Libyan Officials Threaten to Use ‘Human Shields’

 

The warning came a day after Britain’s top general was quoted as saying that NATO would have to broaden its bombing campaign to include infrastructure targets in Libya to prevent Colonel Qaddafi from “clinging to power.”

Barely 36 hours after The Sunday Telegraph in London published its interview with Gen. Sir David Richards, Britain’s chief of the defense staff, foreign reporters in Tripoli were summoned to a news conference at which Libyan telecommunication officials announced that they would deploy human shields.

The use of human shields was a major feature of Iraq’s response to Western threats of military force after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990. Mr. Hussein had Western businessmen taken to oil installations and other potential targets around Baghdad, but most were released under diplomatic pressure before the brief war that ousted the Iraqis from Kuwait in 1991.

The most explicit warning that human shields could be used in Libya came from Mohammed Almaremi, the chief of one of Libya’s two cellphone companies, both controlled by Seif al-Islam el-Qaddafi, Colonel Qaddafi’s son and, until the rebel uprising, his expected political heir.

Mr. Almaremi said that 20,000 employees of Libyana, one of the companies, would disperse to telecommunications sites along with 20,000 members of their families, to remain there as long as the bombing continued.

“We will be human shields to face any aggression,” he said.

Mohammed ben Ayad, head of the Libyan telecommunications authority, said NATO attacks had already destroyed large parts of the country’s telecommunications network, disrupting hospitals, schools and other civilian enterprises.

Mr. Ayad said the network, one of the most advanced in the Arab world, had already suffered more than $1 billion in damage from NATO raids. In a PowerPoint display, he pinpointed areas that had taken the heaviest hits, including several in and near Surt, Colonel Qaddafi’s hometown, on the Mediterranean coast.

“From now on, employees and their families will act as human armor to protect these locations,” one slide said in English.

Some of the anger that Qaddafi loyalists have directed at the West since NATO began its airstrikes in March has drawn on a belief that Colonel Qaddafi made major efforts to prove himself a friend of the West in the past decade. He abandoned Libya’s programs to develop nuclear and chemical weapons, and opened the country to a rush of Western investment in oil, telecommunications and other sectors.

That turning toward the West came after the Libyan leader saw how quickly the American-led invasion force toppled Mr. Hussein in 2003. But now, with the United States, Britain, France and other NATO countries backing Libya’s rebels and demanding that Colonel Qaddafi quit, officials say the leader feels that his turn to the West has been rewarded by Western betrayal.

The threat to use human shields comes after a week of some of the heaviest airstrikes of the campaign. One attack was aimed at an underground command complex in Colonel Qaddafi’s compound in south-central Tripoli, with a volley of bombs aimed at the warren of tunnels and bunkers. Colonel Qaddafi surfaced a day later with an audio message broadcast on Libyan state television defying NATO and saying that he was “in a place where you can’t get me.”

Shortly before dusk on Monday, a new round of airstrikes hit the compound, but Libyan officials, often keen to take reporters to bombing sites, gave no details of what had been struck, or of any casualties.

Along with public statements of outrage about the airstrikes, there have been growing signs that they are wearing down the government’s ability to fight the war. With no air defenses, it has resorted to a propaganda campaign aimed at establishing that NATO has killed thousands of innocent people and destroyed or damaged civilian targets, including hospitals, schools, libraries, homes and guesthouses.

The campaign has faltered, with the government’s tours of the sites of airstrikes in Tripoli failing to show convincingly that there have been any significant numbers of civilian casualties. That failure has fed a growing sense of frustration among officials, who have seemed determined to convey that NATO is engaged, not in a campaign to degrade the Qaddafi government’s fighting ability, but in willful brutality against ordinary Libyans.