:
The Justice and Construction Party (J&C) today refuted claims that they control General National Congress and . . .[restrict]exerted an undue influence on the government. Such claims were dismissed by a spokesman as “slanderous”.
Party spokesman Salim Baitalmal told the Libya Herald that those who targeted the party in this way were seeking to mislead public opinion in a “systematic campaign to counter the February Revolution”. Baitalmal went on to say that the party’s political opponents were seeking to exploit “weak minds” that did not understand Libyan affairs.
Baitalmal asked how the GNC could be dominated by the 30 J&C party members when they represented only 15 percent of the chamber, a minority that could not forces its opinions upon the other 85 percent.
Baitalmal added that his party held only five ministries in the government, none of then principal organisations and, moreover, the Prime Minister, Ali Zeidan, had been nominated by Mahmoud Jibril’s National Forces Alliance (NFA).
At the beginning of the month the NFA announced that it had “suspended its political activities” in protest at the GNC’s failure to advance the drafting of the new constitution. It said that it would only participate in debates connected with the constitution. Within hours, the J&C announced its own boycott in protest at the GNC’s ineffectiveness. In the event, the latter withdrawal from the chamber did not materialise.
Meanwhile, on Friday, Tripoli Congressman Nizar Kawan, a member of the J&C as well as the Muslim Brotherhood, is reported to have said on Al-Assema TV that people who had protested during Ramadan against the killing of the lawyer Abdulsalam Al-Musmari were “human scrap “. Kawan is then supposed to have said that such protests were in the interests of the former regime and were a conspiracy against the 17 February Revolution. [/restrict]
