After years of dispute, confrontations and negotiations, the parties to the Libyan dispute reached a rapprochement with their agreement to restructure the Presidency Council. The nine-member council is to be reduced to three members — a president and two vice-presidents — each representing one of Libya's three regions (Cyrenaica in the east, Tripoli in the west and Fezzan in the south). Libyan sources believe that the most likely candidates from the south are former prime minister Ali Zeidan and former foreign minister Abdel-Rahman Shalgam who had also served as Libya's ambassador to the UN. Sources have also tipped Abul-Qasim Qazit from Misrata and Al-Ujeili Bu Sadil, a member of the High Council of State from Gasr Garabulli (Castelverdi), as candidates from the west and, as candidates from the east, Speaker of the House of Representatives Aguila Saleh and parliamentary representative Nour Al-Din Al-Manfi. In his briefing to the Security Council early November, UN Special Representative for Libya Ghassan Salame expressed his concern that the Tobruk-based House of Representatives and the Tripoli-based High Council of State were working to obstruct elections which, he said, both houses perceive as “a threat that must be resisted at all costs”. He thereby intimated that the two bodies were a source of the problem in Libya and needed to be abolished. He also called for a national conference to be held in the first weeks of 2019 preparatory to setting in motion an electoral process in the spring of that year. Five days after this briefing, a summit on the Libyan crisis was held in Palermo in which participants reiterated the call for the national conference and expressed their appreciation of Egyptian efforts to unify the Libyan military establishment. On 7 December, the American news website “Strategy Page” reported that Fayez Al-Sarraj, chairman of the Presidency Council of the Government of National Accord (GNA), invited Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar, commander of the Libyan National Army (LNA), to visit GNA headquarters in Tripoli to discuss ways to unify the country. According to the report, Al-Sarraj offered this invitation when he met with Field Marshal Haftar on 13 November on the sidelines of the international summit hosted by Italy in Palermo to discuss ways to resolve the Libyan crisis. The report observes that, “while many GNA backers want nothing to do with Haftar (seeing him as another potential dictator) a growing number of Libyans and regional leaders recognise that Haftar and his LNA are the only force in Libya that has consistently (for over five years) worked to unify the country rather than plunder it.” As the report noted, it would be dangerous for Haftar to go to Tripoli which is controlled by numerous militias, “some of them led by Islamic radicals, who see the LNA as the end of their independence.” It adds: “Most Libyans, and especially most residents of Tripoli, would like the LNA to come in and pacify the place.” According to the report, Haftar has delayed sending national forces to the capital until he manages to win Al-Sarraj and the GNA over to his side. Haftar left the Palermo conference because he refused to negotiate with the leaders of radical Islamist and terrorist groups who still control private armies in the country. “Haftar's refusal to negotiate with Islamic terrorist or Islamic radical groups is seen by many as the key to his success,” the article said. It added that the UN and many European countries “still back negotiating with the Islamic radicals,” whereas “Sarraj appears to have come around to Haftar's approach but, unlike Haftar, Sarraj does not have much military clout to deal with the Islamic militias in Tripoli and other towns and cities in western Libya.” On Sunday, Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte announced that Italy would organise another meeting this week between Al-Sarraj and Haftar. Some observers believe that the UN drive is tailored to serve an American initiative to resolve the Libyan crisis. The initiative, a portion of which was revealed in a report by the US-based Atlantic Council, proposes convening a national conference that would demand revoking recognition of all existing political bodies. The observers see this as an American trap that aims to eliminate the House of Representatives and the High Council of State in order to pave the way for arrangements that would enable Washington to play a larger role in Libya, especially now that AFRICOM forces are in Libya. The US administration denies this. However, it was confirmed by various Libyan forces as well as the American online newspaper “The Intercept” which revealed documents the show a “vast network” of US bases in Africa including three previously undisclosed military outposts in Libya. Other observers, however, see the initiative as a ruse to ensure the continued influence of the Islamists in Libya. Former chairman of the Tobruk municipal council Faraj Al-Mabri told Al-Ahram Weekly that the agreement between the House of Representatives and the High Council of State was a victory for the Muslim Brotherhood's fait accompli tactics in its drive to impose itself as a permanent player in the Libyan political process. Al-Mabri, who took part in the talks between the two parliamentary houses in Geneva and Brussels in 2015, described attempts to perpetuate the Muslim Brotherhood as a main player in Libya as “a crime against the nation”. In a posting on his Facebook page, Libyan journalist Bashir Zabiya held that the House of Representatives and High Council of State representatives have been dragging their feet in formulating proposed amendments to the Skhirat accord ever since they first started meeting in Tunisia over a year ago. Yet these self-same representatives are as busy as bees these days, as though they are in a race against time. They set aside differences, reach consensuses and issue decisions with remarkable speed. Zabiya could not help to wonder at this unprecedented and heretofore impossible phenomenon. Was it inspired by plans for a national convention which, as a kind of constituent assembly that paves the way to the establishment of a new government, will put these bodies' survival at stake? “I do not believe that, after everything we have experienced, anyone will believe that what [these MPs] are doing is for the sake of the people and the nation. The people will never believe that the two assemblies which, through their performance, caused and perpetuated their suffering, had a sudden revival of awareness. Closer to the truth is the belief that what is happening is merely the product of political and personal calculations.” Zabiya explained that each MP formulated his calculations in the framework of the struggle for survival and empowerment, be it survival of the job in the case of the House of Representatives MPs or the survival of the organisation, in the case of the members of the High Council of State. He added: “The people will continue to regard with hope and esteem any effort that seeks to serve the welfare of the people and the higher interests of the nation.”
THE ROOTS OF THE PROBLEM: The Presidency Council, in its current format, consists of nine members, three from each region. The legitimacy of this body has long been a subject of controversy. The supporters of the House of Representatives based in Tobruk maintain that its legitimacy is grounded solely in the fait accompli secured through one of the outputs of the Skhirat agreement in December 2015. They argue that although the Presidency Council created by the High Council of State contains representatives from the three regions, the representation is purely geographical. Otherwise, the High Council of State and Presidency Council share the same ideology and agenda, which is to safeguard the presence of the Islamists in the political arena and to compensate for their defeat in the parliamentary elections that were held in August 2014. In these elections the Islamists won only 23 seats out of the 200-member House of Representatives, which came as a stunning blow to them after they had dominated the General National Congress (GNC), the first legislative body created after the February 2011 Revolution. Many Libyans believed that the GNC was hostage to the project to empower the Islamist movement, as embodied by the Loyalty to the Martyrs Bloc, the majority of the members of which were either affiliated with Al-Qaeda or with the Muslim Brotherhood. In the pursuit of the Islamist empowerment project, which entailed controlling the main keys to political and economic power in Libya, the Islamist groups paraded beneath the banner of “revolutionary legitimacy” (linking just popular aspirations that were expressed, sometimes militantly, during the February 2011 Revolution, with the ambitions of the Islamist trend which espouses the use of armed violence) as they harmonised their parliamentary performance (in the GNC during its tenure) with the performance of its militia groups on the ground while refusing to reactivate the Libyan military establishment on the pretext that the old military leaders were part of the former Gaddafi regime. The first and most dangerous law the Islamists pushed through the GNC was the so-called Political Isolation Law, which barred anyone who held a government position during the Gaddafi era from holding office in the new era. The first casualty of that law was the GNC speaker, himself, Mohamed Magariaf, who stepped down from the GNC and vanished from the political scene in May 2013. Magariaf had served as Libya's ambassador to India until 1980, when he split ranks with the Gaddafi regime and joined the opposition as a founder of the National Salvation Front. He was succeeded as GNC speaker by Nouri Abusahmain, an Amazigh GNC member who was supported by the Loyalty to the Martyrs Bloc and some international stakeholders in Libya. In tandem with his rise to the head of the legislative authority, the influence of the militias increased at the expense of the attempts to rehabilitate an official non-partisan military establishment. After the GNC's term expired, a new Libyan legislature was elected in 2014. However, since the House of Representatives, as it was called, was unable to work independently in Tripoli because it was permanently held at gunpoint by the pro-GNC militias, it was forced to relocate temporarily to Tobruk in eastern Libya. The officially defunct GNC reinstated itself in Tripoli, refused to recognise the House of Representatives as the popularly elected legislature and continued to work under the protection of the militias and with the support of some foreign powers. Eventually, by perpetuating itself in this manner and casting the House of Representatives as the “Tobruk parliament”, as though it were just an alternative legislature rather than the one popularly elected through constitutional mechanisms, the GNC succeeded in giving root to the fait accompli which was then consolidated by means of the Skhirat accord which, in turn, converted the GNC into the High Council of State. The legislative bifurcation thus became a reality in the minds of the Libyan people, Arab observers and international powers and organisations. Some Libyan politicians believe that a number of foreign powers not only accepted this situation but actually worked to perpetuate it as a means to safeguard their interests or to promote their international political agendas. The former mayor of Tobruk Faraj Yassin Al-Mabri accuses the UN, Britain and Italy, among others, of fostering the divide by including “illegitimate” political bodies in the negotiations even though those bodies contain individuals known to be affiliated with militant Islamist groups. Al-Mabri observed that while Washington lauded the success of the Presidency Council in defeating the Islamic State franchise in Sirte, when everyone knows that this was accomplished by US forces, Washington withheld such praise from the official Libyan army, under the command of Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar who is backed by the House of Representatives, after it eliminated one of the most dangerous terrorist strongholds in the world in Derna. In addition, he said, Washington continues to insist on sustaining the international arms embargo against Libya, thereby preventing the sale of arms to the official Libyan army, while weapons continue to flow into the hands of the Presidency Council and its affiliated groups. The Libyan politician also picked up on the irony that while London offered an official apology to Abdel-Hakim Belhaj, a member of the jihadist Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, for the role Britain played in his detention and rendition, London never apologised for the role it played in destroying Iraq and it never apologised the Palestinian people for the Balfour Declaration that served to plant an alien entity in Palestine which usurped the Palestinians' land and killed their people. He added that the British apology to Abdel-Hakim Belhaj symbolises London's support for and determination to legitimise the Islamist project in Libya, towards which end it helped perpetuate the institutional bifurcation in the country.
