By Ahmed Elumami.
Tripoli, 4 December 2013:
At a press conference today, Prime Minister Ali Zeidan said that the oil crisis had got . . .[restrict]out of control as different groups sought to impose their will on the Libyan people. Only dialogue and debate could bring about a real solution.
Zeidan said that he hoped that the blockades of terminals in the east could be ended without bloodshed. He warned that the government’s patience was not endless. He indicated that he placed great hope in talks that had started in Tobruk earlier today. These included local elders as well as members of the self-styled Political Bureau of Cyrenaica.
At the end of October, Zeidan came away from meetings in Tobruk with local elders, asserting that he had obtained assurances that the city’s Marsa Hariga terminal and refinery, closed since the start of Ramadan, would reopen within days. They did not. The refinery, which can process 20,000 b/d and the export terminal which has a loading capacity of 51,000 b/d are both run by NOC subsidiary AGOCO.
However a few hours after the prime minister’s press conference today, an uncompromising statement emerged from the Tobruk meeting, which had been attended by members of Ibrahim Jadhran’s Political Bureau of Cyrenaica, (PBC) including its “prime minister” Abdraba Abdulhameed Al-Barasi.
This demanded that a crisis government be formed in Tripoli and that the life of the General National Congress should not be extended. There was also a call for a commission to examine the transparency of oil sales, the abolition of the Political Isolation Law, the return of all Libyans who fled their homes after the revolution and the dissolution of all armed formations.
Barasi asserted that the Tobruk meeting had agreed with the decision to stop exporting oil and instead form a new company, whose income would be kept in a new bank account and distributed between the three regions of Libya; Cyrenaica, Tripoli and Fezzan.
Barasi said the meeting had given Zeidan fifteen days to approve its proposals, otherwise the PBC would start exporting oil itself, through the newly-created Libyan Oil and Gas Corporation. [/restrict]
