April 2011 - Centre for Civil Society - University of KwaZulu-Natal

The President of the Interim Council is Gaddafi ex-Minister of Justice,
Mustafa Abdel Jalil. We also have Gaddafi’s ex-Minister of the Interior,
general Abdul Fattah Younes, who went over to the rebels at the end of
February. Here we have two figures who until only a few weeks ago were
in charge of Gaddafi’s police and judicial system. Among the “rebels” we
also have the ambassadors to Britain, France, Spain, Germany, Greece,
Malta and Italy, Abdel Monehim Al Honi, Libya’s ex-ambassador to the Arab
League and Abdullarhin Shalgam, the ambassador to the UN.
The local councils which emerged in the cities where the revolution won,
initially were made up of mainly human rights activists, lawyers,
professors, experts of all sorts, some of which were most probably genuine
democrats. Some of them were also appointed to the original Interim
Council, together with former top Gaddafi officials. But now things have
moved on further. As imperialist powers have become more and more
involved in the conflict, they also want to make sure that their own people
are leading the rebels, whom they do not trust completely. A whole layer
of characters have now surfaced and been catapulted to the head of the
rebels. Their common characteristic is that they are known to the West,
some of them having spent decades in exile in the US, funded by the CIA
and other agencies, others having been in charge of the implementation of
the privatisation program and the “opening up of the economy” under
Gaddafi.
One of these shady characters is Khalifa Hifter who only arrived in
Benghazi on March 14, directly from his exile in the USA, and has been
proclaimed as the military chief of the “Free Libya Army”. He is a former
colonel in Gaddafi's army, who in the past set up the “Libyan National
Army” which was a Contra-type group operating from within Chad,
receiving training and funding from the CIA, as well as Saudi Arabia, Egypt,
Morocco, Israel and Iraq, the Saudis, donating $7million to the NSF. They
also received support from French intelligence. Thus, the man now in
charge of military operations is a direct agent of US imperialism.
A new “interim government” has been declared, and its make-up is an
indication of the counter-revolution which has been carried out in the
liberated areas of Libya. All of its members are also agents of imperialism.
Ali Tarhouni, who returned to Libya at the end of February, was appointed
finance minister on 23 March. He fled Libya in 1973 in the period in which
Gaddafi was beginning to move against private enterprise and was
subsequently involved in the reactionary Libyan opposition abroad. He is a
Senior Lecturer in Business Economics at the University of Washington and
has always openly called for widespread privatisation in Libya.
Ali Abd-al-Aziz al-Isawi has been designated Minister of Foreign Affairs. He
previously served as Secretary for Economy, Trade and Investment in
Gaddafi’s regime. Prior to that he had founded the Centre for Export
Development in 2006 and became its first Director General. He was also
the Director General of the Ownership Expansion Programme (a
privatization fund) in 2005.
Mahmood Jibril has been appointed Prime Minister of the Interim
Government. Educated in Cairo and the US, he has spent most of his life
training the Arab elite in capitalist managerial techniques. In 2007 he was
appointed head of the National Economic Development Board in Libya, a
semi-governmental body directly accountable to the Prime Minister, and
charged with restructuring the economy and the state to make them
compliant with international capitalism. A Wikileaks cable says this about