New Libyan parliament meets far from city battlegrounds

Libya's newly elected House of Representatives held its first session on Saturday, holed up in a heavily guarded provincial hotel as armed factions turned the two biggest cities, Tripoli and Benghazi, into battlefields. Western governments, who have mostly evacuated their diplomats after two weeks of fighting, hope the new parliament can create space for negotiations after the worst clashes since the 2011 war that ousted Muammar Gaddafi.
But there was no sign of a let up in the capital Tripoli where a huge cloud of black smoke spread over the south of the city once again on Saturday after a fuel depot near the international airport was hit for the second time in a week as rival Zintan and Misrata brigades battled for control. Fighting with rockets, anti-aircraft cannon and other heavy artillery in Tripoli and the eastern city of Benghazi has killed more than 200 people, and edged Libya closer to full-scale civil war just three years after the Nato-backed revolution. Britain became the latest Western government to announce it would close its embassy, fearing being caught in the crossfire.
With its national army still in formation, Libya has struggled to control heavily armed factions that have entrenched themselves as de facto power brokers in the messy transition since Gaddafi's one-man rule. Elected in June, lawmakers met on Saturday for an emergency session in Tobruk, a coastal city east of Benghazi, where they are supposed to form a new government that many Libyans hope will be a step to ending the crisis.
"Our homeland is burning," Abu Bakar Baira, interim head of parliament said. "We have to work fast, to meet the demands of the people and save them from this disaster." The 200-member parliament will hold its first official session to elect its new president on Monday, Baira said. Some deputies aim to form a new cabinet to handle the crisis, three of them told Reuters. Three years after Gaddafi's demise, few Libyan state institutions have popular legitimacy and the country still has no new constitution. Militias stormed the last parliament repeatedly to threaten lawmakers. Heavily armed interior ministry troops and the Libyan army protected the Tobruk hotel that was chosen to host the parliament meeting after Tripoli and Benghazi were deemed too risky.