Tripoli, 6 January, 2013:
The Foreign Affairs committee of the General National Congress plans to interview all the ambassadors nominated by Prime . . .[restrict]Minister Ali Zeidan at the end of last year.
He proposed 34 names, 12 of them political figures. These include former Interior Minister Fawzi Abdelal who has been nominated as Libya’s ambassador to Bahrain and former Foreign Minister Ashour Ben Khayal to Portugal. The former telecoms minister, Anwar Fituri has been nominated for Malaysia.
The remaining 22 are career diplomats.
The nominations followed a clash in mid-December between the Prime Minister and Congress over who had the right to appoint ambassadors.
On 16 December, Congress voted to endorse a proposal from the Foreign Affairs Committee stating that Congress alone had the right to appoint ambassadors. It said that all heads of Libyan diplomatic missions and international organisations abroad were suspended, including those appointed since the revolution by one of the two previous interim governments. Any decision by the interim governments to reappoint ambassadors who had served the Qaddafi regime was null and void, Congress added.
An subsequent appeal by Zeidan to let the Foreign Ministry decide who should be an ambassador fell on deaf ears. However, the clash ended in a compromise whereby, in line with the American system, the government is to nominate ambassadors and Congress to vote for them.
A member of the Foreign Affairs Committee informed the Libya Herald today that the process of approving the 34 ambassadors may take some considerable time. The committee will first await reports from the Integrity Commission and then, even if nominees are cleared by it, they will then be interviewed individually. The 15-member committee chaired by Tazerbu representative Mohamed Douma will then submit a group report to Congress.
It is expected that it will act on the Committee’s recommendations, but it could take a couple of months or more before the process is over — and the present round applies only to less than a quarter of Libya’s top diplomats. The list of nominations had no ambassadors to Sub-Saharan Africa, only six to the Arab world and just three to Latin America and three to Asia.
There is no mention of a nomination to Rome, where the Qaddafi-era ambassador Hafez Gaddur has finally been forced to quit, nor to London, Paris, Washington, Ankara, Valletta, Tunis, Amman, Doha or Dubai — all of which Congress is expected to have strong views about the suitability of the candidates. [/restrict]
