Hundreds of millions pledged for Libyan rebels

International donors pledged hundreds of millions of dollars for Libya's rebels on Thursday and promised to overcome legal problems to free up more aid using frozen regime assets worth tens of billions. Leaders of the rebellion against Muammar Qadhafi said the pledges - mainly from Kuwait and Qatar - were "a good start" and outlined plans for a new constitution and elections within eight months if the Libyan strongman quits.
A fund agreed Thursday will initially receive international donations, while the blocked assets - estimated to be worth 60 billion dollars (40 billion euros) in Europe and the United States - will be used to finance it at a later date. The news came as hundreds of migrant workers and wounded people arrived in the rebel-held eastern Libyan city of Benghazi. Their ship had come under fire from Qadhafi's troops before escaping from the besieged city of Misrata.
France and Italy said they would take turns managing the rebel fund and French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe said the new body could be up and running "within weeks" but added that the unblocking of assets "poses legal problems". Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini, host of the International Contact Group meeting in Rome, said Italy and France had urged the European Union "to seek a solution", adding: "That money belongs to the Libyan people."
Frattini said 250 million dollars were already available in immediate humanitarian aid - far less than the figure of up to three billion dollars in desperately-needed credit wanted by the rebels. Kuwait pledged 180 million dollars for the fund and Qatar up to 500 million, while the United States promised 53 million dollars in aid. Britain however said it would not be contributing to the fund as it had already helped enough. "It's a good start," Mahmud Jibril, prime minister of the opposition's National Transitional Council (NTC), told reporters after the talks.
Jibril said the three-billion figure was in fact "a six-month budget". Expressing a degree of impatience over the frozen assets, he added: "This process should be expedited because having this money soon would help us come up with what we call a roadmap to realise our developmental vision." US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Washington had "decided to pursue legislation that would enable the US to tap some portion of those assets".