The InterDependent

As the Security Council and NATO sharpened the international response to Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s attacks on protestors against his rule in Libya, which were endangering lives across the North African country, the Libyan regime was finding it difficult to replace defecting diplomats in New York, including the country’s chief representative at the United Nations.

Libya’s UN mission is, indeed, flying the Libyan rebels’ flag.

Evan Schneider/UN Photo

Miguel d'Escoto Brockmann, a former president of the General Assembly from Nicaragua, right, recently tried to represent Libya at the UN. Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi next asked Ali Abdussalam Treki, left, a Libyan who headed the assembly in 2009-2010, but Treki defected to Egypt. They are shown here at the UN in 2009, passing the gavel.

In a sort of “take that” gesture to the United States and other Security Council members, Qaddafi decided to make an old Nicaraguan foe of Washington his Libyan ambassador. It was a strange maneuver, and it immediately ran into trouble. The Nicaraguan, Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann, a former Sandinista foreign minister, had been president of the General Assembly for its 63rd session in 2008-2009, but he was not an accredited Nicaraguan diplomat with the requisite diplomatic visa for an ambassador’s job.

D’Escoto canceled a news conference he planned for last Friday and went home to Nicaragua, according to a report from Reuters.

Qaddafi next turned to Ali Abdussalam Treki, a longstanding Libyan diplomat who had been president of the General Assembly in 2009-2010. But things got complicated when Treki defected to the opposition – following Libya’s foreign minister, Moussa Koussa and others who might have been candidates.

So the job is still open.