Algeria is sending military forces to the border with Western Sahara after a group of Spanish and Italian aid workers were kidnapped from the Polisario-run refugee camps at Tindouf by supposed al-Qaeda militants.
Abdurraheem el-Keib—a dual US-Libyan citizen and veteran of the energy industry, described favorably as a “technocrat” by the Washington Post—was elected prime minister of Libya by leaders of the National Transitional Council.
As elite voices in the West call for breaking Libya up along “tribal lines,” the country’s Berbers—who have the most to fear from a centralized Arab-dominated regime—issued a statement calling for a unified state with equal rights for all.
Swiss Federal Judicial Police detained Algeria’s former defense minister Khaled Nezzar for questioning by prosecutors on “suspicion of war crimes” carried out during the North African country’s civil war in the 1990s.
Amnesty International is calling for the NTC to give a full accounting of the slaying of Moammar Qaddafi. Reports conflict on whether he was already injured by a NATO air-strike when he was captured, or was shot while in the hands of NTC fighters.
Striking workers at Libya’s Waha Oil firm, which operates in a joint venture with US companies, agreed to return to work after the government said it will dismiss chairman Bashir Elshahab, accused of being a crony of ousted dictator Moammar Qaddafi.
With Western warplanes still bombing Sirte, TNC Prime Minister Mahmoud Jibril visited Baghdad to meet with his Iraqi counterpart Nouri al-Maliki, who pledged to support Libya, noting (without irony) “similarities between the Iraqi and Libyan experiences.”
Riot police in Tunis used tear-gas to disperse hundreds of young Islamists who fought back with stones, knives and sticks. At least 40 were arrested. The Islamists were protesting against the ban on women who wear the niqab enrolling in university.
Libya’s Berber (Amazigh) minority held the “First Libyan Amazigh Forum” in Tripoli, under the slogan: “Officialize the Amazigh language and support national unity.” The unprecedented festival opened with the new national anthem, sung in Arabic and Berber.
In the worst violence in occupied Western Sahara this year, ongoing clashes sparked by a soccer match have left seven dead, pitting ethnic Sahrawi supporters of the home team against Moroccan settlers who supported the visiting team from near Casablanca.
At a meeting in Benghazi to hash out the details of a new government, Libya’s National Transitional Council (NTC) pledged to investigate Amnesty International’s claims of human rights abuses by both sides in the conflict.
Reviving a protest movement that had become moribund in recent months, some 10,000 Moroccans marched in Casablanca, calling for a boycott of the November parliamentary elections and curbs on the power of the king.
