CAIRO, Egypt — After anti-government unrest spread to the Libyan capital and protesters seized military bases and weapons Sunday, Moammar Gadhafi’s son went on state television to proclaim that his father remained in charge with the army’s backing and would “fight until the last man, the last woman, the last bullet.”
Seif al-Islam Gadhafi, in the regime’s first comments on the six days of demonstrations, warned the protesters that they risked igniting a civil war in which Libya’s oil wealth “will be burned.”
“We are not Tunisia and Egypt,” the younger Gadhafi said, referring to the successful uprisings that toppled longtime regimes of Libya’s neighbors.
The speech followed a fierce crackdown by security forces who fired on thousands of demonstrators and funeral marchers with machine guns in the eastern city of Benghazi and killed 60 people on Sunday alone, according to a doctor in onecity hospital, who added that his hospital has run out of supplies to treat the wounded. Since the six days of unrest began, more than 200 people have been killed, according to medical officials, human rights groups and exiled dissidents.
U.S.-based Human Rights Watch said 173 people died - mostly in Benghazi - in three days of unrest from Thursday through Saturday. A Switzerland-based Libyan activist said 11 people were killed in the city of Beyida on Wednesday. A precise count has been difficult because of Libya’s tight restrictions on reporting.
The younger Gadhafi acknowledged that the army made mistakes during protests because it was not trained to deal with demonstrators but added that the number of dead had been exaggerated, giving a death toll of 84.
Protesters had seized some military bases, tanks and other weapons, the younger Gadhafi said, blaming Islamists, the media, thugs, drunks, drug abusers and foreigners - including Egyptians and Tunisians.
He also admitted that the unrest had spread to Tripoli, with people firing in central Green Square before fleeing.
Witnesses in Tripoli interviewed by telephone Sunday night said protesters were converging on Green Square and clashing with heavily armed riot police officers. Young men armed themselves with chains around their knuckles, steel pipes and machetes, and by midnight looting had begun.
Armed security forces were seen on rooftops surrounding Green Square, a witness said by telephone, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal.
Threatening civil war, the younger Gadhafi said, “Instead of weeping over 84 dead people, we will weep over hundreds of thousands of dead.”
http://www.arkansas…">Protests rock Mideast
There were reports that the powerful Warfalla tribe had switched its allegiance to the cause of the protesters. A leader of the tribe appeared on the Al-Jazeera news network urging the government to stop firing on civilians and suggesting Moammar Gadhafi step down after more than 40 years of authoritarian rule.
The crackdown in oil-rich Libya is shaping up to be the most brutal repression of antigovernment protests that began with uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt. The protests spread quickly around the region to Bahrain in the Persian Gulf,impoverished Yemen in the Arabian Peninsula, the North African neighbors of Tunisia - Libya, Algeria, Morocco - and outside the Middle East to places including the East African nation of Djibouti and even China.
Because of the media blackout, information about the Libyan uprising has come through telephone interviews, along with videos and messages posted online, and through opposition activists in exile.
Britain has called reports of the use of snipers and heavy weapons against demonstrators in Libya “clearly unacceptable and horrifying,” and criticized restrictions on media access.
The U.S. has received “multiple credible reports that hundreds of people have been killed and injured” and delivered its “strong objections” to the use of lethal force against protesters, said State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley in a statement.
The U.S. issued a travel warning for Libya, citing “violent clashes” in six cities in the east of the country including Benghazi.
Seif al-Islam Gadhafi on Sunday offered to put forward changes within days that he described as a “historic national initiative.” He offered to change a number of laws, including those covering the media and the penal code.
In Benghazi, a brigade of more than 1,000 members of the security forces was concentrated a few miles from the courthouse in a barracks in the Berqa neighborhood. Witnesses said young protesters were attempting suicidal attacks on the barracks with thrown rocks,stun grenades usually used for fishing, or occasionally vehicles stolen from the security forces. But the security forces responded by shooting from the cover of the fortified building.
But by afternoon, witnesses reported streams of new protesters flowing to Benghazi. Then another military brigade of reinforcements, described by witnesses as special forces, had begun collaborating with the protesters, with some lending their tanks to help assault other units of the government’s security forces.
Jamal Eddin Mohammed, a 53-year-old resident of Benghazi, said thousands marched Sunday toward the city’s cemetery to bury at least a dozen protesters. They feared more clashes with the government when they passed by Moammar Gadhafi’s residential palace and the regime’s local security headquarters.
“Everything is behind that [Gadhafi] compound; hidden behind wall after wall. The doors open and close and soldiers and tanks just come out, always as a surprise, and mostly after dark,” he said by telephone.
The latest violence in Benghazi followed the same pattern as the crackdown on Saturday, when witnesses said forces loyal to the senior Gadhafi attacked mourners at a funeral for anti-government protesters.They were burying 35 marchers who were slain Friday by government forces.
The doctor at a Benghazi hospital said at least one person was killed by gunshots during the funeral march, and 14 were injured, including five in serious condition. He said some of the latest casualties were hit by machine-gun fire.
On Sunday, mourners chanted: “The people demand the removal of the regime,” which became a mantra for protesters in Egypt and Tunisia.
In Cairo, Libya’s Arab League representative Abdel-Monem al-Houni said he told the Foreign Ministry in Tripoli that he had “resigned from all his duties and joined the popular revolution.”
“As a Libyan citizen, I absolutely cannot be quiet about these crimes,” he said, adding that he had renounced all links to the regime because of “my complete devotion to mypeople.”
The violence rippling across the region poses a challenge to U.S. strategic interests in Bahrain and Djibouti, both U.S. allies, as well as in Yemen, whose government cooperates with the U.S. on anti-terrorism efforts.
“This will be bloody to the last moment but these leaders are finally aware of what is going on,” Helmy Sharawy, director of the African Arab Research Center in Cairo, said by phone. “We see it in Yemen, we see emergency meetings in the Gulf. They can’t ignore it anymore.”
Yemen’s main opposition group rejected an offer from President Ali Abdullah Saleh for dialogue with the government as long as protesters are being attacked by security forces and urged supporters to join in demonstrations. Five people have been killed in 10 days of protest.
In Bahrain, home to the U.S. Navy’s 5th Fleet, seven opposition groups were drawing up demands to put to the government as they discussed the government’s call for dialogue, said Ebrahim Sharif, head of the National Democratic Action Society.
But not all opposition leaders appeared to be in a hurry to talk.
“Yesterday you kill people and today you want them to sit with you. It’s not that easy,” said a leader of the main Shiite opposition group Al Wefaq, Abdul-Jalil Khalil. He said no talks have taken place yet.
Khalil also said the opposition wants the monarchy’s talk of changes backed by actions.
Thousands of protesters on Saturday poured back into the central square that has become the focus of protest in the Bahraini capital, Manama, after tanks, armored personnel carriers and riot police withdrew on the orders of Crown Prince Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa. Unions called off a general strike planned for Sunday in response.
Meanwhile, gunmen burst into a Kurdish television station in northern Iraq on Sunday, shooting up equipment and setting fire to the building, apparently in retaliation for footage it aired earlier in the week of a deadly protest, station officials said.
Later Sunday, about 2,000 demonstrators took to the streets of the Kurdish city of Sulaimaniyah, 160 miles northeast of Baghdad, for a fourth consecutive day to demand political and economic changes from the parties that control the region. Police and hospital officials said at least four people were injured - two of them by bullets - after Kurdish forces fired in the air to disperse the crowd.
Information for this article was contributed by Sarah El Deeb, Salah Nasrawi, Douglas Birch, Slobodan Lekic, Yahya Barzanji, Rebecca Santana, Brian Murphy, Chris Kahn, Hadeel Al-Shalchi and Barbara Surk of The Associated Press; by Mariam Fam, Ola Galal, Glen Carey, Viola Gienger, Kate Andersen Brower, Terry Atlas, Danielle Ivory, Joseph Link,Camilla Hall, Fiona MacDonald, Vivian Salama, Svenya O’Donnell, Caroline Alexander, Mike Harrison, Maram Mazen, William Davison, Mohammed Hatam, Salah Slimani, and Benjamin Harvey of Bloomberg News and by David D. Kirkpatrick and Mona El-Naggar of The New York Times.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 02/21/2011