By Ajnadin Mustafa.
Tripoli, 20 September 2015:
A new political organisation, named the Nidal (“struggle”) Front, has been launched in Cairo by Libyan . . .[restrict]emigrés, mainly former members of the Qaddafi regime. Officially led by the former Libyan ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Mohamed Saeed Algashatt, the organisation is believed to be the brainchild of Ahmed Qaddaf Al-Dam, the dictator’s cousin who is now based in the Egyptian capital.
He is a member of its “central committee”, a term redolent of the Qaddafi era, despite the organisation’s claims to want to build a new, inclusive Libya.
Claiming that the country lived in harmony with the rest of the world until foreigners (it specifically mentions French intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy), “foreign greed” and traitors caused the 2011 revolution, it says it wants a civil, democratic and prosperous state.
The groups says national reconciliation is essential and proposes a truth-and-reconciliation system, a general amnesty for “all the consequences of the civil war and the re-establishment of the army and police. It also says it rejects terrorism, extremism, and violence. In particular, it wants to “confront groups that take religion as a screen to impose its dominance by violence and force the people to adopt its views” – seen as a reference to the Islamic State, Ansar Al-Sharia and associated Islamist militants.
However, it also strikes an Islamist note, saying that Sharia law should have a decisive role in Libya. Nothing that contradicts it, the organisation says, should be allowed in Libya. [/restrict]