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By Sami Zaptia.
London, 28 January 2019:
The head of Libya’s High State Council (HSC), Khaled Mishri, announced that he was leaving the Libyan Muslim Brotherhood Association (MB).
In a video statement released Saturday, Mishri said that he was resigning and withdrawing from the MB on national and ideological grounds and for the sake of conviction and transparency.
He said that this was because the organization had failed to implement the reforms it had agreed upon at its October 2015 conference. These included the decision to end MB activities within Libya in favour of working through NGOs.
Mishri said that he would however continue his political and party work. He said he continued to respect the MB and hoped they would implement their agreed reforms.
Mishri was elected head of the HSC in April 2018, replacing Abdelrahman Swehli.
The HSC is an unelected consultative body created by the UN-brokered Libyan Political Agreement (LPA) of 2015. It is made-up of former General National Congress (GNC) members.
The GNC was Libya’s first Post-Qaddafi parliament, elected in the 2012 elections. It’s tenure was ended by the 2014 election of the House of Representatives.
There has been much discussion and speculation as to why Mishri, a political Islamist, has announced his split from the MB and why now.
There is speculation that this could be a temporary strategic withdrawal in view of proposed Libyan presidential/parliamentary elections.
It will be recalled that despite managing to successfully exert a disproprtionate degree of power in post Qaddafi Libya, the Libyan political Islamist movement failed to win an outright majority in Libya’s 2012 and 2014 parliamentary elections as well as in the 2014 Constitutional Drafting Authority elections.
