By Mustafa Khalifa,
Tripoli, 20 August 2015:
In what is currently a rare act of collaboration, Tebus and Tuaregs have agreed to quit . . .[restrict]the Constitutional Drafting Assembly (CDA). Four members, two from each of the communities, have suspended their partcipation in the CDA in protest at “the violation of the constitutional declaration and the democratic principles for a multicultural state,” they said. They complained at what they said was “the assembly’s lack of commitment to the roadmap agreed with the minorities”.
In the statement published on 19 August, they said they “completely refuse all outlines and proposals of the draft constitution,” and called on the international community to intervene and put pressure on the assembly to respect its previous commitments.
The letter was signed by Ali Hamdani Aghali, Ibrahim Allagh Hamido, Khaled Abubakr Wahli, and Al-Senussi Hamed Wahli.
They had already threatened in June to walk out of the Assembly following a row over the two community’s rights in the future constitution if their demands were ignored.
Libya’s other ethnic community, the Amazigh, never joined the CDA. It boycotted the elections to it in protest at all three communities being reserved just two seats apiece. It complained that, being many times larger than the Tebus and Tuaregs, it should have had more seats given it. Amazigh claims as to their population vary from quarter of a million to over a million.
The Beida-based Assembly, elected in February 2014, was intended to comprise 60 members – 20 for each of the countries three historic provinces Tripolitania, Cyrenaica and Fezzan.
The assembly is supposed to come up with a draft by the end of December 2015 which will then be submitted to the public in a referendum.
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