Libya's western allies are financially "strangling" the rebels due to the lack of progress in releasing funds to pro-democracy fighters trying to unlock up to $1.15 billion of cash in the U.K., the National Transitional Council finance and oil minister said Tuesday.
Libya
's
western allies are financially "strangling" the rebels due to the
lack of progress in releasing funds to pro-democracy fighters trying to unlock
up to $1.15 billion of cash in the
U.K.
, the
National Transitional Council finance and oil minister said Tuesday.
"They [the allies] are strangling us," Ali Tarhouni said."They
just don't understand we are in a war."
"There is this amount of Libyan dinars we've been asking for that are
printed and are sitting in the
U.K.
This
is our money and we need these dinars," he added.
Rebels fighting forces loyal to Libyan leader Col. Muammar Gadhafi are
desperately short of cash and are lacking basic supplies like food and
medicine.
The National Transitional Council, or NTC, is the name of the interim rebel
government that has been recognized by countries such as
Italy
and
France
.
Tarhouni said the cash in the
UK
was
Libyan dinars belonging to Gadhafi which had subsequently been
"seized" by the
U.K.
government a couple of months ago. He said it wasn't clear whether the amount
of money was either 900 million Libyan dinars or 1.4 billion dinars.
In early March
U.K.
authorities intercepted a ship carrying around GBP100 million to
Libya
.
Earlier in the month, Tarhouni said the Libyan rebel leadership needed $3
billion over the next six months to cover basic costs like food fuel and
salaries, but so far the NTC were a long way off securing anything close to
that.
Rebels are asking North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO, countries who
have been conducting air strikes on Gadhafi targets in
Libya
, for
loans to help them run the parts of the war-torn North African country they
control.
In
Rome
earlier in the month at the so-called
Libya
contact group's last meeting, countries agreed on setting up a temporary fund
for the rebels.
"I have a mechanism [fund] but no money," Tarhouni said, who just a
few months ago was a lecturer at the University of Washington in the U.S.
Currently, he said, the rebels were $23 million in debt.
Fighting between rebels and Gadhafi troops has now entered its fourth month and
the NTC is producing no oil because production facilities under its control
were bombed by Gadhafi forces last month.
The rebels have so far only managed to sell a shipment containing one million
barrels of oil "over a month and half ago", Tahouni said.
Qatar
, the
first Arab state to recognise the rebels as the official Libyan government and
to join NATO-led air strikes, helped the NTC market its first shipment of oil.
The wealthy Gulf Arab state set up a bank account at state-owned Qatar National
Bank for money made from rebel oil sales but Tahouni said these funds had run
dry.
Producing oil wasn't a priority for the rebels because "$100 million is
not going to do it for me every two or three weeks" he said in reference
to the one million barrels of crude sold in the only rebel shipment over six
weeks ago.
Tarhouni estimated that a minimum $165 million worth of assets belonging to the
Gadhafi regime have been frozen abroad by the United Nations and the European
Union.
"We don't want them to be unfrozen," he said. "Keep them frozen
because that is a form of protection for the integrity of these assets--what we
want is to get something as a pledge of collateral that will allow us to run
this war."
The
U.S.
has
allocated $25 million to help the rebels procure supplies, but because of legal
issues it has so far declined to release any of the $34 billion in Libyan
assets that were frozen by the Treasury Department this year in the wake of
Col. Gadhafi's violent crackdown on protesters.
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