Will General Haftar attend or boycott Palermo’s conference on Libya’s future?
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Many of Libya’s leading factions will meet on Monday in Palermo, southern Italy, in an effort to reunite the country’s institutions and find a new path to elections that a previous French-convened conference failed to achieve.
The Guardian reports that ‘the two-day conference symbolises an Italian determination to regain diplomatic responsibility for Libya after the French president, Emmanuel Macron, convened a surprise summit in Paris in May in a bid to push for Libyan elections on 10 December.’
Italy, in the midst of forming a government at the time, was aghast at Macron unilaterally trying to stamp his brand on Libya. Politicans believed such as swift timetable was designed to benefit Gen Khalifa Haftar, the anti-Islamist strongman in Libya’s east, rather than the UN-backed government in Tripoli.
Haftar’s presence is still in doubt and reports show in fact that the Libyan military commander Khalifa Haftar may not attend a peace conference in Italy on Monday, undermining the latest attempt by the international community to settle nearly nine years of strife in the North African country.
Sources from Field Marshal Haftar’s Libyan National Army (LNA), which controls eastern parts of the country, told Italian news agency Ansa that he would boycott the international conference on Libya in the Sicilian capital of Palermo.
While the Italian government maintained that Mr Haftar would attend there were denied rumours Italian prime Minister Giuseppe Conte travelled to Libya to convince Mr Haftar to attend.
An official in the LNA told The National the head of Italian intelligence met with Mr Haftar on Saturday to try to make him attend but failed. The LNA official further stated that he was not aware Mr Conte was in Libya, but said it was unlikely Mr Haftar would travel to Palermo for the conference.
The LNA sources told Ansa that their commander would boycott the summit in protest over the attendance of representatives from Qatar, which the LNA has accused of sponsoring terrorism in oil-producing areas of the country.
They said Mr Haftar was also opposed to the presence of Al Qaeda-linked groups, without naming a specific delegation.
Libya has had a leadership vacuum since the 2011 revolution that led to the overthrow and death of Muammar Qaddafi. Militias, a UN-backed government, the remnants of the General National Congress and the LNA commander are just some of the actors vying for control. With violence, corruption and a huge refugee population passing through on the way to Europe, Libya’s problems need lasting political solutions.
The summit on Monday, organised in collaboration with the United Nations Support Mission in Libya (UNSMIL), had raised hopes of progress towards achieving peace and stability.
“The goal of the event … is to provide a tangible contribution to the stabilisation process of the country, in full agreement with the main Libyan political actors,” the Italian government said on its website.
