“We need action within hours not days... Gaddafi is killing his own people for wanting to be free”, an emotional Abdurraham Mohammed Shelagam, the Libyan Ambassador to the United Nations, told the National Council meeting in New York on Friday.

Both he and his deputy broke off their ties with the regime and are supporting their anti Gaddafi compatriots. Many members of the Council hugged them in support, however nothing concrete came out of that meeting despite the UN’s Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon saying, “We need to take concrete action. Loss of time means loss of lives”. He said he was meeting President Obama on Monday.

We also saw the mass exodus of people of varying nationalities on Friday, many arriving at the Grand Harbour after having spent over 24 hours stuck in the port in Libya because of bad weather.

David Cameron was the only EU leader mentioning possible military intervention, which might have worried British people with relatives still stuck in the Libyan Desert.

Meanwhile Barak Obama seemed to be waiting for all US citizens to be evacuated, probably because Gaddafi’s behaviour is both unpredictable and erratic, which is ironic considering that until now one of the reasons he had been propped up by the west was stability in the region.

However by late Friday, when it was felt that all US citizens had left Libya and that Gaddafi’s desperado tactics were getting even worse, Obama was talking about freezing Gaddafi and his families’ assets and unilateral sanctions on his regime.

The US, the UN and the EU are all saying they should act in unison, but so far no concerted plan has emerged.

Earlier Gaddafi, speaking to supporters from the roof of a building, said that arsenals would be thrown open to arm his people for battle.

Until Thursday, despite the outrageous violence, everyone seemed to be walking on eggshells. On Wednesday, while condemning the violence unreservedly, Ban Ki-moon avoided naming Gaddafi, “The reported nature and scale of the attacks on civilians are egregious violations of international humanitarian and human rights law.

“I condemn them, loudly and without qualification. Those responsible must be held accountable in courts of law,” he said. Of course everyone knew full well who was responsible, but because of the oil and gas, business interests, not to mention the Al Qaeda threat, and also the fear that Gaddafi will take foreigners as hostages everyone was being very cautious.

One could not help sympathising with one protestor interviewed, who saw the west as not giving enough support to the anti Gaddafi protestors because of vested interests. “We are not seen as human beings, but just producers of oil”, he said.

Of course with Libya being a large supplier of oil the situation is crucial. As the world was slowly recovering from the global crisis it has now to cope with another. According to Professor Jeffrey Sachs talking to CNBC yesterday, the US has no energy policy and the US is certainly not alone.

Although the US and the EU also dragged their feet at the start of the uprising in Egypt, that situation was quite different. Mubarak was not unpredictable and volatile. Of course he also was reluctant to leave, but he knew how far he could go. Gaddafi does not.

Despite the obvious lack of logic in his rantings, Muammar Gaddafi knows exactly which buttons to press to worry the west. He blamed Bin Laden, for the revolt against him, to further fuel the fear of Islam extremists on EU’s doorstep.

“It is obvious now that this issue is run by al-Qaeda,” he said, speaking by phone from an unspecified location on Thursday, reported Al Jazeera.

Gaddafi’s tyranny has in the past effectively and brutally stifled any uprising by an Al Qaeda faction in Libya, which suited us very nicely. But it is, therefore, not surprising if that group is also seeking revenge.

Gaddafi also warned that the protests could cut off Libya’s oil production. His ambassador in Malta, Saadun Suayeh, looking as though butter would not melt in his mouth, reiterated his master’s message, with a difference.

He tried to tone down the bluster, “unrest was caused by foreign Al-Qaeda operatives, who had duped Libyan youth into joining the insurgency,” he told a press conference on Thursday, underneath a portrait of Gaddafi.

Gaddafi had referred to the protestors as high on hallucinatory drugs and alcohol. Besides the foreigners referred to by Gaddafi were westerners, hence the US and EU caution in their reactions to the violence. They did not want their citizens to be used as scapegoats and be taken hostage or even killed.

The Libyan ambassador portrayed life in Tripoli and the west of Libya as normal, despite reports.

Blaming the media for not giving a true picture of what was going on he said the number of those who died in Libya was being exaggerated and the official death toll was about 300.

Gaddafi’s son echoed the exaggeration theme on Friday calling the media reporting on the violence “a joke”. “We are all laughing here. There was no bombing and there are no mercenaries”, he said. He should know that the rest of the world is certainly not laughing.

I wondered why Dr Suayeh had not joined many of his country’s ambassadors, who have rejected the regime, and is instead defending Gaddafi, I thought that perhaps he had family in Libya and was scared for their safety.

But talking about that to a Libyan woman at the protest in Valletta yesterday her response was “we all have families in Libya”.

Dr Suayeh invited the journalists present at the PC to visit and “discover the truth”, which could not be taken seriously since journalists had not been allowed in precisely because Gaddafi did not want the rest of the world to know what was going on.

Why else were communication channels constantly disrupted? And why are people leaving Libya at the Tunisian border and on their way to Tripoli airport being relieved of their mobile phones, sim cards and cameras.

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“The most important thing to them (the security forces) is to not allow any footage to get across the border into Tunisia,”reported Nazanine Moshri, from the northern side of the Tunisian-Libyan border near the town of Ras Ajdir.

Thuraya, a satellite phone provider based in the United Arab Emirates, has faced continuous “deliberate inference” to its services in Libya, the company’s CEO told Al Jazeera.

The company’s engineers have had some success in combating the jamming, and operations were back on almost 70 per cent of the Libyan territory on Thursday. The blocking was coming from a location in Tripoli.

Some phone services were down again on Thursday. In the town of Az Zawiyah, phone lines were working but internet access was blocked.

According to Malta’s Ambassador George Cassar, the Libyan Foreign Office summoned ambassadors accredited to Libya for a meeting on Wednesday night, when they were given the government’s official line that the insurgency was fuelled by Al-Qaeda operatives.

However, a tour of Tripoli, which was meant to take place a few day ago, to supposedly show ambassadors that it was not true that military aircraft bombed civilians, did not happen.

Dr Suayeh acknowledged, “We do have problems with human rights but which country does not have such problems?” Granted that there are other countries with a poor record, with some showing a complete disregard to civil liberties, but there is a difference in democracies where people can protest without being butchered and bombed.

“Until some time ago, Europeans were rushing to invest in Libya and they never mentioned human rights as a problem”, he added.

Of course he is absolutely right on the latter and it is not just in Libya that human rights issues were and still are ignored when convenient.

But that does not mean that Gaddafi should be allowed to get away with the bloodshed. The Security Council were meeting again yesterday evening. Hopefully they would have come up with a concrete plan, which would include concerted action to help the people of Libya rid themselves of the tryranical regime.

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