Turkey toughens stance on Libya

Turkey has toughened its stance on Libya, definitively pulling its ambassador from Tripoli and adopting fresh sanctions while its foreign minister visited the rebel 'capital' Benghazi on Sunday. The official journal announced Saturday that its ambassador to Libya, Salim Levent Sahinkaya, had been reassigned in Ankara. Sahinkaya was pulled out of Tripoli in March due to the fighting there and has not been replaced. The official journal also published a government decree translating UN sanctions against Libya, its veteran ruler Muammar Gaddafi, his family and regime officials into national law. These sanctions in particular concern the Libyan Foreign Bank, which owns 62 percent of the Turkish-Libyan A&T Bank. According to the daily Radikal the bank could now be placed under the control of the savings banks insurance fund. Meanwhile Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu was spending the day in Benghazi, eastern Libya, Sunday where he had talks scheduled with leaders of the National Transition Council, which represents the rebels fighting Gaddafi. Turkey, the only mainly Muslim member of NATO and an important regional player, has gradually taken a hard line against Libya, after at first criticising the Western airstrikes against Gaddafi's forces. It has refused to take part in the air action, but has provided six war ships to help impose a NATO-imposed arms embargo in Libyan waters. In May Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan called on Gaddafi to cede power and last month offered the Libyan leader a "guarantee" that if he left the north African country he would be taken wherever he wanted.