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By Libya Herald reporter.
Tunis, 16 October 2015:
The president of the General National Congress (GNC), Nuri Abu Sahmain, has again told UN . . .[restrict]Special Envoy Bernardino Leon that the GNC is prepared to send him a list of names to head the new Libyan Government of National Accord (GNA). However, the Dialogue agreement must first be further changed to take on board yet more demands, he said.
The move comes a week after Leon announced that Faiez Al-Serraj would be prime minister, and Ahmed Maetig, Fathi Majbri and Musa Kuni his deputies, representing Tripolitania, Cyrenaica and Fezzan respectively.
In a resentful four-page letter to Leon, effectively dismissing the UN envoy’s choices, Abu Sahmain said that the GNC still had not made any decision on names and that the Dialogue had to accept last November’s Supreme Court Decision – which in the GNC’s eyes makes it the only legitimate parliament in Libya. Abu Sahmain also accused the UN mistreating the GNC Dialogue team when it was in New York at the beginning of the month. (The team are reported to have considered going through security beneath them.)
The offer of names is the third from the GNC. It first said that it would send them if Leon accepted nine amendments to the Draft, which he then largely did in order to bring the GNC back into the process. No names, however, came. It then asked for more amendments, apparently as many as 63, again promising to send names.
Although the latest demands are not mentioned in Abu Sahmain’s letter, officials say they are that the State Council have the same powers as the House of Representatives, that Sharia be the law of Libya rather than the basis of law, and that Khalifa Hafter and other military leaders be sacked.
The demands were said by one senior diplomat to be designed to wreck the dialogue and that the GNC’s position had become “unreasonable and untenable”. However, the diplomat added that Leon had decided that there would be no more changes and was hoping that enough GNC members would ignore Abu Sahmain and sign a private petition approving the deal and the GNA. This the UN envoy would then accept.
Even so, there are fears that the plan is unravelling and that neither side will sign it before next Tuesday’s deadline.
Meanwhile, it is reported that a security track meeting in Istanbul of Tripoli militia leaders as well as representatives from UNSMIL aimed as ensuring security in the capital for the GNA, ended in failure. [/restrict]
