Libya urges Niger to extradite Gaddafi son: report

By Taha Zargoun and Marie-Louise Gumuchian

TRIPOLI (Reuters) - Libya has demanded that Niger extradite Muammar Gaddafi's son Saadi, warning that his call for Libyans to prepare for a "coming uprising" threatened ties between the two countries, Libyan News Agency LANA said on Saturday.

As Libyan rebels gained the upper hand over Gaddafi's regime last September, Saadi and a group of senior loyalists fled across the border to Niger, where they remain under house surveillance in the capital Niamey.

In a telephone call to Al Arabiya television late on Friday, Saadi said that he was in regular contact with people in Libya who were unhappy with the authorities put in place after the ousting and killing of his father.

LANA cited a telephone call between Niger's Foreign Minister Bazoum Mohamed and his Libyan counterpart Ashour Bin Hayal on Saturday, quoting the Libyan minister as expressing "strong resentment" towards Saadi's "aggressive statements."

"Mr Ashour Bin Hayal reiterated to the foreign minister of Niger that these statements threaten the bilateral relationship between the two countries and that the government of Niger should adopt strict measures against him (Saadi) including extraditing him to Libya to be prosecuted for the crimes he committed against the Libyan people," LANA said.

Niger has said Saadi would remain in the West African nation until a United Nations travel ban on him was lifted, despite Tripoli's request for his return.

Interpol last year issued a "red notice" requesting member states to arrest Saadi with a view to extradition if they find him on their territory.

"The foreign minister of Niger ... expressed his regret and apologies to the government and Libyan people for what has happened and confirmed that he will contact the Niger president who is on a foreign visit to France," LANA said.

"He wants to assure the Libyan side that the demands made forth will be responded to in accordance to the laws and approved customs. He added that the communication between the parties will be open in this regard," LANA added.

Libyan government officials were not immediately available for comment.

BAD FOR THE NEIGHBOURS

In an interview broadcast by France 24 on Saturday but recorded before Saadi's interview was aired, Niger President Mahamadou Issoufou stated that Niger had not received any formal extradition request from Tripoli but would study any future one.

"If we receive an official request we will study it. We are a state based on the rule of law. We will study that question according to our laws and our international commitments, because Niger signed the treaty that created the International Criminal Court," Issoufou told France 24.

"We took them in on humanitarian grounds ... and we were very clear with them at the time: we took them in on condition they do not carry out any subversive activities against the Libyan authorities."

The ICC in the Hague issued a warrant for Gaddafi's son Saif al-Islam - who is in a Libyan jail awaiting trial on rape and murder charges - but not for Saadi, who before the war was chiefly known abroad for his obsession with soccer.

The Libyan conflict has created new problems for the fragile region to its south. Heavily armed former fighters from Gaddafi's army have joined a new rebellion in northern Mali that has forced tens of thousands to flee from their homes.

As many as 200,000 migrant workers once employed in Libya have headed back into Niger, which along with the rest of the Sahel region is facing the latest of its recurrent food crises.

Aid agencies say their arrival has stretched scarce food resources even more thinly.

(Additional reporting by Mark John in Dakar; Writing by Marie-Louise Gumuchian, Editing by Rosalind Russell)

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Greece warns bailout rebels of unknown, dangerous path

 

1 of 10. Riot policemen walk in front of the parliament during an anti-austerity rally in Athens February 11, 2012.

Credit: Reuters/Yiorgos Karahalis

By Harry Papachristou and Lefteris Papadimas

ATHENS (Reuters) - The Greek government told rebellious lawmakers on Saturday to back a deeply unpopular EU/IMF rescue in parliament or send the nation down "an unknown, dangerous path" to default and international economic isolation.

Conservative leader Antonis Samaras, who has attacked austerity policies for driving Greece ever deeper into recession, still told his party to back the 130 billion euro deal or be dropped as candidates in the next general election.

With voters deeply hostile to the bailout's tough conditions, former socialist Prime Minister George Papandreou admitted that backing austerity had cost him the premiership and even some of his friends, but the alternative was a collapse in living standards and further "unforeseeable consequences."

The coalition of Prime Minister Lucas Papademos has a huge majority, which should ensure parliament approves on Sunday a package including a further 3.3 billion euros in budget cuts this year, needed to secure Greece's second bailout since 2010.

But six members of his cabinet have already resigned over the heavy pay, pension and job cuts which the European Union and International Monetary Fund are demanding as the price of the funds, which Greece needs by next month to avoid bankruptcy.

INCALCULABLE CONSEQUENCES

Officials hammered home the message that Greece's future in the euro was at stake.

"The consequences of disorderly default would be incalculable for the country - not just for the economy ... it will lead us onto an unknown, dangerous path," Deputy Finance Minister Filippos Sachinidis said.

In an interview with the newspaper Imerisia, he described the catastrophe he believes Greece would suffer if it failed to meet debt repayments of 14.5 billion euros due on March 20.

"Let's just ask ourselves what it would mean for the country to lose its banking system, to be cut off from imports of raw materials, pharmaceuticals, fuel, basic foodstuffs and technology," he said.

Late on Friday the cabinet approved the draft bailout bill and a plan to ease the state's huge debt burden which has deepened the nation's political and social crisis and brought thousands out on the streets in protest.

As a 48-hour protest strike went into its second day, about 50 Communist party activists draped two huge banners on the ramparts of the Acropolis on Saturday, reading: "Down with the dictatorship of the monopolies (and the) European Union."

About 7,000 demonstrators gathered in central Athens, police said, but there was no repeat of trouble on Friday when police fired teargas at protesters throwing petrol bombs and stones.

SAMARAS CRACKS THE WHIP

Members of the conservative New Democracy party, which has a big lead in opinion polls before elections expected as early as April, are likely to back the deal solidly.

Samaras still warned his party, the second biggest in parliament, against stepping out of line. "This is obviously an issue of party discipline," he told New Democracy lawmakers in parliament, warning anyone who opposed the bailout "will not be a candidate in the next election."

However, the smallest party in the coalition, the far-right LAOS, quit the government in protest at the package on Friday, ordering its four cabinet members to resign. Two members of the Socialist PASOK party have also left the cabinet.

Papandreou, who negotiated the first bailout before his government collapsed in November, acknowledged the huge pressure on any politician backing the second rescue.

"I've lost friends, my family suffered, I gave up my office, I was insulted, vilified, like no other politician ever was in this country," he told PASOK's parliamentary group.

"Still, all that is nothing compared with what our people will suffer if we fail to do the right thing... Despite all the anger we are feeling inside, we must persevere."

Party discipline is much weaker at PASOK, whose support has dived to eight percent in the latest opinion from the nearly 44 percent it commanded when Papandreou led it into power in 2009.

A WHIFF OF REBELLION

Despite the whiff of rebellion, analysts expect parliament to pass the package, which also includes a bond swap which will ease Greece's debt burden by cutting the value of private investors' bond holdings by 70 percent.

Some economists suggest that if Greece defaulted and left the euro zone, its new national currency would dive in value and allow the Greek economy to become internationally competitive.

But government spokesman Pantelis Kapsis dismissed this notion. "We'll have to reduce the deficit, regardless of whether we have the euro or not."

Euro zone finance ministers have told Greece that it must explain how 325 million euros ($430 million) out of this year's total budget cuts will be achieved before it agrees to bailout.

Bailout documents released on Friday left blank the amount of the rescue but even 130 billion euros may not be enough.

Finance Minister Evangelos Venizelos said on Saturday 15 billion euros more might be needed to rescue the country's banks, confirming estimates from EU officials.

The banks are up to their necks in Greek government debt, the value of which will be slashed under the bailout, and have suffered huge losses of deposits as Greeks have either shipped their savings abroad or stuffed them under the mattress.

EU EXASPERATION

The European Union and the IMF have been exasperated by a series of broken promises and weeks of disagreement over the bailout. They will not release the aid without clear commitments by the main party leaders that the reforms will be implemented, regardless of who wins the next elections.

The uncertainty has upset world financial markets, with stocks snapping a five-day winning streak on Friday and the euro tumbling.

The bill, approved by the cabinet along with hundreds of pages of accompanying documents, sets out reforms including a 22 percent cut in the minimum wage, pension cuts worth 300 million euros this year, as well as health and defense spending cuts.

"The government believes that sustained implementation of this policy program, complemented by debt restructuring, will put the public debt on a clear downward path," it says in a draft letter to EU and IMF chiefs, attached to the bill.

In the same letter, the government promises to speed up implementation of reforms in the labor, product and services markets, cut spending, and push through a privatization plan.

One of the attached documents, which spells out the reforms Greece will have to undertake in return for the aid, says the target of cutting the debt to "about" 120 percent of GDP by 2020 from about 160 percent now will be achieved.

(Writing by David Stamp)

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Syria forces shell Homs, Saudis push U.N. resolution

1 of 12. Demonstrators gather during a protest against Syria's President Bashar al-Assad in Homs February 10, 2012.

Credit: Reuters/Handout

By Khaled Yacoub Oweis and Angus MacSwan

AMMAN/BEIRUT (Reuters) - Syrian forces unleashed new tank and rocket bombardments on opposition neighborhoods of Homs on Saturday while diplomats sought U.N. backing for an Arab plan to end 11 months of bloodshed in Syria.

Activists said seven people were killed in the latest attacks in a week-long government siege of Homs, a battered city at the heart of the uprising to oust President Bashar al-Assad.

Mohammed Hassan, one opposition campaigner in Homs, told Reuters by satellite telephone that a 55-year-old woman was among those killed by shellfire on the Bab Amro district.

The bloodshed followed a day of violence across Syria on Friday, when bombings targeting security bases killed at least 28 people in Aleppo and rebel fighters battled troops in a Damascus suburb after dark.

Assad has ignored repeated international appeals, the latest from the European Union, to halt his crackdown.

"I am appalled by the reports of the brutal attacks by the Syrian armed forces in Homs. I condemn in the strongest terms these acts perpetrated by the Syrian regime against its own civilian," EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton said.

However, the world is deeply divided over how to end the Syria conflict. On Sunday Russia and China vetoed a draft U.N. Security Council resolution sponsored by Western and Arab states that backed an Arab League call for Assad to step down.

HOMS SUFFERS

The government offensive on opposition-held, mostly Sunni Muslim areas of Homs has killed at least 300 people in the past week, according to activists. Food and medical supplies are running low in blockaded areas, where many people are trapped in their houses, fearful of coming under fire if they step out.

Accounts could not be independently confirmed as Syria restricts access by most foreign journalists.

Youtube footage provided by activists showed a doctor at a field hospital next to the body of the woman. "Shrapnel hit her in the head and completely drained her brain matter," he says.

Big guns also pounded other Sunni neighborhoods in Homs that have been at the forefront of the uprising.

The 46-year old president belongs to the Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shi'ite Islam that has dominated the majority Sunni country since Assad's late father took control in a 1970 coup.

Security forces have also made house-to-house raids in Homs in the last two days. The bodies of three people shot by snipers were pulled from the streets on Saturday, activists said.

YouTube footage from Friday showed two tanks said to be on the edge of Bab Amro, one firing its main gun across a highway.

"The indiscriminate shelling is killing mostly civilians," Fawaz Tello, an Egyptian-based member of the opposition Syrian National Council, told Reuters.

"Assad cannot push his troops into street fighting...so he is content with shelling Homs to bits until civilian losses pressure the Free Syrian Army to withdraw and regime troops can enter these neighborhoods without taking any serious losses."

TROOPS AMBUSHED

Elsewhere in Syria, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said 10 soldiers were killed in an ambush by army defectors on Friday in the rebellious Idlib region on the border with Turkey.

The defectors hit a patrol between two villages with hand grenades and roadside bombs, the British-based Observatory said.

In Damascus, Free Syrian Army rebels fought for four hours on Friday night against troops backed by armored vehicles who had entered al-Qaboun neighborhood, activists said.

The fighting between government and rebel soldiers showed how opposition to Assad has increasingly evolved from pro-democracy street protests to armed insurrection.

World powers fear a slide into all-out civil war which could inflame a region already riven by revolts and rivalries from Bahrain and Yemen to Iran and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Gulf Arab states, the United States, Europe and Turkey are leading diplomatic efforts to force Assad to end his 11-year rule. But they have ruled out a military intervention of the kind that helped bring down Libya's Muammar Gaddafi last year.

Assad can count on the support of Russia, Syria's main arms supplier and an ally stretching back to the Soviet era, as well as Iran. Moscow, which is keen to counter U.S. influence in the Middle East, insists foreign powers should not interfere.

Kamel Ayham, a Eurasia Group analyst, said Syria was also the nexus of a regional power struggle, with Assad's fate the focus of competition between Sunni and Shi'ite Muslim countries.

At the United Nations, Saudi Arabia circulated a draft resolution backing an Arab peace plan for Syria among members of the General Assembly on Friday, diplomats said. The text echoed the one vetoed by Russia and China in the Security Council.

Like the failed draft, the assembly text "fully supports" the Arab League plan floated last month. The assembly is due to discuss Syria on Monday and vote on the draft later in the week.

Russia and China blocked the Security Council draft, saying it was unbalanced and failed to blame Syria's opposition, along with the government, for violence in which thousands have died.

The United Nations, which says it can no longer tally casualties, estimated in mid-December that the security forces had killed more than 5,000. A week later, the government said armed "terrorists" had killed over 2,000 soldiers and police.

Eurasia's Ayham said the Russian and Chinese vetoes indicated that change was not imminent. As the rebel forces lacked structure and a unified command, Assad would keep the military edge, but would find it hard to stamp out the revolt.

"In the next few months, Syria will transition from civil conflict into civil war. Assad's power and control over the country will diminish and civilian casualties on both sides are expected to rise," Ayham said.

(Additional reporting by Patrick Worsnip at the United Nations and Dominic Evans in Beirut; Editing by Alistair Lyon)

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