No The Guardian.
"I applaud France for its involvement in this sordid affair and hope for the best, but I'm really not very assured that things will improve."Jason B., Massachusetts
domingo, 24 de abril de 2011
sábado, 23 de abril de 2011
YEMEN: RESIGN FOR IMMUNITY
Publicado no Truthout.
President of Yemen Agrees to Resign for Immunity
by: Robert F. Worth and Michael Slackman, The New York Times News Service
Cairo - Yemen’s president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, agreed on Saturday to leave power after 32 years of autocratic rule, according to a top Yemeni official, but only if the opposition agrees to a list of conditions, including that he and his family be granted immunity.
Opposition leaders said they were prepared to accept most of the terms of the deal, which both they and a Yemeni official said would establish a coalition government with members of the opposition and ruling party. The president would turn over authority to the vice president.
But the opposition said it could not guarantee at least one of Mr. Saleh’s demands — that demonstrations be halted — and opposition members said they would present a counteroffer to the president later Saturday. The opposition said it had little influence with the mainly young protesters who have been demanding Mr. Saleh’s departure.
Even if the opposition and the government agree to a deal, it is unclear the demonstrators will go along, especially after pro-government snipers brutally crushed a demonstration on March 18, killing 52.
Mr. Saleh is a wily political survivor, and it was unclear if his offer was a real attempt to calm the political turmoil and growing demonstrations that have rocked his country for weeks or a way to shift blame for a stalemate to the opposition. His offer follows days of unrelenting pressure, from Saudi Arabia and other neighboring states fearful of more instability in the region, for him to step aside.
A Yemeni official portrayed the deal as one devised by the Gulf Cooperation Council, a regional group dominated by Saudi Arabia. But a member of the Gulf council said it had presented only a framework for a political solution, not a plan with such specifics.“The most important thing in the initiative to all parties, including Saleh himself, is for a smooth and peaceful transition of authority,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the delicacy of the negotiations. “Now the devil is in the details. This is up to them to decide, not up to us.”
Mr. Saleh has been an important ally of the United States in its efforts to stamp out Al Qaeda, which has an active branch in the country. The relationship became especially crucial to the United States after attempted terrorist attempts were linked to the Qaeda branch there. That included an attempt to bring down an airliner bound for the United States at the end of 2009.
But in recent weeks, American officials began joining calls for Mr. Saleh to step down; they said the White House had determined that he would not make the changes necessary to bring stability to the country. American officials were also increasingly worried that the stalemate and continued violence there were allowing Qaeda members to become even more entrenched.
Saudi officials have also been intent on ushering Mr. Saleh from power because of anxiety over continued instability on the Arabian Peninsula.
Nasser Arrabyee contributed reporting from Sana, Yemen.
The article "President of Yemen Offers to Resign for Immunity" originally appeared in The New York Times.
sábado, 16 de abril de 2011
quarta-feira, 13 de abril de 2011
terça-feira, 12 de abril de 2011
CONFLITO NA LÍBIA EXPULSA 500 MIL PESSOAS
Do sítio do Acnur.
Genebra, 12 de abril de 2011 (ACNUR) – O conflito na Líbia, que começou em meados de fevereiro deste ano, já expulsou cerca de 500 mil pessoas do país. Segundo a agência da ONU para refugiados, os novos deslocamentos envolvem 500 líbios da etnia Berber, que deixaram suas casas nas montanhas localizadas no oeste do país e buscaram refúgio na região de Dehiba, no sudeste da Tunísia.
“Eles nos disseram que a pressão cada vez maior das forças governamentais nas cidades do oeste, a falta de medicamentos e a escassez de comida forçaram a saída deles da região”, disse hoje em Genebra o porta-voz do ACNUR, Andrej Mahecic.
O porta-voz lembrou que Dehiba está localizada a cerca de 200 quilômetros ao sul de Ras Adjir, a fronteira por onde dezenas de milhares de pessoas entraram na Tunísia fugindo da Líbia desde o início dos conflitos no país, em meados de fevereiro deste ano.
Segundo Mahecic, as pessoas que chegam têm recursos limitados e “necessidades humanitárias significativas”. Todos estão sendo acomodados pelas autoridades locais em uma quadra esportiva esportivo na cidade de Remada, 45 quilômetros além da fronteira, onde o ACNUR estabaleceu um campo com 130 tendas.
“Eletricidade e água foram conectadas e outros serviços estão sendo estabelecidos. O ACNUR trabalha com uma organização local – Al Taáwon – e o Vermelho Crescente da Tunísia”, explicou o porta-voz.
A comunidade de Remada tem oferecido uma assistência considerável, disponibilizando suas casas para milhares de famílias líbias. Hotéis econômicos em Dehiba e na cidade e na vizinha Tataouine também estão sendo usados para abrigar famílias. Uma escola perto do campo em Remada se ofereceu para receber os estudantes líbios.
Mahecic disse também que pessoas cruzando a fronteira Líbia/Egito têm dado às equipe dos ACNUR mais detalhes sobre os deslocamentos no leste do país, entre as cidades de Ajdabiya e Tobruk. “Milhares de famílias deslocadas nas cidades de Benghazi e Tobruk estão sendo abrigadas por residentes, enquanto outras estão refugiadas em escolas e prédios vazios. As pessoas têm medo de serem pegas pelo conflito em Ajdabya, caso as forças do governo vençam a disputa”, disse Mahecic.
O porta-voz lembrou que pessoas continuam fugindo da Líbia pelo mar em direção à Itália e a Malta. Na manhã de hoje, as forças armadas maltesas ajudaram um barco dom 116 pessoas, incluindo uma mulher já morta. Desde o dia 26 de março, mais de 1.100 pessoas chegaram a Malta em cinco barcos vindos da Líbia. Na Itália, três barcos com 1.008 pessoas chegaram à Ilha de Lampedusa durante o último final de semana. A maioria dos passageiros é formada por somalis e nigerianos. Desde 26 de março, 3.358 pessoas chegaram ao território italiano vindos da Líbia.
Entre as cerca de 500 mil pessoas que já deixaram a Líbia, aproximadamente 200 mil foram para o Egito, 236 mil foram para a Tunísia, mais de 36 mil cruzaram a fronteira com Níger, 14 mil chegaram à Algéria, 6.200 foram para o Chade e outros 2.800 chegaram ao Sudão.
No último domingo, cerca de 3.900 pessoas cruzaram o posto fronteiriço de Sallum, no Egito – entre elas 3 mil líbios. “Isto representa o dobro da média de líbios que têm cruzado aquela fronteira diariamente nas últimas semanas”, afirmou o porta-voz do ACNUR.
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segunda-feira, 11 de abril de 2011
GBAGBO CAPTURADO
Do The New York Times.
Former Leader of Ivory Coast Is Captured
Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Laurent Gbagbo and his wife, Simone, in Abidjan after his arrest on Monday.
By ADAM NOSSITER
Published: April 11, 2011
ABIDJAN, Ivory Coast — The strongman of Ivory Coast, Laurent Gbagbo, was captured on Monday after a week-long siege of his residence and placed under the control of his rival claimant to power, according to French and United Nations officials.
Related
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Rebecca Blackwell/Associated Press
Ivory Coast residents celebrated in the streets after the capture of Laurent Gbagbo, on Monday.
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Troops loyal to Alassane Ouattara, the internationally recognized winner of Ivory Coast’s presidential election last year, had pressed toward the residence where Mr. Gbagbo had been holed up for days. According to French officials, Mr. Gbagbo surrendered at the entrance to the residence, while four French Gazelle helicopters swirled around the area.
“It is my pleasure to announce officially that the former president of Cote d’Ivoire, Laurent Gbagbo, has been arrested,” said Youssoufou Bamba, Mr. Ouattara’s representative to the United Nations. “He is alive and he will be brought to justice to respond to the crimes he committed. In this way, the Cote d’Ivoire reaches the end of its tragedy, of its nightmare.
“His era is over,” Mr. Bamba added, saying Mr. Gbagbo was now “under our custody.”
Cmdr. Frederic Daguillon, a French military spokesman in Abidjan, Ivory Coast’s main city, said Mr. Gbagbo had been taken by forces loyal to Mr. Ouattara, a statement that French and United Nations officials in Ivory Coast, Paris and New York reiterated.
“I can affirm that categorically,” Commander Daguillon said. “There was not one single French soldier in the residence.”
Alain Le Roy, the head of the United Nation’s peacekeeping operations, said that Mr. Gbagbo and his wife, Simone, were now being guarded by United Nations security officials, after Mr. Gbagbo had requested their assistance to ensure his physical safety. Mr. Le Roy noted that the same United Nations security officials who had previously been protecting Mr. Ouattara were now protecting Mr. Gbagbo, while Mr. Ouattara and his government decided on his fate.
Mr. Le Roy said that it was up to Mr. Ouattara to decide on the next step, and that Mr. Ouattara had indicated prosecuting Mr. Gbagbo was an option. Mr. Bamba, the United Nations representative, has previously said that Mr. Gbagbo should be tried for war crimes at the international criminal court in the Hague, but other Ouattara officials have said they might try to bring charges at home.
Hamadoun Touré, a spokesman for the United Nations operation in Ivory Coast, said the United Nations had spoken with Gen. Dogbo Blé, the commander of Mr. Gbagbo’s Republican Guards, and that 300 Republican guards had also surrendered.
“One can guess that he was really weakened by the strikes,” Mr. Touré said, referring in part to the French and United Nations attacks on Mr. Gbagbo’s weaponry at his redoubts in recent days, part of what they called an effort to protect civilians. “I think it weakened him a lot.”
Images broadcast on Ivorian television showed a sweating, plaintive Mr. Gbagbo after his arrest. At one point, he appeared in a white tank-top undershirt, wiping dry his face and underarms with a towel as men dressed in military camouflage looked on, smiling.
“I want us to stop the weapons,” Mr. Gbagbo said in a voice slightly hoarse, in video broadcast on French television.
Mr. Le Roy, the peacekeeping chief, stressed that Mr. Gbagbo’s detainment was an important first step to bringing stability to Ivory Coast, but that it was too early for euphoria.
“It’s an important step in the process," he said. "The crisis is not over and we must establish law and order,” he said, noting that there was a pressing need for national reconciliation to take place.
The capture of Mr. Gbagbo brought a dramatic climax to a four-month standoff that has crippled the nation’s economy and plunged it back into civil war. Mr. Gbagbo steadfastly refused to accept Mr. Ouattara’s victory in the elections last year, insisting that he was still the legitimate president of this West African nation, maintaining firm control over the population by conducting attacks on civilians and rejecting international demands to step down.
Now, he is being held at Mr. Ouattara’s headquarters at the Hôtel du Golf in Abidjan, the same place Mr. Gbagbo had cordoned off since the elections, essentially making Mr. Ouattara and his government prisoners there.
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sábado, 9 de abril de 2011
ALLIES OF ZIMBABWE'S PRESIDENT PUSH FOR QUICK VOTE
Do The New York Times.
Allies of Zimbabwe’s President Push for Quick Vote
Stephane De Sakutin/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Some supporters of President Robert Mugabe, above, fear that his health may be ebbing, so they want Zimbabwe to hold an election soon.
By CELIA W. DUGGER
Published: April 8, 2011
HARARE, Zimbabwe — As Zimbabwe hurtles into another violent political season, President Robert Mugabe’s party is fiercely pushing for a quick election this year because of fears that the president’s health and vigor are rapidly ebbing, senior party officials said.
Associated Press
In 1985, Mr. Mugabe campaigned in Harare before parliamentary elections. His party, ZANU-PF, increased its majority.
With no credible successor to unite the quarrelsome factions that threaten to splinter the party, its officials say they need Mr. Mugabe, who at 87 has been in power for 31 years, to campaign for yet another five-year term while he still has the strength for a rematch against his established rival, Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai, 59.
“There’s urgency, real urgency,” said a party insider, speaking anonymously because of the delicacy of the topic. “The old man is not the same as he was.”
Zimbabwe’s neighbors, who helped broker a power-sharing government led by Mr. Mugabe and Mr. Tsvangirai after a discredited election in 2008, have strongly warned against trying to hold another one too soon. But a separate Mugabe confidant said the party’s power brokers worried that the president would no longer be a plausible candidate by next year.
“Imagine him being supported all the way to the podium to address a rally and him telling the people he is the future of this country,” the Mugabe confidant said. “Even the staunch supporters would not believe that.”
The intensity of the party’s determination to hold an election this year was evident as a newspaper controlled by Mr. Mugabe’s party carried out an extraordinary attack on South Africa’s president, Jacob Zuma, the official mediator in Zimbabwe’s political crisis, after he publicly called for a halt to political violence in the country.
South Africa had long been criticized for coddling Mr. Mugabe through a decade of rigged, bloodstained elections, but last week Mr. Zuma persuaded regional leaders to endorse assertive, time-consuming efforts to ensure that the next time Zimbabweans voted, they would be able to do so freely and fairly.
“There is no way we can agree to an election in Zimbabwe when the institutions needed to ensure a credible, free and fair election are not in place,” Mr. Zuma told Mr. Mugabe and Mr. Tsvangirai at the meeting, according to Mr. Zuma’s adviser, Lindiwe Zulu.
A day later, Mr. Mugabe defiantly told his party’s central committee that Zimbabwe’s neighbors should not meddle in its political affairs and urged his followers to prepare for an election. An editorial in The Sunday Mail, a state-controlled newspaper, accused Mr. Zuma of duplicity and dishonesty and called him a puppet of the West.
South African officials reacted sharply to the vitriolic, personal attack on the president of the region’s most powerful nation, and Mr. Mugabe’s spokesman this week sought to soften Zimbabwe’s tone, saying the editorial was not government policy.
“President Jacob Zuma’s erratic behavior is the stuff of legend,” one of Mr. Mugabe’s loyalists wrote in the editorial’s opening line.
Mr. Mugabe’s domineering rule has led to the country’s disastrous economic decline, pervasive corruption and an intensely repressive society, but as the centerpiece of the state, there is uncertainty about whether his death would lead to a military coup, a vicious internal battle within his party, ZANU-PF, or some still unforeseen outcome.
“Mugabe’s health is a matter of national instability,” Mr. Tsvangirai said. Having been pressured by regional leaders into the power-sharing deal with Mr. Mugabe, his political enemy, two years ago, Mr. Tsvangirai said of his still dominant partner, “He left the succession way too late, and now there is a scramble between the two main factions of ZANU-PF.”
A Western ambassador here likened this period in one of Africa’s longest-surviving autocracies to the last days of Brezhnev and Franco. It is a time of fevered rumors and back-room plotting.
And it has brought a crackdown on pro-democracy civic groups and members of Mr. Tsvangirai’s party, the Movement for Democratic Change. The authorities have banned its rallies, rounded up activists and party workers and put truckloads of riot police officers on the streets to head off protests.
The revolutions in North Africa, and particularly South Africa’s support for a no-fly zone in Libya, have unnerved the sprawling spy operation controlled by Mr. Mugabe’s party. Dozens of students, trade unionists and activists who had gathered to watch news reports on the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt were arrested in February and charged with treason, accused of plotting to oust Mr. Mugabe.
“We are hearing from the intelligence services that M.D.C. meetings are intended to incite people to engage in an Egyptian-, Tunisian-style uprising,” said a spokesman for Mr. Mugabe’s party, Rugare Gumbo.
Tsvangirayi Mukwazhi/Associated Press
Beyond that, recurrent speculation that Mr. Mugabe suffers from prostate cancer has quickened since he made trips to Singapore in February and March, ostensibly for routine follow-up care after cataract surgery he had there over the Christmas holidays. But why would such an elderly man have made three grueling, transoceanic flights unless he was really sick, analysts here asked.
Cabinet ministers say Mr. Mugabe is mentally sharp, but tires easily and has difficulty walking up stairs. Mr. Mugabe himself declared at his 87th birthday celebration in February, according to an Associated Press account, “My body may get spent, but I wish my mind will always be with you.”
At a conference here in November, Mr. Mugabe was natty in a charcoal gray suit, blue silk tie and matching handkerchief peeking from his breast pocket. A waiter in white gloves poured his juice and hovered nearby. The president’s sonorous voice still echoed in the hall as he read a speech he held up close to his eyes.
But as he left the stage, Mr. Mugabe — his days as a vibrant liberation leader long past — gripped the banister as he slowly made his way down the steps. Outside, an ambulance trailed his limousine.
His press secretary, George Charamba, said at the time that Mr. Mugabe had dashed up 22 flights of stairs when elevators at the party headquarters malfunctioned, leaving security agents panting in his wake. Even some political opponents wonder if he has years left. His mother lived to nearly 100.
“There’s nothing that tells me he’s about to drop dead,” said Theresa Makone, a leader of Mr. Tsvangirai’s party and the co-minister of Home Affairs in the power-sharing government.
But the uncertainty about his health has profoundly unsettled politics here.
After each of Mr. Mugabe’s Singapore trips, Mr. Charamba insisted in interviews that his boss had just been seeking routine eye care. But the spokesman revised that explanation in a recent interview, saying the president had actually made the trips to accompany his wife, Grace, who had badly injured her back while exercising at a gym.
“She’s up and about so we can talk about it” now, he said.
In a rare interview with Reuters last year, Mr. Mugabe himself brushed off rumors he was dying of cancer.
“I don’t know how many times I die, but nobody has ever talked about my resurrection,” he said.
“Jesus died once, and resurrected only once, and poor Mugabe several times,” the president added, laughing gleefully at his own joke.
Under the current Constitution, if Mr. Mugabe died in office, ZANU-PF would choose the next president to finish out his term, legal experts said. Zimbabweans are supposed to vote on a new constitution before the next election, but drafting one has spurred an intense struggle between the parties. The member of Parliament leading the constitution-making effort for Mr. Tsvangirai’s party was recently jailed for almost a month.
Mr. Mugabe wants an election as soon as possible, not because of his own ill health, but because the power-sharing government is not working, his spokesman said.
Mr. Mugabe has unhappily shared the stage with Mr. Tsvangirai in what they call an inclusive government for the past two years. The deal has brought a tenuous political stability and improving economy, but has left Mr. Tsvangirai with little authority.
It was formed after the 2008 election. In May and June of that year, Mr. Mugabe’s lieutenants orchestrated a campaign of beatings, torture and murder against Mr. Tsvangirai’s workers and supporters. Mr. Tsvangirai, who won more votes than Mr. Mugabe in the first round, quit the race days before the runoff.
A senior ZANU-PF leader offered a blunt assessment of his party’s current political quandary, acknowledging Mr. Tsvangirai as a formidable opponent.
“Morgan has been in the making for 10 years,” he said, using Mr. Tsvangirai’s first name. “He has contested three elections. So there’s fear he has momentum. Who among our so-called leaders can face Morgan if the old man is gone?”
sexta-feira, 8 de abril de 2011
quinta-feira, 7 de abril de 2011
O EXÉRCITO REBELDE NA LÍBIA
Do The New York Times.
MILITARY ANALYSIS
Libyan Rebels Don’t Really Add Up to an Army
Bryan Denton for The New York Times
In Benghazi, Libyan rebels, including a boy, trained recently, but the rebels lack firepower and knowledge of how to fight a war.
By C. J. CHIVERS
Published: April 6, 2011
BENGHAZI, Libya — Late Monday afternoon, as Libyan rebels prepared another desperate attack on the eastern oil town of Brega, a young rebel raised his rocket-propelled grenade as if to fire. The town’s university, shimmering in the distance, was far beyond his weapon’s maximum range. An older rebel urged him to hold fire, telling him the weapon’s back-blast could do little more than reveal their position and draw a mortar attack.
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Bryan Denton for The New York Times
A drill instructor high-stepped as rebel volunteers ran in formation recently around the fairground at a training base in the Libyan city of Benghazi.
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The younger rebel almost spat with disgust. “I have been fighting for 37 days!” he shouted. “Nobody can tell me what to do!”
The outburst midfight — and the ensuing argument between a determined young man who seemed to have almost no understanding of modern war and an older man who wisely counseled caution — underscored a fact that is self-evident almost everywhere on Libya’s eastern front. The rebel military, as it sometimes called, is not really a military at all.
What is visible in battle here is less an organized force than the martial manifestation of a popular uprising.
With throaty cries and weapons they have looted and scrounged, the rebels gather along Libya’s main coastal highway each day, ready to fight. Many of them are brave, even extraordinarily so. Some of them are selfless, swept along by a sense of common purpose and brotherhood that accompanies their revolution.
“Freedom!” they shout, as they pair a yearning to unseat Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi with appeals for divine help. “God is great!”
But by almost all measures by which a military might be assessed, they are a hapless bunch. They have almost no communication equipment. There is no visible officer or noncommissioned officer corps. Their weapons are a mishmash of hastily acquired arms, which few of them know how to use.
With only weeks of fighting experience, they lack an understanding of the fundamentals of offensive and defensive combat, or how to organize fire support. They fire recklessly and sometimes accidentally. Most of them have yet to learn how to hold seized ground, or to protect themselves from their battlefield’s persistent rocket and mortar fire, which might be done by simply digging in.
Prone to panic, they often answer to little more than their mood, which changes in a flash. When their morale spikes upward, their attacks tend to be painfully and bloodily frontal — little more than racing columns down the highway, through a gantlet of the Qaddafi forces’ rocket and mortar fire, face forward into the loyalists’ machine guns.
And their numbers are small. Officials in the rebels’ transitional government have provided many different figures, sometimes saying 10,000 or men are under arms in their ranks.
But a small fraction actually appear at the front each day — often only a few hundred. And some of the men appear without guns, or with aged guns that have no magazines or ammunition.
For the nations that have supported the uprising, the state of the rebels’ armed wing — known as the Forces of Free Libya — raises many questions. It seems unlikely that such a force can carry the war westward, through dug-in Qaddafi units toward the stronghold of Surt, much less beyond, toward Tripoli, the Libyan capital. And a sustained war of attrition could quickly bleed their ranks dry.
Unlike many antigovernment militias in other countries, the rebel-armed column has not had the benefit of years of guerrilla fighting, which could have winnowed and seasoned its leaders and given them a skeletal field structure to build on.
Instead, Libya’s rebels have entered the grim work of waging war almost spontaneously, and would need time, training, equipment and leadership to develop into even a reasonably competent force.
For now, their ranks have three elements: a so-called “special forces” detachment of former soldiers and police officers; a main column organized into self-led cells of fighters built around a few weapons and pickup trucks; and a sort of home guard that is undergoing quick training to man checkpoints and serve as a civil defense force.
There is also the “shabab,” milling groups of youngsters who arrive at the front each day hoping to pitch in, but with scant idea of how. Officially, the shabab are not part of the fight.
The rebels insist the size of the special forces detachment is large, but on the battlefield it feels anything but. Colonel Ahmed Bani, the military’s top spokesman, suggested that some of these soldiers are being held back for now.
“Our army, the professionals, are still waiting for armaments,” he said. “Only some of them are at the front lines supporting the young men.”
The largest visible body of rebels each day consists of groups of self-led fighters in cars and pickup trucks, who move up and down the highway to Brega, where the Qaddafi forces have plugged the road to Tripoli and taken custody of essential oil infrastructure — a key to the economic fortune of any Libyan government.
These men are a Libyan melting pot, a cross-section of professions and backgrounds. Businessmen and engineers fight beside students and laborers.
A few are Libyans from abroad who hurried home in February or March, answering an urge to topple Qaddafi and remake Libya on less autocratic lines.
They lack structure and they know it. Each contingent fights largely according to its own whim. Sometimes no one knows who is in charge.
“We are without command,” said Ibrahim Mohammed, 32, who said he had served as a sergeant in the Libyan army. “Too many without command. And this is the problem.”
His fighting cell consisted of six men, two pickup trucks, a rebel flag, a heavy machine gun, a few Kalashnikov rifles, a Lee-Enfield bolt-action rifle and a surface-to-air missile. The six men — excepting two who are related — had not known each other before the uprising began.
Now they lived in the desert, roaming a single road, dodging mortar and rocket fire. Their truck beds contained blankets, a tarp, ammunition, bottled water and ammunition crates packed with fresh vegetables and canned food.
The third group is made up of more recent volunteers, who turn up each morning for training at a military base at the edge of Benghazi.
Mindful that the rebels lack weapons and trainers, and that sending them into battle against Colonel Qaddafi’s conventional military will get too many of them killed, the rebels’ military leadership is training them for the more limited duties of civil defense.
On two recent mornings, slightly more than 600 volunteers showed up at the base for a half-day of training. They looked to be from 18 to 60 years old.
They briefly marched and jogged on a parade ground. (On the first morning, one of them fainted within 10 minutes.) After this warm-up, the volunteers attended open-air classes on various weapons — the assault rifle, the heavy machine gun, the 82-millimeter mortar.
But the classes contained little more than the nomenclature of each weapon’s parts, a discussion of each weapon’s basic characteristics, and demonstrations of how to assemble and disassemble the weapons, and to clean them.
Tellingly, only the instructors had weapons.
Marey el-Bejou, an Airbus pilot serving as a spokesman for the training camp, said the indoctrination course would last a week. He had no illusions about whether it might produce a real military. He noted that the troops were unpaid and their training was marginal. The military had no barracks, no blankets, no uniforms and, in the eyes of many who showed up, little time.
“Can I be clear?” Mr. Bejou asked. “We are not organized. We do not have weapons, other than anti-aircraft machine guns. If Qaddafi wanted to be here, he could be here in four hours.”
Out on the battle lines near Brega in the afternoon, where spirits were high but fighting skills and ammunition were in short supply, the rebels were engaged in a contest for which they were clearly unprepared. One of their most fearsome weapons said much. It consisted of Grad rocket-launcher tubes, jury-rigged into pods of four. Each was then welded to heavy machine-gun mounts welded or bolted to the bed of a pickup truck. Car batteries provided the power to launch each barrage. The firing switch was a box holding four doorbells, one for each rocket.
As monuments to the rebels’ resourcefulness and determination, these homemade launchers were impressive. As instruments of war, they were not.
To use them against the Qaddafi forces, the rebels sped forward with loaded tubes, stopped along the highway, and fired the rockets toward Brega.
Each of the rockets, slightly more than nine feet long, climbed into the air with tremendous whooshes and long plumes of smoke. They accelerated out of sight.
No one knew for sure where they might land, and firing them this way exposed the rebels to charges that they are waging indiscriminate war.
“ “God is great!” the rebels cheered. Then they pulled back quickly, before the Qaddafi forces fired back, and the highway was pounded with incoming fire, another of the daily exchanges of fire in a ground war bogged down.
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