By Jamal Adel.
Tripoli, 8 April 2014:
Tebu elders in Kufra have called on the Ministry of Local Government to delay the town’s municipal . . .[restrict]elections and meanwhile assess the needs of its Tebu districts .
The head of the Tebu committee of elders in Kufra, Husain Aya, told the Libya Herald that the body charged in November with evaluating the needs of Tebu majority districts in Kufra had not yet arrived. He insisted that, because of this, the elections scheduled for 6 May could not go ahead.
“The committee of judges and the head of the crisis committee in Kufra, Ali Al-Bahbah, were meant to have completed fact finding procedures on the ground and an evaluation,” he said. “This has not yet been accomplished.”
The evaluation committee was formed last year as one of the conditions for Tebu demonstrators from Kufra and its surrounding area ending their blockade of Sarir power station. Protestors were demanding a sub-council be established for the Tebu districts in Kufra where, at present, all local council members are Arab. They also demanded that the nearby Tebu town of Rebyana be given a municipal council of its own. The committee was supposed to consider how authorities might address these demands.
“We can’t go back to square one,” Aya said. “We have sent letters to the Ministry of Local Government, urging them not to hold elections until the evaluation committee had performed its duties,” he added.
The Chairman of Central Committee for Municipal Council Elections, Otman Gajiji, declined to comment directly on the matter but said that at present Rebyana was a voting centre for Kufra and not a municipal area in its own right.
There have been suggestions that, rather than become municipality on its own, Rebyana could because a special district directly under the Local Government Ministry.
Kufra has been the site of frequent clashes between ethnic minority Tebu and Arab majority Zwai tribesmen since the revolution in which hundreds have died and many more have been injured. [/restrict]
