>> union bank offers unique insight and expertise in a range of industries. what can we do for you? >> and now bbc "news night." >> this week, as world leaders meet the transitional council in paris, we have a special report from benghazi to assess the changeovers in democracy. >> the euroforya here was intense. can the rebels justify, fulfill these expectations? >> so does libya's revolution offer a blueprint for western intervention in syria? we'll discuss with former aides of tony blair and hillary clinton. >> when you see the pictures of the young people demonstrating on the streets, the brutality of the regime, it's very hard not to want to intervene. >> and freeze-dried or liquefied? the environmental way to say goodbye. hello, nicolas sarkozy and david cameron played host in paris this week to an international conference of libya's future and a bid to help the national transitional council, who also were in attendance, to carve out its countries changeover to democracy. several billions of dollars of assets have now been unlocked for the new leadership to get its hands on as it attempts to rebuild a battered country that has known nothing but colonel gaddafi's rule for the past four decades. till hule reports now from benghazi. >> after the siege of the cities, the siege of the an ex. this is the new front lie. the fight for money in a country breft of funds. as ram dan ends, they're desperate for cash to buy something special for their families. but libya has earned nothing for months and its assets held abroad are still mainly frozen. >> for myself as a man, i don't mind even if i don't have enough money, but my children will suffer. the children will be very upset if we did not receive it. >> we are still waiting for the money. >> you can allow each customer a maximum of just 150 dinners, about 70 pounds. there aren't enough bank notes in the system to pay in full. >> the government money, that's why it's very difficult to serve people. >> what are your reserves of hard currency now? >> let me say it this way. we have a little money here. but most of the amount is in the businessmen. >> as for the rest, all the rest of the assets abroad, when realistically will you start to receive those? >> when you look to the history of what happened in the other countries similar to libya, like iraq and iran. i think it will take a long time. but i think it will take much less than six weeks. >> for now, the simple joy of liberation is enough for most. late at night, hundreds have dashed to benghazi to catch a glimpse of newly released political prisoners who just returned by boat from tripoli, the years they were incarcerated in gaddafi's most notorious jail. soon thoughts will have to turn to building a new libya after 42 years of dictatorship. the euphoria here is intense. the question is, though, can the victorious rebels build a new libya that will justify and fulfill these people's expectations? >> the revolution has been won is a heavy price. this is a souvenir, 21-year-old engineering student has brought back from the front line. like thousands of other ordinary civilians, he had to learn to fight, to kill, to see death beside him. >> we see these images in movies only. seeing them in the movies is much different than in reality. one of the memories that i will never forget is when we were going towards brega. some people that were with us the same side, we knew them. and then after like a couple of days, we find ourselves carrying their bodies, their legs back to the hospital. >> what's the worst thing that you remember? >> one of my crew members handed me a leg, and he said take it to the hospital. >> it might affect them in the future if they didn't take care of themselves by seeing doctors, seeing some people who are specialized talking to patients, even the government should bring high qualified doctors for the ones who are coming back on the front line. >> meanwhile at this outdoor market in benghazi, you can find what else the revolutioners have brought home, not just memories, but also guns. now being traded. >> ask him how much that is. what? >> he said this is 1,400. >> 1,400? about $1,000, yes? allow me to see it? that is heavy. >> yes. >> that is seriously heavy, yes. i'd have difficulty using that. >> he said this machine gun. >> i know. it, it might be a bit much. you've got a lot of them. excellent. all this is being sold completely openly, isn't it? >> it's safer to film from a distance because arms dealing is a sensitive matter. the national transitional council wants to ensure the country is not awash with weapons in the future. but they seem ambivalent about accepting any foreign police or peace keepers. >> we are working to establish a local police force and a security force to protect initially the borders of libya, and as i have said before, the young people who led this revolution and created this victory are capable of securing and stabilizing their country. >> personally, there's no luck of activism here. every day, volunteers have labored. 22,000 fragrant boxes of rice with almond and liver are being packed for fighters at the last main battleground around sirte. above, the slogan no to tribalism, yes to unity. they saga da if i's policy was divide and rule. theirs will be reconciliation. the enthusiasm that has sustained the revolution here in eastern libya and the large business donations that have helped fund it will now be directed towards nation building. >> we'd like to introduce the idea to collect the workers from the people. so we are going to do this to encourage people to give up their weapons. we can offer them some money instead of getting any of their weapons. so this is one of the ideas. when life gets back to normal, we need some more work for our country. i think the big challenge will be in the future. the people will have more energy to do this, i'm quite sure. libya's revolution won't be as smoothly as this feast. but the will to do that is certainly there. >> as prayers mark the end of ramadan in syria, thousands of anti-government protesters poured on to the streets. but the security forces were ready for them. at least seven people were reported to have been shot dead. it's inevitable perhaps that given the recent breakthrough made by libyan rebels, hope will have passed to damascus. western governments will be relieved that things worked out as they did in libya, but does its offer for blueprint for action against syria? to discuss this, emily spoke to the former british secretary, and to an marie slaughter, former advisor to hillary clinton in the u.s. state department. >> the regional differences that are clearly involved when you're looking at syria rather than libya, how constrained, for example, are we by the fact that iran is backing this regime? >> well, it's part of the complex. of course it is. there's no good thinking of libya as a sort of blueprint and everybody goes away and follows that blueprint. each of these situations is different. desperately different from each other. and you just have to make up your mind in each case separately, what's the best thing to do? and the worst thing to do is to send your soldiers to kill and be killed without any assurance that you're going to make the situation better. >> of course it didn't be a blueprint, but there will be politicians looking at this now and saying well, that did work, as far as we're able, we got lucky in lib yasm can't the same be done in syria? >> it worked too in cossvow and sierra leon. intervention can make a difference. the problem was the aftermath. intervention can undoubtedly make a difference in syria. when you see the pictures of the young people demonstrating in the streets and their extraordinary bravery in syria and the brutality of the regime, it's very hard not to want to intervene. the problem is can you do it practically? tony blair made that speech in chicago at the time of kosovo, he said there were five conditions for intervening, and one of them was practicality. >> do you agree with that? there is no entry into syria in the way the war is to libya. >> i agree that we are not talking about military force in syria, at least not for unless things got far, far worse. but i think i disagree that we only have small diplomatic moves to make. there's a great deal more that we can do diplomatically in terms of helping to build much more unity against syria in the region, working with turkey in particular. turkey has much more leverage. it's barely begun to use that leverage. working with other islamic arab league countries. and above all, to start creating the sense that was important in libya that bashar's days are numbered. that it may take a long time, but he is not going to survive this. once that starts becoming an inevitability, then the business community starts to think well, wait a minute, where do i need to be? then even countries right now that are supporting the syrian regime like russia need to think well, wait a minute, we still want to use the port if there's another government in power, we better perhaps hedge our bets. and finally, the e.u. has only begun to really apply diplomatic pressure. today haven't really put important sanctions in place. those should be coming. but i think there's a lot we can do that will help the protesters without actually using force. >> do you think this requires american leadership? is there any will in the u.s. to lead on this one in syria? >> absolutely. although i think the europeans and the turks have a very important role to play, but the u.s. has been extremely active diplomatically. it was extremely active diplomatically in libya. secretary clinton worked very hard to help keep the various coalitions together, not only within nato, but with qatar and u.a.e. and similarly here, we've been out front imposing sanctions, pushing the europeans to compose sanctions, pushing others on the security council. again, what we want here is for this to be on the model much more of tunisia and egypt, where protests of these extraordinarily brave people ultimately create the situation in which the government has to go. >> i think the significant phrase that you used was ultimately. this will take time. he's got himself in quite a strong position. but fundamentally, he's in a weak position. fundamentally, he cannot command the loyalty of the majority of syrians. arer but he has iran behind him. and nobody wants to anger iran. what do you make of this idea of a manufactured regional war with israel to die vert attention? >> i don't think that's at all likely. he's got a problem. he's not handling it well. that problem may ultimately be his down fall. and we should bring that day closer if we can. and the diplomatic activity that we've heard about, economic activity, we and the french and the americans are in the lead in new york, in the u.n., trying to build up these pressures. how fast we can go will depend on how much progress we make. >> this whole question on foreign policy is always a reaction, a pendulum to what has gone before. so in essence, what you did under tony blair was a reaction to what doug lad heard -- douglas heard didn't do. >> i think we tried non-intervention to disastrous consequences. sometimes you have to be ready to intervene. many people died as a result in bosnia. in kosovo, we were criticized by many for intervening, but it was successful and we did save many lives. there's always a pendulum between intervention and people said after iraq, we would see no more interventionism. we've seen it in libya really quickly. >> what does that tell you that people haven't lost the appetite for confrontation in the right situation? >> when you see people dying on the streets, month after month being killed. this regime will fall. >> you talked about the pushes that came from hillary clinton. certainly we saw a lot of reluctance initially from president obama to get involved. it was led by cameron and sarkozy. >> we did. and i think from the american point of view, given that we have troops in iraq and obviously still fighting actively in afghanistan, president obama had no interest in getting involved in a third military conflict anywhere, much less in another muslim country. on the other hand, as jonathan just said, when you saw the prospect of tanks and planes overrunning a city of 750,000 and gaddafi saying i'm going door to door to eradicate opposition, all the leaders involved, and certainly ultimately president obama realized this was going to be potentially on his doorstep. this massacre was something he could prevent, and if he didn't act, it was going to be partly on his hands. and that plus the diplomatic pressure allowed for military force. >> and if this was tony blair now, what do you think would be his response? >> he would be arguing with the american president for thinking about how you put the maximum pressure on here. >> what does maximum pressure mean? >> the measures ann marie was talking about. if the neighbors take a different attitude, if turkey, saudi arabia, and syria's other neighbors become more interventionist. if this regime falls, then it's iran next. >> i know that you run a mile from this idea of a blueprint, but what impact do you think iraq and all this has had on our intervention now? >> iraq was a blow to the concept of intervention. but jonathan is quite right. the concept won't go away. whenever people see horrible things happening on the screen, they will say well, we must do something about it. i'm very familiar with that in bosnia. there we took the view, out of listening to a lot of advice, that we would not be able to impose a solution by force. by each case is different. kosovo, cierre leon, we heard about. -- sierra leon, we heard about. >> liquefying the remains of the dearly departed may not be a process we're ok with, but these owners are hoping it will become common place across the united states and indeed beyond. it's more ecological than cremation, and it's another novel method, freeze-drying, a technique in sweden. neil bodeler reports. >> welcome to the anderson mcqueen funeral home in st. petersburg, florida. it's a family-run place which tries to celebrate rather than mourn the dead. inside, a piano plays funeral favorites. while screens display pictures of the dearly departed. after the services, the bodies are cremated in furnaces to the rear, where employees have to wrestle with the combined heat of the fires and the sweltering florida summer. but there's now another addition, a shiny stainless steel machine in a bright glass room. this is the resumator, a machine designed in scotland now approved for use for the first time in the world in florida. none of us like talking about death or about what comes after. but something has to be done with our mortal remains. this might offer a better option. this animation shows how the machine will work once it's up and running in just a few weeks time. the body goes in in a silk coffin and is heated in a solution, dissolving all but the bone. after about three hours, it's poured into the water system and the bones removed and ground into powder, which can be given back to the families. critics have described it as washing a loved one down the drain. not so, say its designers. >> there's absolutely no d.n.a. in the liquid. it's simply chemicals and it will go to -- it will eventually go to the river, out to the sea. a cycle similar to all the other processes. >> its designers say it will reduce greenhouse gas emissions by about a third compared to cremation. it also allows for the safe removal of tooth fillings, which means harmful mercury won't be vaporized and released into the environment. a florida funeral home's owner is saying it's green. amount of mercury we emit out into the atmosphere. it reduces the amount of consumption of gas, a much gentler process on the human remains than the traditional flame-based cremation. and so we believe that the families we serve will find that to be of a real benefit and we'll probably have a lot of families that want to partake. >> he believes there will be a market for it here and elsewhere. >> we'll be very excited and very proud that we were the first ones to introduce it. we're very happy that our legislature here in florida was the first one here if the united states to approve it as a type of cremation, and although i understand that it's not accepted yet in the u.k., we're hopeful that once they see how successful it is here in florida and other parts of our country, that the u.k. will also embrace it and it will become an accepted form over there, too. it will make us proud to know we were the first ones to start. >> this is not the only alternative to cremation, which might be coming our way. a rival process called pro mesion involves freeze drying our remains. so far it's only been tested on pigs, but to get an idea how it works i went down to imperial college london. imagine this is a deceased individual. i'm going to put it in this flask of liquid nitrogen and leave it there for a few minutes. the rose is now so fragile that this is enough to shatter it. it is the brain child of a sweed, she came up with the idea while composting in her garden. the theory is that what works for potato skins and apple cores could work for the human body, too. >> this was what inspired me to really see if not only the kitchen and garden works but also everything organic, including us, could be treated this way to really become solid. >> she envisages a fully automated process in which coffins are fed into the machine which takes care of the rest. by exposing the body to liquid nitrogen, we can easily vibrate the body down to a powder within seconds. and that frozen powder is then going to the freeze-drier where it becomes dry, and in that stage, we allow the powder to go down through coffin. so all the solid metals that are within our body as spare parts, tooth fillings and whatever, is separated. >> she is still to build a full commercial facility, but the designs are in place and the manufacturer is ready. a square biodegradable coffin has also been designed, into which the residue from the process will be placed ready for shallow burial. >> it fulfills the need that nature asked us to fulfill and it will be here within six to 12 months. >> she claims it could even help us to talk more about death. >> we thought it was taboo, so we avoided it. once you start, and especially if you have the chance to talk about this person to person, it seems to be very relieving. and it is, i would say nine times out of 10, they find it very appealing. and death has never been appealing before, so this must be something new. >> the arrival of these new technologies is going to give us options we could never have imagined. to burial and cremation, we may have to add more possibilities. it's often said we now have more choices in our modern lives. soon, that may extend to what comes next. >> and that's all for this week. from all of us, goodbye. >> funding for this presentation is made possible by the freeman foundation of new york, stowe, vermont, and honolulu. newman's own foundation. and union bank. >> union bank has put its financial strength to work for a wide range of companies, from small businesses to major corporations. what can we do for you? >> bbc "news night" was >> bbc "news night" was presented by kcet los angeles.