Gaddafi troops take oil town, France pushes no-fly

AJDABIYAH, Libya
Petroleumworld.com, Mar 14, 2011



Muammar Gaddafi's troops battled rebel fighters for control of the strategic Libyan oil town of Brega on Sunday, as France promised to push harder for a U.N.-backed no-fly zone over the country. Government troops advancing east along the coast road took Brega early on Sunday in what looked like an increasingly confident drive towards the rebel stronghold of Benghazi. But the rebels, inspired by the overthrow of the Tunisian and Egyptian presidents to try to end Gaddafi's four-decade rule, said they had re-taken Brega on Sunday night. There was no way of verifying the rival claims. the government, whose forces had previously captured Ras Lanuf, another oil town 100 km west of Brega, said earlier it was certain of victory and threatened to "bury" the rebels, whom it linked to al Qaeda and "foreign security services".


Gaddafi himself met the Russian, Chinese and Indian ambassadors and urged their countries to invest in Libya's oil sector, badly disrupted by the uprising and the flight of tens of thousands of expatriates oil workers.
Libyan oil exports have been badly disrupted by the fighting, lack of staff, international sanctions and the refusal of international banks to fund trade deals. Some experts say it may take a year for output to recover to its previous level of about 1.6 million barrels per day. International crude prices fell by about $1 a barrel LCOc1 CLc1 on Gaddafi regaining territory over the weekend. On the diplomatic front, France said it would step up efforts to persuade world powers to impose a no-fly zone over Libya. It said the Arab League's weekend call on the United Nations to impose such a zone showed the world's concern for Libyan civilians.


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The Libyan government said it would welcome an African Union panel to try to help resolve the crisis, but condemned the Arab League call for a no-fly zone, describing it as "a dangerous act for Arab security that only serves the Zionist enemy". France said it would consult other powers "in the coming hours" to try to set up such a zone "to assure the protection of the civilian population in Libya ... in the face of the terrible violence suffered by the Libyan population." France hosts a Group of Eight foreign ministers' meeting on Monday and said they would discuss the situation in Libya.



ARMY SAYS CAPTURED BREGA

A Libyan government army source told state television on Sunday morning: "Brega has been cleansed of armed gangs," and rebel fighters retreating eastwards were demoralised.


"There's no uprising any more," said rebel Nabeel Tijouri, his heavy machinegun destroyed in the fighting. "The other day we were in Ras Lanuf, then Brega, the day after tomorrow they will be in Benghazi." Brega is 220 km (135 miles) south of the rebel stronghold of Benghazi and Ajdabiyah is the only sizeable town between them.


The flat desert terrain means the government's aircraft and tanks outweigh the rebels' enthusiasm and light weaponry, except in towns where the odds against the rebels are reduced. State television carried a confident official message. "We are certain of our victory, whatever the price," it said. "Those acts of division will be buried together with those who committed them, who are linked to foreign security services and the terrorist organisation al Qaeda," it said. But on Sunday night, rebel media officer Mustafa Gheriani told reporters in Benghazi the rebels had retaken Brega, killed 25 Gaddafi fighters and taken 20 prisoners of war. "Tonight it (Brega) is back in the hands of the revolutionaries, but they will probably come back tomorrow with big machines, bomb it and take it back again," Gheriani said. "This is a war of resolve and the resolve of his (Gaddafi's) people is breaking down." Rashid Khalikov, the U.N. humanitarian coordinator for Libya, said in an interview he wanted unimpeded access:
"The situation is changing from one day to another," he said. "The main concern is to find out what's going on, which we don't know...The civilian population is suffering a lot." The United States said the Arab League's call for a U.N. no-fly zone to protect Libyan cities was an "important step", but Washington remained cautious about military intervention.


Arab support satisfies one of three conditions NATO set on Friday for it to police Libyan air space. The others are proof that its help is needed, and a U.N. Security Council resolution. Even if the Security Council meets to discuss a no-fly zone, it is far from clear whether it would pass a resolution as veto holders Russia and China have both publicly opposed the idea. MUTINY? The Libyan conflict has escalated from a popular uprising similar to protests that toppled the leaders of Tunisia and Egypt and have shaken other countries in the region. It is now more akin to a civil war.


Protests in the capital have stopped.
Human Rights Watch said "Gaddafi and his security forces are brutally suppressing all opposition in Tripoli -- including peaceful protests -- with lethal force, arbitrary arrests, and forced disappearances." Fresh from crushing the revolt in Zawiyah, west of Tripoli, elite government troops and tanks turned to Misrata, Libya's third biggest city with 300,000 people and the only pocket of rebel resistance outside the east. Rebels said a mutiny among government troops stalled their advance on Sunday for a second day, but this was impossible to confirm independently. "From the early morning they (government troops) are fighting each other. We hear the fighting," rebel fighter Mohammed told Reuters by telephone. "This division between them came to us from God ... Now we are waiting to see what happens." Journalists have been prevented from reaching the city by the authorities. The government dismissed the reports as rumours and said there were al Qaeda fighters in Misrata. (Additional reporting by Maria Golovnina and Michael Georgy in Tripoli, Tom Pfeiffer in Benghazi, Mariam Karouny in Ras Jdir, Tunisia, Alister Bull in Washington; Writing by Tim Pearce; Editing by Matthew Jones)


















Story by Mohammed Abbasfrom Reuters

"Operation Libya" and the Battle for Oil: Redrawing the Map of Africa




"Operation Libya" and the Battle for Oil: Redrawing the Map of Africa

Geological studies really started in 1926 when Ardito Desio (see photographs in the oval heading this section) was assigned by the Italian Geographic Society to explore the Giarabub (Al-Jaghbub), an oasis within the Libyan Sahara. Ardito Desio organized and led this geographical and geological expedition, resulting in the publication of four volumes on the local geology. The oval header on the menus bar above figures Ardito Desio riding a camel during this expedition to the Sahara and he signed dedicated this picture to sponsoring Italian Geographic Society in the Libyan Desert. From 1930 to 1933 Ardito Desio led geological and geographical expeditions into the hinterland of Libya. One of the most notable was in the summer of 1931 and sponsored by the Italian National Academy. It crossed the Sahara desert using a large caravan of camels from the Mediterranean to the frontier of Sudan and back across the Libyan Sahara through the Fezzan. The report of this expedition was published in 4 volumes.

Oil and Gas in Libya


Oil and Gas in Libya - Overview

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"Wa tu izzu man-ta shaa, wa tu zillu man-ta shaa"

Images of Gaddafi’s death highlight visual distrust in the digital age


Philip Kennicott
for The Washington Post



If anything could humanize Moammar Gaddafi, it was the before-and-after drama that emerged as images of the fallen dictator flooded the Internet and cable news. One early bit of data pinging out of Sirte looked like a screen grab from a cellphone video, filled with telltale markings that suggest but don't assure authenticity — a time-and-date stamp, battery-level indicator, elapsed-time bar and play button on the bottom. The dead Gaddafi was seen with half-open eyes, as if staring at the camera, bloodied but ashen, looking hauntingly like himself, but with the odd, theatrical mask of a white-faced geisha. It felt real, but it had a strange, too-concentrated emotion.

No matter how loathsome, a powerless person looking straight into the camera almost inevitably becomes sympathetic. The images of the dead Gaddafi were reminiscent of a photo of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu taken after his hasty execution in 1989. Captured with his eyes open, the gray-haired tyrant looked natty in a red tie and blue jacket, and strangely handsome in a way that almost erased the memory of decades of brutal rule. It was an accidental envoi, an uncanny postmortem appeal.

Anyone new to the story Thursday, seeing just that image of Gaddafi's lifeless face, with memories of the fake digital death mask of Osama bin Laden that surfed the same networks of information and falsehood, had reason to be skeptical. But there was also video of what appeared to be Gaddafi's bloodied body, filmed in the crowds-and-power style of accidental verite, the jerky camera, the bad focus, the manic efforts to frame and hold the image as humanity surges around the event.

Authenticity in the digital age is all about the feel of the image, the drama of how it seems to have been made. Anything can be faked in our wag-the-dog world, but it's hard to fake this well this quickly. An image feels true not because it looks true — that's easy to do — but because it arrives in a way that feels true.

The need of angry Iraqis to see Saddam Hussein's execution might lead one to doubt the truth of the grainy film apparently captured during the execution. But it felt true because it seemed authentically purloined. Perhaps the bloody face of the terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, triumphantly displayed by the U.S. military after he was killed in 2006, was mocked up with Photoshop. But the beleaguered Bush administration's ham-fisted effort to celebrate Zarqawi's death like a war trophy — enlarging the photo, matting and framing it for a news conference — somehow made the image seem more genuine.

More is more, and speed matters in the authenticity game of digital imagery. The self-reinforcing surge of Gaddafi images and video erased doubts. News Web sites and television called it for death, the headlines went big, the scrolling ticker was scrubbed of equivocations.

But al-Jazeera was also showing Gaddafi alive, in video apparently taken just before he was killed or had expired from his wounds. The flood of information on television always confuses our sense of tense, but this simultaneity of death and life changed everything. The death footage was no longer about forensics, proving that a bloodthirsty man has been killed. An image of a corpse is a data point. An image of a living man juxtaposed with an image of his corpse is a drama. Everything in between is left to the imagination, and in that gap even a thug whose monomania brought death to people as far away as a small town in Scotland and a discotheque in Germany can suddenly seem human. Split screens on television filled in the gap: crowds of young men, pumped with the ecstasy of victory, tearing at the fallen regime's green flag with knives, shredding pictures, firing guns into the air.

How did Gaddafi die? It's not hard to imagine.

The missing images, paradoxically, become iconic. That gap, if it remains a gap, is almost assuredly being pondered in a sleek, brooding, hilltop palace above Damascus where another murderous leader hangs on to power, by nervous elites in Bahrain and an erratic old man in Yemen. But the gap that now stands in for the unknown manner of Gaddafi's death will also be a volatile part of the founding mythology of the new Libya. Will it be a nation of laws or passion? Order or retribution?

The speed with which the Gaddafi drama unfolded, the rapidity with which life-and-death images arrived, the chaos of their cinematography, and the uncontrollable speed of a crowd of angry men all reinforced an underlying sense that there is a horrifying truth yet unseen.

Judging an angry crowd, exhausted by oppression and months of revolution, is like judging the weather. What happened between Gaddafi alive and Gaddafi dead has happened thousands of times, all over the world, for millennia. Watering the tree of liberty with the blood of tyrants is as much a part of United States history as it is now a part of the new Libyan nation.

We have, of course, mostly forgotten the flinty words of Jefferson, who wrote about tyrants and liberty in an age before photography, with its power to change the valence of man's past and keep his most pathetic moment forever in the present. It used to be that time, amnesia and ideology helped a nation forget the oldest rule of politics: In the beginning was violence. But that was before the indelible, perpetual infinity of the digital image.

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"Wa tu izzu man-ta shaa, wa tu zillu man-ta shaa"