Muammar Gaddafi and his family could be hit with war-crimes indictments within the coming weeks for his brutal crackdown against unarmed protesters in eastern Libya last February, turning him and his top officials into international fugitives — and probably burying any hope of a ceasefire deal or an arrangement for quiet exile for Gaddafi and his family as a way of ending the war. As if to emphasize the regime’s defiance on Wednesday, Gaddafi loyalists shelled the rebel port of Misratah where an international aid ship had docked, reportedly killing four.
Underlining the Libyan leader’s mounting isolation, one of his closest pre-war allies, Turkey’s Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan, called on Gaddafi to resign on Wednesday, saying that he should hand power to “the Libyan people” as a way of securing the country’s future. That was a dramatic reversal, just five months after Erdogan few to Tripoli to receive the Al-Gaddafi International Prize for Human Rights, Libya’s highest honor for foreign leaders. As recently as last month, Turkish diplomats in Tripoli served as one of one the last remaining conduits to Gaddafi for Western leaders, and on several occasions Turkish diplomats have negotiated the release of Western journalists detained by Gaddafi’s forces.
