Tripoli, 6 April 2013:
The Russian president Vladimir Putin has said that Libya has “split into three parts” as a result of the revolution.
Comparing the situation in Syria with that of other countries where there had been change, he said in a television interview with German public broadcasting corporation ARD that as a result of the changes in the region aided by Western governments, it was “unclear where Libya will go. In fact, it has already split into three parts.”
Bashir Assad should stay, he said in the interview broadcast yesterday, Friday, ahead of his visit to Hannover Fair in Germany this weekend. Russia did not want to see the same situation in Syria as had happened in other Arab countries where there had been dramatic changes which he blamed on the West. “We do not want to have the situation of the same difficulty as we still have in Iraq. We do not want to have the situation of the same difficulty as in Yemen, and so on.”
Putin did not say what the three parts in Libya were, although he was probably referring to the country’s historic regions: Tripolitania, Cyrenaica and the Fezzan.
Despite the demands by Cyrenaica federalists for a return to the 1951 constitution, they and few others in Libya do not want to split the country.
It is not clear if the Russian president’s misrepresentation of the political reality in Libya was deliberate, in an attempt to justify Russia’s support for the Assad regime, or the result of genuine if willful ignorance.
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