Libyan plan to build parliament on ruins of Gaddafi's compound

Source: The Guardian

It was once Libya's most forbidding place, the sprawling family compound where Muammar Gaddafi and senior regime figures lived behind impenetrable concrete walls. The Bab al-Aziziya complex in the centre of Tripoli was a city within a city, housing a network of underground tunnels, barracks and camouflaged villas.

Now Libya's transitional government has come up with a plan to build the country's new parliament building in the heart of Gaddafi's collapsed empire. Officials have suggested that the complex could house the country's new national congress. They are also planning a museum and a library.

"I'm going to propose this. It's very urgent," Othman ben Sassi, general secretary of the outgoing National Transitional Congress (NTC), told the Guardian on Saturday night, shortly before polls closed on Libya's first election for nearly 50 years. A 200-strong national congress, currently homeless, will replace the NTC next month. The congress will write a new constitution, and debate whether Libya's fledgling post-Gaddafi state should have a parliamentary or presidential system.

For the moment, Libya's elected representatives will meet in an opulent conference centre next to Tripoli's Rixos Hotel. Ben Sassi said he wanted the new parliament building to be ready by late 2013, when fresh national elections are due to take place.

Read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jul/08/libya-gaddafi-compound-parliament