Foreign Minister Franco Frattini is in Benghazi for meetings with Libya’s Transitional National Council. During his visit, the head of Italian diplomacy will meet the Chairperson of the Transitional National Council (TNC), Mustafa Abdel Jalil. He will then visit the Italian Consulate in Benghazi to officially open the temporary premises. After a lunch hosted by the deputy leader of the TNC, Ali Al Isawi, Frattini will return to Rome. His visit to Libya follows those of the European Union’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs, Catherine Ashton, and the Polish Foreign Minister, Radoslaw Sikorski. In the meantime, the Gaddafi regime continues to suffer defections. “A total of 120 soldiers and officers have left, all of them now outside Libya”, announced the former Libyan Foreign Minister and Ambassador to the United Nations, Abdel Rahamn Shalgam.
The former Minister, one of the first to abandon the Colonel, was speaking at a press conference in Rome presenting the eight senior officers who fled Tripoli last Friday (27 May) to embrace the “17 February Revolution”. The eight fled overland, via Tunisia, “with the help of the revolutionaries in the western mountains”.
The defection of the eight officers is “one of the most significant developments”, commented MFA spokesperson, Maurizio Massari, in expressing the Italian Government’s “great satisfaction” at this turn of events. “A development that rewards the courage of our Libyan friends but also the careful, skilful and determined work of our intelligence operators and the Italian institutions in their various capacities”. One of the eight officers attending the press conference in Rome, Infantry General Malud Massud Halasi, said that the Gaddafi regime “is now left with no more than 20% of its military capacity”.
The Libyan leader can now count on just “a few hundred soldiers, while the number of generals can be counted in just dozens”. All telecommunications between the government forces are down. On the ground, therefore, Gaddafi’s capability seems to be at the lowest possible ebb. Indeed, NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen declared that “the operation in Libya is achieving its objectives” and Gaddafi’s “reign of terror” has come to an end.
Economic cooperation between Italy and Egypt is growing stronger as Italy supports that North African nation’s “path to democracy”. The two countries are aiming at intensifying and strengthening debt conversion as a development instrument with a new joint declaration of intent, signed today at Villa Madama by Minister Franco Frattini and his Egyptian counterpart Nabil Al Arabi, who held a bilateral meeting during the latter’s visit to Rome. 
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