By Michel Cousins.
Tripoli, 14 December:
Prime Minister Ali Zeidan had said that the Supreme Security Committee (SSC) is not going to be . . .[restrict]disbanded in just over two week’s time. “It will continue for a while,” he told the Libya Herald.
In October, Hashim Bishar, the head of the SSC in Tripoli, said that the organisation would be cease to exist at the end of the year. He reconfirmed this just last week in an second interview with the Libya Herald, saying that no member of the SSC would be paid as of January.
“From next month, only the fighters that have signed (new) contracts with the ministry will be paid,” he declared. “That includes all the fighters who were offered jobs in different departments or those who applied for the jobs.”
The only element of the SSC that would continue, but only for a few months, Bishar said, was its administrative section. It would continue working until all the fighters who had registered to work in other security positions had been transferred.
Speaking at the press conference today, Friday, on his return from his six-day tour of four neighbouring states, Zeidan said that the SSC had been set up as “a temporary organisation” to absorb the revolutionaries into the security system. However, it would not be disbanded quite yet.
The plan to do so by the year end has been met with scepticism by several observers who saw it as too optimistic a deadline. They feared that doing so and stopping salary payments to its members without ensuring that they had been transferred to new jobs would be dangerous and destabilising. [/restrict]
