By Hadi Fornaji.
Tunis, 14 October 2017:
Members of the dialogue committees of the House of Representatives (HoR) and the State Council’s (SC’s) dialogue committees resumed negotiations in in Tunis today to work out amendments to the Libyan Political Agreement so as to make it acceptable to the HoR and for it to then vote it into law. The two teams had separate meetings in separate rooms with UN special envoy Ghassan Salamé to discuss their positions.
At their first session which ended at the beginning of this month, the two teams agreed to reduce the Presidency Council from nine members to three and for there to be a separate prime minister and government. They then went back to their colleagues in Tobruk and Tripoli to report on what had been agreed and discuss the next steps.
These are the mechanics of appointing the three PC members and the prime minister, the issue of supplementary Article No. 8 on who appoints top military, civil and security posts, the HoR demand that the SC contain not 145 members as currently stipulated in the LPA but 200, and the future of the Constitution Drafting Assembly.
The HoR is reported to have agreed this week that it should select two of the three PC members including the head of it, the SC should appoint the other one, and the PC then appoint the prime minister who would still, of course, have to be approved by the HoR along with the ministers he choses. The HoR also agreed that the reduced PC should collectively act as commander-in-chief (not just the PC’s head alone) and as such make top military, security and civil appointment. These, though, would then have to be ratified by the HoR.
Progress on the HoR/SC negotiations, however, is seen as being slowed down by moves on the sidelines on the discussions to come up with names for the new PC and the prime minister’s job. Various suggestions are being proposed for the former including HoR president Ageela Saleh as head of the new PC, with SC president Abdulrahman Sewehli as one of his deputies, with both resigning their present positions for that to happen. So far, though, the only proposal concerning the PC that seems to have found widespread support is that each of the three PC members should come from one of the three historic regions of Libya: Cyrenaica, Fezzan and Tripolitania.
UN special envoy Ghassan Salamé is said to be unhappy about the bargaining on the sidelines and to determined that all efforts concentrate purely on changes to the LPA.
Meanwhile, it is reported that Sewehli has appointed another seven SC members to join its dialogue team in Tunis. Until now there has been an imbalance, with the HoR having 24 members and the SC 13. As a result both sides agreed to delegate the negotiations to a team of five members from each side.
