By Ahmed Elumami.
Tripoli, 11 November 2013:
The government may need international help to organise the purchase and collection of weapons not held . . .[restrict]by the police, army and affiliated units, prime minister Ali Zeidan has said.
Zeidan proposed yesterday at his press conference that Libya needed to take advantage of international experience, to set up a programme to buy up all illegally-held arms in the country.
Zeidan said that if the GNC approved his plan, the government would seek to set up a procedure whereby “arbitrators” would receive surrendered weapons from individuals and organisations, who might have been reluctant to hand over their arms to other Libyans.
He did not spell out how this would work, but he may have been thinking of the system that worked in Northern Ireland, after the Good Friday peace accord, whereby the Irish Republican Army put their weapons “beyond use” under the gaze of independent observers led by a US politician Senator George Mitchell.
Zeidan emphasised however that he was merely floating this as an idea for debate. He was not proposing that the government should decide on such a move without consultation. [/restrict]
