Gaddafi vows fight as world backs new leaders

Saturday, 3 September 2011 00:00 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}

(Reuters) - Muammar Gaddafi urged his supporters from hiding to fight on as Libya’s new interim rulers met world leaders on Thursday to discuss reshaping a nation torn by 42 years of one-man rule and six months of civil war.

“Let it be a long battle. We will fight from place to place, from town to town, from valley to valley, from mountain to mountain,” Gaddafi said in a message relayed by satellite TV on the anniversary of the coup that brought him to power in 1969.

“If Libya goes up in flames, who will be able to govern it? Let it burn,” he said with his trademark verbal flamboyance.

In further comments broadcast later, he vowed to prevent oil exports, in the kind of threat that stirs fears of an Iraq-style insurgency: “You will not be able to pump oil for the sake of your own people. We will not allow this to happen,” Gaddafi said. “Be ready for a war of gangs and urban warfare.”

Amid conflicting reports of where the 69-year-old fugitive might be, a commander in the forces of the new ruling council said he had fled to a desert town south of the capital, one of several tribal bastions still holding out.

Seeking to avoid more bloodshed, opposition forces also extended by a week a deadline for Gaddafi’s hometown of Sirte, on the coast, to surrender.

Meeting the National Transitional Council in Paris at the invitation of France and Britain, prime backers of the Libyan uprising which followed other Arab Spring revolts, Western powers said Gaddafi was still a threat, but handed the NTC $15 billion of his foreign assets to start the job of rebuilding.

“The world bet on the Libyans and the Libyans showed their courage and made their dream real,” Mahmoud Jibril, the prime minister in the interim government, said as NATO air forces maintained support for NTC fighters on the frontlines in Libya.

A history of tribal, ethnic and regional friction as well as divisions during the rebellion have created a wariness among Libyans and abroad about the ability of the new leaders to introduce the stable democracy that is the declared goal for the potentially oil-rich nation of six million.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said in Paris: “The work does not end with the end of an oppressive regime. Winning a war offers no guarantee of winning the peace that follows.”