Gaddafi's burial and Tunisian election results - live updates

Gaddafi's burial and Tunisian election results - live updates

? Muammar Gaddafi buried in a secret desert grave, NTC says
? An-Nahda declares victory in Tunisian elections
? Medical workers involved in torture in Syria, says Amnesty

Matthew Weaver and Paul Owen

Tuesday October 25 2011
guardian.co.uk


http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/middle-east-live/2011/oct/25/gaddafi-burial-live-updates




12.05pm: In Tunisia, the An-Nahda party says it has obtained "first place" in the country's first free election.

The election is to form an assembly that will sit for one year to draft a new constitution. It will also appoint a new interim president and government to run the country until fresh elections late next year or early in 2013.

The voting system has built-in checks and balances, making it nearly impossible for any one party to gain a majority, compelling An-Nahda to seek alliances with secularist parties. Today party officials said they were prepared to form an alliance with two such parties: the Congress for the Republic, and Ettakatol.

Abdelhamid Jlazzi, An-Nahda's campaign manager, said: "We will spare no effort to create a stable political alliance ? We reassure the investors and international economic partners."

An estimated 90% of voters turned out for the election on Sunday. Full nationwide results are expected later this afternoon.

The seeming success of An-Nahda means its leader Rachid Ghannouchi may become interim president. He was forced into exile in Britain for 22 years under Tunisia's former leader, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. Reuters provides this mini-profile of him:

A softly spoken scholar, he dresses in suits and open-necked shirts while his wife and daughter wear the hijab.

Ghannouchi is at pains to stress his party will not enforce any code of morality on Tunisian society, or the millions of Western tourists who holiday on its beaches. He models his approach on the moderate Islamism of Turkish prime minister Tayyip Erdogan.

In Tunis, my colleague Lizzy Davies has been leafing through the francophone Tunisian papers this morning. She says  it is clear that the media are reacting in subtly different ways to the anticipated victory of the An-Nahda party - a win which is due to be announced formally later today.

La Presse appears to adopt [http://www.lapresse.tn/25102011/dans-lere-de-la-democratie.html] the most sympathetic stance towards the party, pointing out that Rachid Ghannouchi's moderate Islamists have been "chosen democratically in a transparent system which bestows upon them all legitimacy." But there are challenges ahead, it says, one of which is to "definitively wring the neck of the prejudices harboured against them by broad swathes of opinion - those who accuse them of disregarding cultural and political minorities' right to freedom of expression."

The editorial in Le Temps [http://www.letemps.com.tn/article-60084.html], on the other hand, sounds more concerned:  "Should we be worried for our rights? An-Nahda claims to be reassuring and says it has no intention of affecting women and no problem with G-strings, tourism or those who don't go to the mosque ... At the end of the day, what is possible and what is impossible with An-Nahda? Let's listen to Sherlock Holmes: 'When we have eliminated all the impossibilities, only the probabilities remain.'"

Striking a balance between alarmism and celebration, Le Quotidien fires an implicit warning shot to Ghannouchi's party to stick to its pragmatic campaign image. Those elected, it remarks, have a responsibility that is too important for the "personal interests and visions of those who might think - wrongly - that they have reached nirvana and that from now on they have the right to put their ideology before a social programme along the lines of what the people expect."

But, whatever the result, the "big star" of the election was the Tunisian people, it writes. "The main thing is that we have got off on the right foot, and that the Tunisian nation remains, in its confirmed maturity and heightened sense of responsibility, the eternal guard ? of our blossoming democracy. Those who are called upon to govern it, whatever their ideological or political leanings, must not lose sight of this."

11.58am: Muammar Gaddafi's burial is expected to be confirmed at an NTC press conference, Ian Black reports from Tripoli, via Skype [http://vimeo.com/31077350].

The public viewing of Gaddafi's body had become a great embarrassment to the new Libyan government, Ian says.

"It is a pretty horrible story and it reflects the powerful hatred and desire for revenge every where you see in Libya," Ian says.

There will be considerable effort to try to keep the location and circumstance [of the burial] as secret as possible. Whether that works, or course, is another question ... The whole spirit of the country is to move on.

On the whereabouts of Gaddafi's son Saif al-Islam, Ian said: "There are only rumours ... there is speculation that he has escaped to Niger. It seems to me that the more time that elapses since the death of Gaddafi himself ... it is less likely that Saif al-Islam is going to be caught ... For the moment we simply don't know."




11.42am: America's outspoken ambassador to Syria may have left Damascus but his  staff continue to highlight the brutality of the Assad regime on the embassy's Facebook page [http://www.facebook.com/syria.usembassy/posts/186749828072507].

In its latest update administrators of the embassy's page posted a link to a Time magazine article [ http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2097528,00.html#ixzz1bmsXkDjO] about Syrian refugees in Turkey who are afraid of being kidnapped by spies and sympathisers of the regime. It says:

There's a palpable change in the border area since the heady, bustling days this summer when the sleepy village of Guvecci was inundated with refugees. Activists who swaggered around town have now moved deeper into Turkey, into the city of Antakya, where they keep a low profile. Gone are the days of illegally trekking across the Turkish border into Syria unimpeded by the security forces of either country, and of the hopeful optimism that the Damascus regime would soon fall. It's all been replaced with a sharp fear that Assad's reach extends well beyond his borders.

11.18am: The Local Coordination Committees [http://www.facebook.com/#!/LCCSy], which monitor protests in Syria, are reporting on demonstrations, arrests and detentions across the country, as they do almost every day.

Today the LCCs say that 10 buses full of "thugs and security" cut electricity and communications in  Daraa and began a "massive wave of arbitrary arrest[s]".

In Homs heavy gunfire and explosions were reported.

There were demonstrations in the countryside near Damascus, in Banyas, in Hama, and in Daraa.

11.09am: The whereabouts of Muammar Gaddafi's most high-profile son, Saif al-Islam Gaddafi (left), are still unknown, but an NTC official has told Reuters he is in the southern desert and trying to flee Libya, "with the NTC powerless to stop him", as the news agency puts it.

The official said:

He's on the triangle of Niger and Algeria. He's south of Ghat, the Ghat area. He was given a false Libyan passport from the area of Murzuq.

This map shows where those places are [http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?msid=209495235774282418880.0004a5a9b058f2989681a&msa=0&ll=26.066652,12.996826&spn=8.924046,7.679443].

The official said that Gaddafi's former intelligence chief, Abdullah al-Senussi, who, like Saif, is wanted by the international criminal court, was involved in helping Saif escape.

The region is very, very difficult to monitor and encircle. The region is a desert region and it has ... many, many exit routes.

10.59am: Syria's ally China is sending an envoy to Damascus and is urging the Assad regime to reform [ http://af.reuters.com/article/libyaNews/idAFL3E7LP1JW20111025?].

The move suggests China may be tentatively filling the diplomatic vacuum left by the departure of the US ambassador Robert Ford.

China's foreign ministry says Wu Sike, China's special envoy on the Middle East, will visit Syria and Egypt for a five-day visit starting on Wednesday.

Foreign ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu was quoted by Reuters as saying:

We hope that all sides in Syria can put the interests of the country and people first, discard violence, avoid bloodshed and clashes, and resolve differences via dialogue in a peaceful way. We believe that Syria's government should proactively fulfil its promises of reform, and answer the people's reasonable demands.

10.42am: Here's a Reuters story on the Amnesty International report [http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/oct/25/syrian-government-hospitals-torturing-demonstrators] about wounded prisoners being tortured and assaulted in Syrian hospitals.

And here's a video of a US official explaining [http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2011/oct/25/us-ambassador-syria-video] why they have withdrawn ambassador Robert Ford from Syria.

10.15am: Barack Obama's Syria policy has now "crashed and burned" [http://www.juancole.com/2011/10/ambassador-fords-departure-a-defeat-for-al-assad.html?">Barack Obama's Syria policy has now "crashed and burned] with the departure of ambassador Robert Ford from Damascus, according to Middle East analyst Juan Cole.

In a new blogpost he say he hopes Ford can be reinstated because dialogue rather than the kind of military intervention proposed by senator John McCain is the solution to the crisis.

Obama has been left with a policy toward Syria of financial sanctions and a diplomatic freeze, despite his best efforts to craft a better approach.

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad should realise that keeping Ford in Damascus and safe is his best option for keeping a line open to Obama. By allowing or perhaps fostering threats to the US ambassador, he has cut himself off from any dialogue with Washington. It is Senator McCain's warmongering that has filled that vacuum.

McCain is wrong that western military intervention is plausible in Syria. There has been no Arab League resolution calling for it, and no UN security council resolution (action is being blocked by Russia and China). Most Syrian protesters themselves have opposed foreign intervention. There is no framework of international legality or legitimacy that would permit an outside intervention. Additionally, Syria's geography is diverse and often rugged, and no attempt at intervention would be simple, tactically or logistically.

Given the danger that sinister accusations will come to substitute themselves for reality in Washington with regard to Syria, Damascus would be better off finding a way to get Ford back into the country. To jaw-jaw is better than to war-war.

But leading dissident Ammar Abdulhamid says the Syrian people need military protection [http://syrianrevolutiondigest.blogspot.com/2011/10/time-for-intervention.html] from the international community and the failure to mount a Libya-style intervention amounts to double standards.

The hypocrisy of it all is too glaring. Homs city is being bombed to smithereens under our very eyes, and the world that was willing to bleed in pain for a Benghazi that has not yet been attacked is admonishing patience and dialogue, as attempts at self-defence by locals get depicted as morally compromising. This has to remain a peaceful protest, we are told, so the revolution can retain its moral superiority. No one admonished the Libyans to do that and no one described their revolution as immoral even though it turned violent within days of its start. And the world rushed in to save Libya and the Libyans, even before the death toll reached 100.

9.54am: The sourcing for reports that Gaddafi has been buried is still quite sketchy. Martin Chulov in Tripoli says some NTC figures are not confirming the news.

The military council in Misrata, one of the first with the news of Gaddafi's capture, is reporting that he was buried at 5am [http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-15441867].

An interim government official told Reuters: "Gaddafi and the son, Mutassim, were buried at dawn [http://uk.reuters.com/article/2011/10/25/uk-libya-idUKTRE79F1EL20111025">] in a secret place with proper respects paid. We will release more details officially later."

Gaddafi's defence minister Abu Bakr Younis, who was killed in the Nato airstrike on the convoy fleeing Sirte, is also thought to have been buried.

It is unclear whether relatives attended the burial. There are some reports that relatives observed a ceremony before the bodies were taken away to be buried in secret [http://twitter.com/jnyhutton/statuses/128751873590173696].

9.31am: An explosion in Sirte has underlined the continuing instability in Libya. Reuters reports:

More than 50 people were killed when two fuel tanks exploded in the Libyan city of Sirte on Monday, local residents said.

The explosion was caused by a short circuit, they said, and happened at midday on Monday. The two tanks were still on fire after dark.

9.19am: One of the fighters who captured Gaddafi tried to sodomise him after he was captured alive, according to video footage obtained by the Global Post.

An analysis of highly disturbing video footage  [http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/middle-east/111024/gaddafi-sodomized-video-gaddafi-sodomy][Warning: link contains graphic images] shows a fighter trying to insert a stick, knife or gun into Gaddafi's rear end, it says.

9.06am: More details are emerging about the burial of Gaddafi, his son Mutassim and an senior official. AP has this:

A Misrata military council official says Muammar Gaddafi, his son Mutassim and a top aide have been buried in a secret location, with a few relatives and officials in attendance.

In a text message spokesman Ibrahim Beitalmal is quoted as saying the burial took place at 5am Tuesday, and that Islamic prayers were read over the bodies. The information could not be independently verified.

The three bodies had been held in cold storage in Misrata since Gaddafi was captured near his hometown of Sirte on Thursday.

BBC producer Kate Benyon-Tinker tweets:

Guma Al Gamaty of NTC has confirmed to #BBC that #Gaddafi, son Muatassim & top aide were buried at dawn [http://twitter.com/katebt3000/statuses/128743053933551616] in an unknown location #libya

9.02am: Human Rights Watch made this film on the unsecured surface-to-air missiles in Sirte. [http://youtu.be/cdnQiM6oJ3w]

Peter Bouckaert, the group's emergencies director, said crates of missiles can be taken with no one noticing.

8.30am: Welcome to Middle East Live on a hugely symbolic day in North Africa. Muammar Gaddafi is reported to have been buried, while across the border in Tunisia election results are due to be declared. Here's a round-up of the latest developments across the region.


Libya

?  [http://twitter.com/Reuters/statuses/128730935947567104]Muammar Gaddafi is reported to have been buried at a secret location in the Libyan desert. Al-Jazeera said the ceremony took place at dawn, citing National Transitional Council officials.

?  [http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/oct/24/libya-investigation-gaddafi-death]Libya has bowed to international pressure and announced it will investigate the killing of Gaddafi. Mustafa Abdel-Jalil, head of the ruling National Transitional Council, said it had set up a committee to look into the circumstances of the deaths of Gaddafi and his son Mutassim in Sirte.

?  [http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle-east/commander-says-nato-had-no-idea-moammar-gadhafi-in-convoy-hit-by-airstrikes-as-it-fled-sirte/2011/10/24/gIQAJS7BDM_story.html?]Nato said it had no idea Gaddafi was in a convoy hit by airstrikes as it fled Sirte last Thursday. Lieutenant General Charles Bouchard, commander of operations in Libya, said:  "We saw a convoy and we had no idea that Gaddafi was on board. In fact, I was surprised that Gaddafi was in the Sirte area."

?  [http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/oct/24/britain-family-gaddafi-legal]The daughter of a Libyan dissident who was imprisoned by Muammar Gaddafi following a rendition operation mounted with the help of MI6 has told how her family was flown across the world and held for months in Libya while her father was being tortured nearby. The wife and children of Sami al-Saadi have launched legal proceedings against the British government and its intelligence agencies, and say they are also planning to lodge a complaint with Scotland Yard over the role that the British authorities played in their abduction and detention.

?  [http://www.hrw.org/news/2011/10/25/libya-transitional-council-failing-secure-weapons]Vast amounts of unsecured explosive weapons, including surface-to-air missiles, remain unguarded in the area around Sirte, according to Human Rights Watch. Peter Bouckaert, the group's emergencies director, said: "Now that fighting has ended, one of the NTC's top priorities should be securing weapons facilities, and bringing the unchecked flow of arms in the country under control. The evidence at these sites indicates that there is no time to waste."


Tunisia

 [http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/oct/24/tunisia-elections-an-nahda]The moderate Islamist party An-Nahda has declared victory in the first elections since the ousting of president Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali in January. The official results are expected to be announced later today.


Syria

?  [http://www.amnesty.org.uk/news_details.asp?NewsID=19770]Medical workers in Syria have subjected patients to torture and abuse, forcing many to stay away from hospitals, a report by Amnesty International claims. The report accuses the regime of Bashar al-Assad of turning hospitals into instruments of repression where the security services are given free rein. Amnesty International's Middle East and North Africa researcher Cilina Nasser said:

In many cases hospital staff appear to have taken part in torture and ill treatment of the very people they are supposed to care for. Given the scale and seriousness of the injuries being sustained by people across the country, it is disturbing to find that many consider it safer to risk not having major wounds treated rather than going to proper medical facilities.

?  [http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/oct/24/syria-us-withdraw-ambassadors-assad]The US has withdrawn its ambassador to Syria over fears for his safety in the face of what officials said was a growing campaign of incitement against him being orchestrated by the regime. The Syrian government quickly ordered home its envoy to Washington, raising the diplomatic stakes.

?  [http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle-east/hezbollah-leader-syria-largely-out-of-danger-zone-despite-7-month-uprising/2011/10/24/gIQAHimFDM_story.html?]The Assad regime is largely "out of the danger zone" seven months after the Syrian uprising began, according to the leader of the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah. Speaking on the group's Manar TV station, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah (left), a key ally of Syria, said: "Is Syria out of danger? We can say, to a very large extent, yes."


Egypt

?  [http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/greenslade/2011/oct/24/egypt-press-freedom]An influential Egyptian TV talk show host has suspended his broadcasts in protest at media censorship. Yosri Fouda, host of the Last Word on the private satellite channel ONTV, said there had been "a noticeable deterioration in media freedoms".

?  [http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/oct/24/egypt-to-free-suspected-spy]Egypt is to release a US-Israeli citizen held since June on suspicion of spying, according to a statement issued by the office of prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu. Israel will release 25 Egyptian prisoners in exchange for Ilan Grapel, who has been held without charge since he was arrested in Cairo on 12 June.


Jordan

?  [http://mideast.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2011/10/24/fragile_hopes_for_jordan_s_new_pm]Opposition activists have cautiously welcomed the appointment of the new prime minister Awn Shawkat al-Khasawneh, according to Foreign Policy magazine.

Many Jordanians believe Khasawneh represents the best chance since the Arab Spring began for Jordan to achieve meaningful reform. With his legal talents and lack of political entanglements, many hope that he will be able to bridge the kingdom's deep political divides and tackle the corruption that is pervasive throughout the Jordanian government.