Mohammed leans his bicycle against the wall of a café on Tripoli’s Green Square, opposite the city’s red-stone museum and Roman walls. Six months ago, he would have left his Volkswagen Passat for valet parking.
“The boys would take it and wash it while I was here,” he says. The oil-company engineer asked to be identified by one name because of the security situation. Libyans in the capital are getting on their bikes to avoid the hundred-metre lines and weeklong waits at gas pumps — evidence that the rebellion against Muammar Gaddafi, backed by North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato) warplanes and international sanctions, is applying a squeeze on the territory that remains under his control.
The US and its European allies say the leader’s four-decade grip on the country that holds Africa’s biggest oil reserves is nearing its end, as economic pressure and strikes on troops and communication centres erode his capacity to resist a spreading insurgency. Gaddafi is betting that he can survive longer than the coalition against him can stay united.
Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini on June 22 called for a “humanitarian suspension” of hostilities. The House of Representatives refused on June 24 to authorise President Barack Obama to continue American involvement in the Nato’s aerial combat missions, while declining to restrict funding for the operation.
There are signs of opposition to Gaddafi even within the zone he controls. Drivers in Azzawiya, 100 kilometres (62 miles) west of Tripoli, are stopped by soldiers every five minutes at checkpoints amid searches for rebel weapons.
COVERED GRAFFITI
Patches of fresh paint on some walls in the capital show where anti-government graffiti has been covered up, while slogans denouncing “the rats,” Gaddafi’s term for the rebels, are left alone. In the centre of Tripoli, a city of 2 million people that is shaken almost daily by Nato bombs, unexplained bursts of gunfire sound at night.
Oil rose more than $25 a barrel in the first two months of the Libyan conflict. The International Energy Agency in Paris said last week that the US and 27 other countries will release 60 million barrels of emergency stockpiles, only the third such action in more than three decades, to offset the loss of 132 million barrels of Libyan output.