By Hadi Fornaji.
Tunis, 28 August 2017:
For the second time this month, UN special envoy Ghassan Salamé had had talks on the Libyan crisis with House of Representatives president Ageela Saleh. The two had a two-hours meeting at Saleh’s home in Guba today on what Salamé tweeted as “ways out of [the] political vortex”.
He similarly said after the meeting that he and Saleh had exchanged ideas about the best solution to escape the economic and political crisis and that he had also wished Saleh an Eid Adha Mubarak. It had, he added, been important to confer with him ahead of his own video briefing on Libya to the Security Council this evening – his first since taking up the post.
No further details were disclosed other than that he would be attending a series of international meetings on Libya over the next three weeks.
However, it is believed that the two men discussed the issue of changes to the Libyan Political Agreement (LPA) and elections for a new House of Representatives and for a president.
Saleh’s public position is that he supports such elections and would also approve the LPA is changes were made. However, he is widely believed to be privately opposed to both elections and the LPA in any form.
As part of his travels in search of a Libyan solution, Salamé was in Algeria over the weekend discussing the crisis with the Algerian foreign minister Abdulkader Massahel and the country’s new prime minister Ahmed Ouyahia.
