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Wednesday, November 13, 2013
The protests which started late last month by Libya’s Berber minority that led to the closure of the Mellitah Oil Terminal have spread and now closed the Greenstream pipleine that sends natural gas to Italy. The Berbers have been demanding more rights.
“We tried to convince them not to close the pipeline, but it’s closed now,” Munir Abu Saud, head of the local oil workers’ union, told Reuters.
“Sadly, it’s true,” said a senior official at the Libyan oil ministry. Tripoli has seen its authority crumbling over its restive regions and fears an exodus of foreign oil companies and investment.
The Berbers or Amazigh minority in September were responsible for the shut down of a pipeline feeding gas from ENI’s Wafa field to export facilities at Mellitah. Although this squeezed exports, much of the gas Libya sends to Italy comes from offshore fields.
A spokesman for the protesters camped out at the Mellitah complex said they had ordered the closure because Libya’s parliament and the government had failed to meet the group’s demands. “This time it is for real because the General National Congress did not meet our demands,” the spokesman said.
Some of the demands the Berbers are making include having their language guaranteed under Libya’s planned new constitution and a bigger say in a committee to be elected to draft the constitution. The Berbers believe they are treated as second-class citizens in the Arab country.
The government has debated the issue but as yet a solution has not been found.
“They want their language to become the official language…We would then have four official languages,” GNC Spokesman Omar Humeidan said, referring to demands from the Berbers and two other minorities to add their languages to Arabic, the only official one so far.
On Sunday, an autonomy movement escalated tensions with the Tripoli government by forming a regional oil company which plans to sell crude, bypassing the oil ministry.
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