New international summit in Berlin to try to stabilize Libya

Published on : 06/23/2021 – 07:35

The main countries involved in the conflict in Libya are meeting in Berlin on Wednesday 23 June for a new summit. The main challenge will be to ensure the simultaneous holding of the presidential and legislative elections on December 24, which the transitional government, led by Prime Minister Abdelhamid Dbeibah, has promised to organize.

All the players in the region and, for the first time, the Libyan transitional government will take part in this conference in the afternoon at the level of foreign ministers.

On January 19, 2020, a first conference brought together in the German capital, under the aegis of the United Nations, the leaders of the countries involved, reaching a fragile agreement to end the conflict.

Ten years after the fall of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, the participants will notably take stock of the political transition in Libya.

Doubts about the real will of the power in place?

UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres is expected to intervene in video. The United States will also be represented by US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on a European tour.

“It is essential for the continued stabilization of the country that the elections take place as scheduled and that the troops and foreign fighters actually leave Libya,” German foreign minister Heiko Maas, host of the meeting, said on Monday.

However, doubts remain about the real will of the government in place to see this election take place at the end of the year.

The former Libyan Minister of the Interior Fathi Bachagha, probable candidate for this first presidential election by direct suffrage, thus put on notice, on June 2, the government not to delay their holding.

“The date of the elections is accepted by all”, wants to believe a diplomat, who feared, before being reassured by the preliminary discussions, that the transitional government “has no interest in the elections”.

This Berlin summit can be limited to “simple declarations of intent” but it can also allow “progress” on the way to elections in December, explains to AFP Jalel Harchaoui, specialist on Libya within the think Global Initiative tank.

After a decade of failures to bring Libya out of chaos, the formation of this new cabinet at the end of a UN-sponsored political process had sounded like hope that was long overdue.

The European Union is also relying on the power in place to resolve the problem of migrants leaving the Libyan coast, often on overloaded and unsafe boats, in an attempt to reach Europe.

But divisions between the two rival powers, in Tripolitania (west) and Cyrenaica (east), have resurfaced in recent weeks.

An official truce has been in effect since October, but UN envoy to Libya Jan Kubis himself admitted in May that progress on the unification of divided institutions and the withdrawal of foreign forces was “on point. dead “.

20,000 overarmed mercenaries

This parameter is central in this process, the Libyan conflict having been largely fueled by outside powers.

“Those who gave the commitment the last time in Berlin to withdraw their troops did not respect it,” laments Heiko Maas. An implicit reference to Russia, Turkey or the United Arab Emirates.

In December, the UN estimated the number of mercenaries and foreign fighters in Libya at some 20,000: Russians from the private Wagner group, Chadians, Sudanese and even Syrians.

Several hundred Turkish soldiers are also present under a bilateral agreement concluded with the previous government in Tripoli.

“The number of combatants has not decreased significantly, but we have a ceasefire which is generally accepted and respected everywhere,” said a diplomatic source.

At the end of April, the League of Arab States, the UN, the European Union and the African Union jointly called for a withdrawal of foreign forces.

A brutal dispersal of these overarmed men would, however, represent a new threat to the region, fear UN diplomats. Chadian President Idriss Déby Itno was killed in April during an offensive by Chadian rebels from Libya.

With AFP