Tripoli to be pregnant with democracy for eight months

Libyans should be allowed to vote within eight months to elect a national council that would draft a new constitution and form an interim government, PM Mahmoud Jibril said on Saturday as he prepared to step down.

Priority was to remove weapons from Libyan streets, restore stability and order and begin a process of national reconciliation, Jibril said at the World Economic Forum in Jordan. “The first election should take place within a period of eight months, maximum, to constitute a national congress of Libya, some sort of parliament,” he said. “This national congress would have two tasks — draft a constitution, on which we would have a referendum, and the second to form an interim government to last until the first presidential elections are held,” said Jibril. He said that he planned to step down — a move he had planned to make once the country was under full government control. Commenting on the disgust felt by many at the sight of Gaddafi’s blood-stained, body, he said: “People in the West don’t understand the agony and pain that the people went through during the past 42 years.”