Libya’s national museum, formerly known as As-Saraya Al-Hamra or the Red Castle, has reopened in Tripoli, allowing the public access to some of the country’s finest historical treasures for the first time since the revolt that toppled Muammar Qaddafi.
The museum, Libya’s largest, was closed in 2011 during a NATO-backed uprising against longtime ruler Qaddafi, who appeared on the castle’s ramparts to deliver a fiery speech.
Renovations were started in March 2023 by the Tripoli-based Government of National Unity (GNU), which came to power in 2021 in a UN-backed political process.
“The reopening of the National Museum is not just a cultural moment but a live testimony that Libya is building its institutions,” GNU Prime Minister Abdulhamid Al-Dbiebah said at a reopening ceremony on Friday.
Built in the 1980s, the museum’s 10,000 square meters of gallery space features mosaics and murals, sculptures, coins, and artefacts dating back to prehistoric times and stretching through Libya’s Roman, Greek and Islamic periods.
The collection also includes millennia-old mummies from the ancient settlements of Uan Muhuggiag in Libya’s deep south, and Jaghbub near its eastern border with Egypt.
“The current program focuses on enabling schools to visit the museum during this period, until it is officially opened to the public at the beginning of the year,” museum director Fatima Abdullah Ahmed told Reuters.
Libya has since recovered 21 artefacts that were smuggled out of the country after Qaddafi’s fall, notably from France, Switzerland, and the United States, the chairman of the board of directors of the antiquities department Mohamed Farj Shakshoki told Reuters ahead of the opening.
Shakshoki said that talks are ongoing to recover more than two dozen artefacts from Spain and others from Austria.
In 2022, Libya received nine artefacts, including funerary stone heads, urns and pottery from the US
Libya houses five UNESCO World Heritage sites, which it said in 2016 were all endangered due to instability and conflict.
In July, Libya’s delegation to UNESCO said the ancient city of Ghadames, one of the sites, had been removed from the list as the security situation had improved.
Libya’s Red Castle museum opens for first time since fall of Qaddafi
https://arab.news/2uxbe
Libya’s Red Castle museum opens for first time since fall of Qaddafi
- The museum was closed in 2011 during a NATO-backed uprising against longtime ruler Qaddafi, who appeared on the castle’s ramparts to deliver a fiery speech
RSF drones hit civilian sites in Sudan’s North Kordofan
- According to the sources, the strike targeted classrooms at Kordofan University for the second time this week
CAIRO: The Sudanese paramilitary Rapid Support Forces carried out a drone attack on multiple civilian sites in Al-Ubayyid, the capital of North Kordofan state, in the early hours of Friday, field sources have told Al-Arabiya and Al-Hadath.
According to the sources, the strike targeted classrooms at Kordofan University for the second time this week.
The city’s medical supply center and a private home in the Riyadh Al-Salihin neighborhood were also hit.
No civilian casualties were reported, the sources said, though the buildings sustained material damage.
A military source told the two outlets that army ground-based defenses intercepted and shot down about 11 drones involved in the attack on Al-Ubayyid.
The use of drones has escalated in recent months, with both the Sudanese army and the RSF increasingly relying on unmanned aerial systems in their operations.
The RSF has been accused of deliberately targeting civilian infrastructure in Kordofan.
Meanwhile, the army has continued to track and strike RSF supply lines in Kordofan and Darfur.
More than 100,000 people have been displaced from the Kordofan region in just over three months, according to the UN, as violence between the army and RSF intensifies with the conflict nearing its third year.
