By Libya Herald reporters.
Tripoli, 11 January 2017:
Amid confusion and some recrimination, members of the Libya Dialogue have not met in Ghadames today as announced. Their gathering is understood to have been cancelled.
The first problem was that the authorities in the town apparently did not know about the meeting. “The first we heard about it was when we read about it in the media” a municipal official was quoted as saying.
There appear however to have been deeper issues behind a meeting which was supposed to allow the Dialogue members to discuss away from Tunis without the normal attendance of UNSMIL people and foreign diplomats.
One Dialogue member told the Libya Herald that some colleagues had decided not to go because they wanted first to see what amendments to the Libyan Political Agreement the House of Representatives would propose when it next meets on Monday.
The member added: “There were also several reservations about the Ghadames meeting, including who had called it and who was paying for it. Was there a hidden agenda behind it?”
There was a suspicion that the Ghadames council did in fact know of the planned meeting. However, councillors had avoided preparing for it because there they did not wish to be connected with anything that undermined the Dialogue and the Libyan Political Agreement.
UNSMIL had no comment on the news from Ghadames.
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