Election Commission Offices in Eastern Libya Are Sacked
By
<
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/k/david_d_kirkpa
trick/index.html> DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
Published: July 02, 2012
CAIRO - Hundreds of armed protesters on Sunday attacked the offices of
<
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/li
bya/index.html?inline=nyt-geo> Libya's election commission in two cities,
Benghazi and Tobruk, in anger over the way seats in next week's planned
election for a constituent assembly were distributed among the country's
regions.
The protesters carried computers, ballot boxes and ballots out of the
offices, and shattered and burned them in the streets outside, according to
witnesses, news agencies and photographs that circulated on the Internet.
Some of the attackers carried signs calling the leader of Libya's interim
government a "traitor" to the eastern region of the country, known as
Cyrenaica, which the protesters said got too few seats in the assembly.
Others demanded the writing of a constitution before elections.
Libyans hoped that the election of the assembly on July 7 would establish a
government with more credibility than the weak Transitional National
Council, one that could control the freewheeling local militias that have
dominated the country since the overthrow of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi last
year.
But it was far from certain that the transitional government could provide
enough security to hold a credible vote, or persuade the rival regions and
tribes to set aside their grievances and respect the result. Whether the
attacks on Sunday would derail the vote was unclear.
There have been reports in recent weeks of low-level violence against
diplomatic missions from the United States, Britain and Tunisia. In
Benghazi, the main eastern city, a senior prosecutor was murdered,
apparently in revenge for having detained a prominent rebel commander, Gen.
Abdel Fattah Younes,
<
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/03/world/africa/03libya.html> who was
assassinated while in custody during the rebellion against the Qaddafi
regime.
Fighting among rival tribes around Kufra in the south killed more than a
dozen people earlier this month. And there were reports in the past week
that easterners angry over the constitutional assembly had blocked the main
coastal road connecting the country's centuries-old rival provinces.
Many in the east remain deeply suspicious of western Libyans. Before Colonel
Qaddafi's 1969 coup, the country was ruled as a loose federation under a
monarch based in the east, but Colonel Qaddafi moved the capital to Tripoli
in the west, and took with him the biggest share of the country's resources,
which were exploding from the oil boom. Easterners worry that an imbalanced
assembly might draft a constitution that favors the more populous west and
leaves their region vulnerable to neglect.
Many easterners have nonetheless embraced the vote as the only path forward.
But others have begun movements calling for a return to a more federal form
of government, or urging a boycott of the vote. The country has no recent
history of elections or voting districts to work from, nor is there a
reliable census.
Emad al-Sayeh, deputy head of the High National Election Commission in
Tripoli, told Reuters that the attacks on Sunday caught commission officials
unprepared. "There wasn't enough security at the gates of the commission to
stop the protesters," he said, "so they had to step back and let them storm
the building."
Suliman Ali Zway contributed reporting from Tripoli, Libya.
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Received on Mon Jul 02 2012 - 17:59:48 EDT
