Mediaboss Marketing

February 11, 2017 - 19:27

The Head of the Control Department at the General Electricity Company of Libya (GECOL) Abdel Rahaman Al-Jali said that the linking of the western and eastern electric grids will have positive results on all Libyan cities.

Libyans will sense the difference once a failure or a damage happens to a certain area while another will be operating with power, so the GECOL will provide the first area with power through the linkage with the second area. He explained.

Speaking on TV, Al-Jali added on Friday that connecting Benghazi and the Green Mountains grids with the western one will stabilize the general power network and decrease the hours of outage.

He hailed the efforts of the maintenance teams in east Libya, the supervision division of the GECOL, executive department and control department in eastern Libya, saying he thanks them for their professional performance, which was without any foreign companies assistance.

GECOL announced that electric grids that connect eastern and western regions were joined again after two years of severance due to clashes in Benghazi.

View post:
GECOL: Linkage of western and eastern electric grids beneficial for all Libyan cities - The Libya Observer

EU and Italy migration deal with Libya draws sharp criticism from Libyan NGOs Libya Herald Twelve Libyan non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have issued a joint statement criticising the EU's latest migrant policy as set out at the Malta summit a week ago as well as the Italy-Libya deal signed earlier which agreed that migrants should be ... and more »

Originally posted here:
EU and Italy migration deal with Libya draws sharp criticism from Libyan NGOs - Libya Herald

US President Donald Trump has a unique chance to fix the mess in Libya by backing Gaddafis son Saif al-Islam as head of state.

Libya remains a dysfunctional state largely due to failed American policy. The 2011 Obama/Clinton support to Al Qaida affiliated groups in order to oust Muammar Gaddafi heavily backfired, with ISIS now profiting from the massive wave of immigration, which also destabilizes Europe.

President Trump has a unique chance to fix this terrible mess by backing the appointment of the leader of the Libyan national reconciliation, Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, as head of state, the only man able to reunite the tribal nightmare in Libya, and to form a proper democracy, exterminate ISIS,and solve the immigrant crisis.

Millions marched in Libya July 1st, 2011 in support of the government of Muammar Gaddafi, and pleaded for NATO to stop the destruction of the country. At that time, the massive support for Gaddafi was not reported in the mainstream media, yet it was well known that Gaddafi had many supporters. Libya was Africas richest country, a socialist, welfare state with lavish benefits, free education, and good living standards. Since 2003, Libya had opened up towards the West in a liberalization process largely led by Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, who was instrumental in resolving the Lockerbie-bombing issue and paying damages to the victims families, deescalated the military, removing its nuclear arms and privatized the economy.

It was Saif al-Islam who freed the Bulgarian nurses in Benghazi, led the large scale Benghazi housing projects, created the Charity Gaddafi Association which helped poor countries in Africa, as well as worked diligently to democratize Libya. He called for a free press and hoped to issue a Constitution of the state. It was also Saif al-Islam who led the Reconciliation Project in 2006 between the government and the opposition, and the peaceful release of political prisoners, like Abdelhakim Belhadj and Khaled Sharef, most of whom joined the rebels and are controlling Tripoli now.

Libya was, prior to 2011, closely cooperating with the CIA and Western intelligence in order to eradicate the Sunni terrorist groups in the region. Gaddafi was an enemy of Al Qaida, which had tried to kill him several times. Under this cooperation, the US and Libya created stability in the region and controlled the immigration flow towards Europe.

Yet, by 2011, mainstream US news outlets and partisan NGOs were responsible for massively presenting misleading information that later turned out to be wrong, which served as a pretext for NATOs support for armed rebels to overthrow the Libyan government. The basis was that Gaddafi bombed his own people in what was described as a genocide. But already in early March, US secretary of Defense Robert Gates said that no such attacks could be confirmed. The Russian military monitoring the situation via satellite said that no planes had been in the air at the time in question. In the hands of the very few, any war may easily be ignited by using mainstream propaganda tools. As we know, 90% of the American media is owned by 6 corporations and only 62 individuals now own more than 50% of world assets.

Due to the diligent legal work of organizations such as Judicial Watch, we now know that the chosen Obama/Clinton allies in Syria were The Muslim Brotherhood, the Salafists and Al Qaida groupsGaddafis long term enemies. A Judicial Watch retrieved USA Defense Intelligence Report, dated August 12th, 2012 reveals the axis of alliance: The Salafists, Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaida in Iraq are the major forces driving the insurgency in Syria. The West, Gulf countries and Turkey support this opposition.

US foreign secretary John Kerry further enlightened us in his leaked conversation with Syrian oppositional groups, first published by The Last Refuge January 1, 2017. The secret conversation took place September 22, 2016 and in it Kerry states that the US was heavily arming rebels in Syria and watching ISIS grow and that the reason for the intervention of Russia, which the US heavily opposed, was that Daesh [ISIS] was threatening the possibility of going to Damascus. He also states that the American goal is to remove the Assad government in Damascusthe same goal as Daeshand that the Obama administration was hoping for ISIS to strengthen its position in Syria. Assad was threatened by ISIS, he says in the recording, and the administration thought it could probably manage the situation to force Assad to negotiate; but instead, Russia intervened to support Assad against the extremist group.

Thanks to Wikileaks, we also know that the authorization for the Libya war was Hillary Clintons achievement, which meant turning the state into an ISIS haven. Her notorious laughter when hearing about Gaddafis brutal death makes one realize what kind of ruthless gang of bandits that the US had aspolitical leaders, people with no respect whatsoever for national sovereignty or international law.

This American cartel activity is now out in the open to the point that president Donald Trump openly states that Obama is the founder of ISIS, co-founded by Hillary Clinton. Which, by the way must be a great joy to many Muslims, who for years have had their religion thrown in the dirt since Islam is barbarism, just watch ISIS. As it turns out, ISIS is American geopolitical barbarism at its worst.

Der Spiegel reporting on the finding of the ISIS organization chart, discovered in the house of killed ISIS strategist Hadj Bakr in 2015, further showed that ISIS was not particularly occupied with Islam, but rather much more about intelligence, surveillance, and military operations, and how to infiltrate and break down Syrian civil society. The chart shows remarkable resemblance to CIA organizational charts of covert operations, hardly easy for some rugged Sunni-Baathist remnants in northern Iraq to chart out.

Current ISIS leader in Libya Abdulhakim Belhadj, who was a leading NATO ally in 2011 and became the military governor of Tripoli after the war, long displayed his excellent relationship to republicans such as John McCain. The senator must be an exceptionally stupid individual, hailing on his own webpage Belhadj as a Libyan patriot whom we should support. He furthernotoriously assertedthat it was he and Lindsey Graham who convinced the Saudis to fund the opposition in Syriathus proudly stating that it was the US who got the Saudis into the whole Syrian mess.

Furthermore, the shocking scandal on how theObama/Clinton-backed government in Libya have detained thousands of prisoners for years and kept them without trial in Libyan jails, is currently, maybe, the worlds worst example of lack of respect for the Geneva convention and the standards of international law for the humanitarian treatment in war. Human Rights Watch has long complained about this. Sources on the ground state that as many as 35,000 Gaddafi loyalists have been incarcerated and continually detained without trial since 2011. This is happening in Tripoli, Misrata, and other places in Libya under the Western backed leadership and underObama/Clintons watch.

The Libyan Islamic Fighting Group and its ISIS leader, Belhadjthe great friend of senator John McCainis, according to Libyan sources, currently controlling these prisons, there among the Hadba Prison in central Tripoli, where Libyan leaders and Al-Saadi Gaddafi have been kept since 2014. Al-Saadi is currently very ill and urgently needs proper medical attention or he will probably die. In the aftermath of the Arabic network Clear News 2015 release of the documented torture of Al-Saadi Gaddafi under the Western backed government, nothing much has been done. It was a shocking video that raised serious questions about the treatment of prisoners.

It is now reported from Tripoli that around 7,000 of the 35,000 thousand detainees are women, many being as old as 80 years of age. They have been in these prisons for six years. UN Human Rights groups, now active in Libya in order to try to solve this situation, are of course fully aware of the utter disgrace this is to Western powers, who helped instigate the Libyan tragedy. Sources on the ground state that ISISs support is now faltering in Libya as the movement has little local supportallegedly always, by the way,paying its bills in euros or US dollars. Saif al-Islam now has united the tribes and strategically positioned his allies all over the country.

A final point. Libya was extremely rich before 2011, on the verge of implementing the gold dinar and working toward implementing broad African unity under this currency. At that time, the Libyan Investment Authority (LIA), constituted in 2006, had over $150 billion in assets invested world-wide.The financial accounts from 2010 display a full overview of detailed accounts and contents of its LAFICO, LAP, OIL Invest, LTP and LLIDF branches. In the vault of the Libyan Central Bank alone lay 144 ton of gold.

What the mainstream US media spoke of in 2011 as Gaddafis personal wealth turned out in large part to be the Libyan Investment Funds and contents of the Libyan Central Bank, public institutions to which Gaddafi had no direct access. This was reportedly again stated on December 12, 2016, to the Official Libyan Channel by the vice chairman of the Presidential Council in Libya, Ahmad Maiteeq. He was addressing the issue of the $67 billion or more US dollar investments currently available outside Libya, the ban on the Libyan Central Bank now having been liftedthe question, of course, again being the dire necessity to control who withdraws what, in order to ensure that the Libyan funds are not continually disappearing into various personal accounts, as has been a vast problem since 2011.

So, ever since ex-president Obama managed to shed a tear and call the Libya war the worst mistake of his presidency, we are still waiting to see action and the US and associates to release back to responsible rulers in Libya its billions in assets. If you regret stealing, bombing, and destroying peoples lives, you should also return the money and pay damages.

The national Libyan assets never belonged to the US Obama/Clinton administrationor its affiliated international cartel friends. Yet, according to sources on the ground, the US still control part of the LIA, Libyan Central Bank, and oil revenues through its liaisons with the Western backed Tripoli government, where the current Central Bank governor, Sadiq al-Kabir, the link to IMF and other Western institutions. The LIA currently consists of $67 billion investments, yet in 2011 its frozen assets were around $150 billion. Many wonder what happened to the discrepancy and hope to establish in the future who took what.

President Trump has a golden moment in history to breach some of the terrible reputation the US now have all over the globe, as US war-mongering and ruthless foreign policy has caused unspeakable damage to millions of innocent civilians, traumatized by loss and bitterness, outside the USs own borders. It is obvious that the Trump administration aims to team up with more moderate forces in the Middle East. When Gaddafi was in the US, it was Trump property he placed his tent on. Repeatedly Trump admits that getting rid of Gaddafi was a big mistake, stating that Libya would be a 100 % better country if Gaddafi had not been killed, Sources now state that more than one million Gaddafi supporters live in Egypt, waiting to return to Libya, and around 300,000 in Tunisia.

Peace in Libya would for certain award the US President a great name as a peace broker in history. The solution to the Libyan crisis is to support the Green movement and The Popular Front for the Liberation of Libya, now nationally unified behind London School of Economics-educated Saif al-Islam Gaddafi. The push is for equality, prosperity and stability, away from division, exclusion and marginalizationthe reunification of the Libyan people under one democratic, tribal-backed leader. The development will be most interesting to follow in the months to come.

Go here to see the original:
Could Muammar Gaddafi's son Saif al-Islam Solve the Libya Crisis? - Foreign Policy Journal

Johannesburg Airstrikes carried out by the Libyan National Army (LNA) on the Jufra airbase in the centre of the country have killed two people and wounded another 13.

The Benghazi Defence Brigades (BDB) were the targets of the strikes although there were other militias in the area, including those from Misrata situated on the Mediterranean coast, the Libya Herald reported on Friday. Before the attack, local residents reported that they heard the sound of planes overhead.

The attacking aircraft took off from the Al Khadim base, in Al Marj in north-eastern Libya, used in recent weeks by fighter jets from the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

The UAE maintains a military base that supports the operations of Khalifa Haftar in eastern Libya.

Haftar's Emirati allies want to maintain a presence on Libyan territory in order to act in support of his military operations, and to protect his main base in AL Marj.

Haftar, a former loyalist of the late Muammar Gadaffi, has gained popularity in the eastern city of Benghazi for fighting Islamic militants.

Violence also continues to plague in the Abu Saleem and Salahadeen neighbourhoods of the capital Tripoli.

Clashes erupted several days ago between the Abu Saleem Central Security Force belonging to Abdul Ghani Al Kikli and gunmen loyal to the Salah Al Burki militia, most of them from Misrata.

During the fighting tanks and heavy mortar were used forcing residents to stay indoors.

There were also reports of shooting in Ain Zara and Tajoura. Meanwhile, the UN Special envoy to Libya, Martin Kobler, is to be replaced by former Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad.

The decision to replace Kobler was made by the new UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres.

So far there has been no official confirmation, although a leaked letter from Guterres to the UN Security Council on Wednesday announcing the appointment had been circulating on social media. In it Guterres thanks Kobler for his service.

Responding to the move the former Libyan representative to the UN Ibrahim Dabbashi criticised the UN for failing to consult Libyan authorities before making the decision. During his last days as the UN's Libyan envoy Kobler has slammed a European Union (EU) proposal on how to deal with the thousands of desperate African refugees who attempt the perilous sea journey to Europe, using Libya as the point of departure.

Earlier in the week criticised a European Union (EU) plan to send migrants back to Libya and suggested such a decision would be a violation of international standards and the Geneva Convention.

You cant send them (migrants) back to camps where they will go hungry, be tortured and raped, he said. In his final report to the Council Kobler said: The citizens of Libya deserve security and an end to the rampant crime and lawlessness.

Kobler was a personal appointment by former UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.

The new special envoy, US-educated Salam Fayyad, was Palestinian finance minister from 2002 to 2005 and Palestinian prime minister from 2007 to 2013. His background is in finance, having previously worked for both the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, and is regarded as having been a successful finance minister.

Seen as both a conciliator and a pragmatist, Salam Fayyad will, however, have his work cut out for him in trying to implement a Libyan Political Agreement that is widely seen as broken and unimplementable, the Herald reported.

More here:
Libya airstrikes kill two - Independent Online

One Libyan figure may prove to be central to any negotiations: Gen. Khalifa Haftar, whose forces have been fighting Islamists and control a chunk of the country's east. He's already been talking to Russia.

It continues to compete with the Islamist-dominated General National Congress in Tripoli, also known as the Government of National Salvation, and with the previous internationally recognized government, the Council of Deputies, which has set up camp in the east of Libya and backs Haftar.

Haftar, who heads the so-called Libyan National Army, has been working to drive out Islamist forces, with some success, said St John. His forces now control much of the east, including Benghazi and most of the major oil producing and exporting areas -- crucial to Libya's economy, said St John.

In the last six to nine months, Russia has been trying to take advantage of the chaos and instability in Libya to establish itself as a regional player, said St John. After gaining a "major foothold" in Syria, where it has backed the regime of President Bashar al-Assad, influence in Libya could allow it to expand its reach into North Africa, he said.

Anna Walker, associate director for Europe at the business risk consultancy Control Risks, said Russia was seeking to exert its influence in the region to help reinforce its position as a power on the world stage.

Nikolay Kozhanov, an academy associate with UK-based think tank Chatham House, said Moscow is trying to orientate its foreign policy toward non-Western nations.

Russia is also "disappointed" by the results of Western involvement in the Middle East, he said, which it largely blames for the fall of pro-Moscow regimes in Iraq and Libya, and associated political and economic losses.

The Arab Spring and subsequent instability in the region has been a blow to Russia's economy, Kozhanov said. Russia had huge investments in Libya before the Arab Spring -- from military infrastructure to railroad construction to energy.

The Soviet Union was also a major supplier of weapons to Libya's former strongman leader Moammar Gadhafi following his rise to power in 1969, said St John. Russia would like to tap back into that market, he said.

In addition, Libya has oil and gas reserves that could offer future development opportunities, said Walker.

Haftar -- who defected from Gadhafi's military to live in exile in the United States before returning to Libya in 2011 -- will have to be brought on board if a stable Libyan government with popular support is to be formed, said St John.

The general opposes the rule of the UN-backed Tripoli government and has indicated he might try to extend his power base to the Libyan capital, said St John.

Haftar traveled to Moscow last year and met with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. He also met with a high-level Russian delegation on board a Russian warship off eastern Libya last month.

Kozhanov said he doubted Russia had a "clear master plan" in Libya -- but links with Haftar could be useful in a future Libyan government.

Libya is a departure point for hundreds of thousands of migrants who have left poverty and repression in African and Middle Eastern nations.

Europe's migrant crisis is not a real factor in Russia's plans, said Kozhanov. But, he said, "Moscow often offers to cooperate with the West on the anti-terrorist agenda, using it as the way to make the West less interested in confronting Moscow on other topics." That would include Ukraine, where Russian aggression has led to European sanctions.

US President Donald Trump has also spoken of working with Russia to fight Islamist terrorism.

EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini last week spoke by phone about Ukraine, Syria and Libya with Lavrov. The pair have agreed to meet in the coming weeks, perhaps on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference.

"Both on Libya and Syria, we decided to find ways to join efforts and cooperate," said Mogherini of her call with Lavrov, adding that working with the Russians to help Libyans unite their country "can only be a positive thing."

Italian Foreign Minister Angelino Alfano also spoke with Lavrov about Libya, Russian state news agency Tass reported, citing Italian newspaper La Stampa.

Support within Europe for sanctions against Russia over Ukraine has been weakening, said Walker. Treating Russia as a credible negotiating partner in Libya will make maintaining unity on sanctions harder, she said.

However, she said, "Europe has so many issues it is grappling with at the moment that refusing Russia's support or actively trying to counter it is probably not in its interests."

She stressed that Russia was talking to various political forces in Libya, not just Haftar, and planned to receive Prime Minister Fayez al-Sarraj, head of the GNA, in Moscow this month.

"We would like Libya to get out of the protracted crisis as soon as possible and once again become a prosperous state relying on strong government institutions, capable army and law enforcement forces restoring its status as a major regional player," she said.

CNN's Antonia Mortensen and Milena Veselinovic contributed to this report.

See the original post:
Libya: Why the EU is looking to Russia - CNN