President Obama spoke out clearly against
Qaddafi's attacks on peaceful demonstrators
President Barrak Obama “strongly condemned” the Libyan government’s violent crackdown on protesters and said his administration was considering a range of responses to the bloody clashes unfolding in the oil-rich North African state.
Calling it “imperative that the nations and peoples of the world speak with one voice,” Mr. Obama said he was dispatching Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton to Geneva next Monday to meet with top diplomats on how to respond to the crisis. “The suffering and bloodshed is outrageous, and it is unacceptable,” Mr. Obama said at the White House after meeting with Mrs. Clinton. “These actions violate international norms and every standard of common decency. This violence must stop.”
Mr. Obama made no mention of the Libyan strongman, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, reflecting the administration’s worry about the safety of American diplomats and their families in Tripoli, where a ferry meant to evacuate Americans was still stuck at the port, penned in by high winds in the Mediterranean. Mr. Obama has been coming under fire from critics who said he has not been tough enough against Colonel Qaddafi in the wake of the violent crackdown by pro-Qaddafi forces against demonstrators.
In his remarks Wednesday, Mr. Obama said that the Libyan government has a “responsibility to refrain from violence,” adding that “it must be held accountable for its failure to meet those responsibilities.” But he did not call for the resignation of Colonel Qaddafi, who vowed on Tuesday to fight against the uprising until “the last drop of my blood.”
Mr. Obama now joins the list of American presidents bedeviled over the past 40 years by the man whom Ronald Reagan called the “mad dog of the Middle East.”
Administration officials said they were considering sanctions to try to influence Colonel Qaddafi. The White House press secretary, Jay Carney, refused to say whether sanctions might include a no-fly zone over Libya, but Mrs. Clinton, without addressing the no-fly option, said Tuesday that “everything will be on the table.”
She said the administration “will look at all the possible options to put an end to the violence, to try to influence the government.”
But foreign policy experts were quick to point out shortcomings in both economic sanctions and a no-fly zone. In the case of sanctions, the United States cannot do much by itself against Libya because the two countries only recently re-established diplomatic relations, and America has little economic influence there.
The United States will work with other countries on multilateral sanctions, but that would have to be done through the United Nations, which means involving countries like China that do not like imposing sanctions.
Setting up a no-fly zone would be even more difficult — it would most likely have to be enforced by NATO and establishing rules of engagement would be difficult. In addition, the Arab League would be likely to balk at what its members would consider an infringement on Libyan sovereignty, foreign policy experts said.
Mr. Obama’s announcement came as senior diplomats fanned out across North Africa and the Persian Gulf. The under secretary of state for political affairs, William J. Burns, was in Tunis on Wednesday after stopping in Cairo. Jeffrey D. Feltman, the assistant secretary responsible for the Middle East, began a trip that will take him to Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, Oman and the United Arab Emirates.
Meanwhile, administration officials were working furiously, with an eye on weather maps, to move the ferry of Americans out of Tripoli. With 35 diplomats and their dependents in the country, as well as about 600 other American citizens, the administration has worried that threatening Colonel Qaddafi personally could provoke him to take Americans hostage.
On Monday, the State Department ordered its diplomats to evacuate Libya. But the effort has been hampered by a shortage of seats on commercial flights and the refusal of Libyan authorities to allow flights chartered by the United States government to land in Tripoli. The State Department chartered a ferry, with a capacity of 575 people, to sail from the Mediterranean island of Malta to Tripoli.
But rough seas delayed the ship’s arrival, a senior official said, and made several consular officers aboard seasick on the passage over. Now the ship is tied up at a pier in Tripoli, waiting for the seas to calm.
The frantic effort to get diplomats and other citizens out of Libya filtered into a meeting Mrs. Clinton held with Brazil’s foreign minister, Antonio Patriota. When Mr. Patriota told her Brazilian nationals were seeking to leave Tripoli, a senior administration official said, Mrs. Clinton told him there was still space on the American-chartered ferry.
As the administration grappled with the tenor of public remarks on Libya until it could evacuate Americans, administration officials continued to give Bahrain’s besieged royal family time to demonstrate that its offer of dialogue with protesters there was genuine. Mrs. Clinton and other officials praised the offer, as well as Bahrain’s decision to release 23 political prisoners, as a positive step.
The administration’s modulated approach, officials said, reflected both the royal family’s decision to pull back its security forces, as well as the recognition that the unrest in Bahrain was not a black-and-white case of economically frustrated young people rebelling against an autocratic regime. The protests have laid bare the resentment of a Shiite majority discriminated against by a Sunni leadership.
Bahrain dispatched a former police chief who is close to the royal family to plead its case with the administration. The special envoy, Abdul Latif al-Zayani, said he encouraged American officials to lend public support to a dialogue proposed by the crown prince, Sheik Salman bin Hamad al-Khalifa. Protesters have demanded the resignation of key government officials as a sign of Bahrain’s commitment to change.
“We have all it takes to be a successful role model for the region,” Mr. al-Zayani said in an interview Tuesday. “This is an opportunity to show that there is a peaceful way to resolve these things.”
