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and elections, but Muammar Gaddafi must remain as the Libyan leader.
“We are ready for political solutions: constitution, election, anything, but the leader has to lead this forward,” Mussa Ibrahim said.
The spokesman said the Libyan people, rather than other countries, must decide the country’s future and whether the Libyan leader should stay or go.
He added no conditions could be imposed on Libya from abroad, even though the country was ready to negotiate proposals for changes and reform.
“Don’t decide our future from abroad, give us a proposal for change from within,” he said.
He accused some Western politicians of trying to force Gaddafi to step down out of personal gains or economic interests, and denied allegations that the government troops were involved in any attacks against civilians.
NATO-led air strikes have destroyed 30 percent of the government’s military capacity since the UN-backed bombing campaign started on March 19, an alliance commander said, even as the rebels suffered their first significant loss of territory in almost a week.
A one-million-barrel supertanker docked in the rebel-held port of Tobruk to pick up the first oil cargo for 18 days, the specialist shipping newsletter Lloyd’s List said, in a big boost to the anti-Gadaffi forces’ finances.
Government spokesman Mussa Ibrahim told journalists in Tripoli that everything except the departure of Gadaffi was negotiable, saying he was a unifying figure after ruling the nation for four decades.
“What kind of political system is implemented in the country? This is negotiable, we can talk about it,” Ibrahim said. “We can have anything, elections, referendums.”
But Gadaffi’s future was sacrosanct, he stressed, only hours after the rebels flatly rejected a reported peace deal that could see the embattled leader’s son take charge of the North African nation.
The “guide of the revolution”, who has always rejected the title of head of state, was “the safety valve” for the unity of the country’s tribes and people, Ibrahim said. “We think he is very important to lead any transition to a democratic and transparent model.”
In a show of defiance, Gadaffi greeted supporters late Monday in his first public appearance since March 22 at his Bab el-Aziziya residence in Tripoli, bombed by coalition forces two days earlier, state television said.
Gadaffi’s son Seif al-Islam meanwhile, dismissed former foreign minister Mussa Kussa, who defected to the West last week, as just a “sick and old” man who had succumbed to the psychological pressures of war.
Long seen as the heir apparent to his father before the wave of protests shook the country, Seif al-Islam briefly showed up at a Tripoli hotel to record an interview with the BBC in which he made dismissive comments about Kussa, once a pillar of the regime.
The son, who had not been seen in public since coalition air strikes began on March 19, said Kussa had been allowed to go abroad for medical treatment.
“Regarding Mussa Kussa, he said: ‘I’m on a travel ban list and I’m sick and I have to go every three months to Cromwell hospital, in London, if I can get permission. I want to go there,’ so . . . and we allow him to go to Djerba, in Tunisia, so there’s nothing against that,” the younger Gadaffi said.
He added: “We have been bombed for two weeks, imagine the psychological pressure and you are sick and old, so you resign. It’s a war.”
Asked what information Kussa might provide the West, Seif al-Islam said: “He’s sick, he’s sick and old, of course, he would come out with funny stories.” But he dismissed the idea Kussa might have secrets to share, for instance on the extent of the involvement of the Libyan intelligence services, in which he was long a senior figure, in the December 1988 bombing of a US airliner over Lockerbie, Scotland, which killed 270 people. -Reuters/AFP.