The Libyan parliament voted Tuesday
to oust Prime Minister Ali Zeidan amid anger at his government's failure to
stop eastern rebels from independently exporting oil.
“The situation in the country has
become unacceptable. Even those MPs who used to support the prime minister no
longer have any alternative,” MP Suad Gannur told AFP prior to the vote.
Zeidan's government has been
repeatedly criticized for its failure to rein in the myriad of former rebel
militias which have carved out their own fiefdoms since the NATO-backed
uprising that ended the 42-year dictatorship of Muammar Qaddafi in 2011.
The prime minister was himself
briefly abducted by former rebel militia in the heart of the capital last
October.
But in a new humiliation for his
government, a North Korean-flagged tanker laden with oil from a rebel-held
terminal in the east slipped the warships deployed to intercept it and escaped
to sea earlier Tuesday.
The Morning Glory, which docked in
Al-Sidra on Saturday and is reported to have taken on at least 234,000 barrels
of crude, is the first vessel to have loaded oil from a rebel-held terminal
since the revolt against the Tripoli authorities erupted last July.
Zeidan's government had threatened
armed action, even an air strike, to prevent the tanker getting away with its
cargo of oil bought from the rebels' self-declared autonomous regional
government without the authorisation of the state-owned Libyan National Oil
Corporation.
Zeidan, an independent elected with
the support of liberals, has been the target of previous no-confidence motions
in the General National Congress but they have never achieved the statutory
quorum of 120 of its 194 members.
Zeidan accuses his Islamist
opponents of seeking to oust him solely to replace him with their own candidate.
AFP. Al Arabiya
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