The U.S. hopes that Paris meeting on Libya will pave the way for a "new phase" in the war-torn country after the ouster of Muammar Qadhafi, as the international community stepped up efforts to help the rebels establish a government at Tripoli.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Thursday left Washington for Paris to attend the international contact group meeting on Libya.
"What we will try to accomplish here is helping the Libyans as they turn the page and mark this transition, and we want to hear from them what their needs are in the area of humanitarian assistance and in the area of financial support," a senior State Department official said.
"We are entering a new phase here. For the past six months, there has been one agenda, protecting civilians and enforcing the Security Council resolutions, which we all believed might necessitate Qadhafi leaving.
Now he is no longer in power, so that's clearly the end of one period and the beginning of another," the official said.
The State Department official said that there has been a transition and now the TNC is no longer the rebels or the opposition, but in the process of moving to Tripoli and establishing a government in this country.
Financial aspect would also be the focus of the meeting.
"You know how hard we've been working on this question of unfreezing assets and getting them financial support, going all the way back to the creation of the temporary financial mechanism.
In the past two or three days, we have succeeded in getting the Sanctions Committee in New York to unfreeze, first, 1.5 billion in frozen assets in the U.S., and then just yesterday, another 1.6 or so from the UK. So that's USD 3
billion that will be critical in helping to meet some of these needs," the official said. The official asserted that the security situation in Libya is stable.
The humanitarian needs of the population, especially in Tripoli, with respect to water, power, food, gasoline, is met, because that will really be a key test in these first few days in terms of their ability to show what credibility they have.
The Paris meeting would also be an opportunity for TNC leaders to tell how they would like to interface with the international community now that they are beginning to, as they look ahead to the next several weeks.
"Assuming that the situation in Sabha and Sirte is managed and that we can move on to do what they want to do, obviously, the UN will play an important role in that, so there will be a question of how the UN effort will interface with that.
And I think that we'd like to come out of Paris, I think, with at least some semblance of how the international community will deal with the various needs that the TNC has as they move forward," the official said
