Libya’s beleaguered rebels may have gotten a reprieve. The United Nations Security Council not only passed a resolution imposing a no-fly zone over Libya but authorized ground attacks on regime forces besieging the opposition stronghold of Benghazi. Many of the rebel fighters and residents who have fled the front lines to the eastern city of Tobruk in recent days had said that without speedy international assistance, disaster would unfold within the next 24 hours. At the news of the U.N. vote, Tobruk erupted immediately into celebratory gunfire, fireworks, and fog horns sounding from ships in the harbor. It was an emotional reaction that eclipsed rebel joy at their conquests of Brega and Ras Lanuf barely two weeks before — cities they have since lost.
In Gaddafi’s capital, the regime’s Deputy Foreign Minister Khaled Kaim told foreign journalists in a press conference at 2 a.m. Tripoli time that the Libyan government was “ready immediately” to implement a ceasefire, but needed further discussions with UN officials about the “technicalities.”
Looking relaxed and smiling, Kaim said Libya agreed with the resolution’s aims to maintain the country’s unity and protect civilians — a striking shift in stance after weeks of belligerent statements from the regime about those seeking a no-fly zone.
Officials in Tripoli for days have said that they believe the no-fly zone will have come too late, since government troops have pushed rebels hundreds of miles back towards Benghazi. In an interview a week ago, Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, the powerful son of the Libyan leader, dismissed the push by the U.S. and Europe for action in Libya, saying, “They [Western leaders] have the sense that the game is over in Libya. We will win the war.”
That confidence about impending victory before the UN vote has built steadily day by day, as Gaddafi’s troops have stormed through rebel positions along the Mediterranean coast, pushing the anti-government fighters hundreds of miles back towards Benghazi — and making a no-fly zone increasingly urgent.
As the regime dismissed the UN debate as coming too late — at least before the vote — so anti-government forces said that without it they faced imminent disaster. In a secret interview in Tripoli just 12 hours before the vote, a resident of the defeated rebel city of Zawiyah 30 miles away, describing the grim vengeance exacted there by the regime’s security forces, said, “Where is the world? We need more than a no-fly zone, we need a no-ground zone.”
The rollback of the opposition had led to a visible panic. Rebel fighters manning the checkpoint leading into Tobruk, which is the closest large city to the Egyptian border, said that hundreds of families have fled this way over the past few days, up the desert road from Ajdabiyah, the city currently being bombarded by Gaddafi. Many, they say, particularly those with injuries, have continued on to the Egyptian border. Said, a mechanic who gave only his first name because he fears for the relatives he left behind, has found shelter for his family in an empty student dormitory in Tobruk. He talked about his nightmares about the situation if a no-fly zone was not imposed. “If they don’t die by guns, they will die without food,” he said. And, after Gaddafi cordoned off the city, a slaughter would ensue.
