5 + 5 military dialogue set to resume according to UNSMIL

On 1 June, UNSMIL released a statement welcoming agreement from both the Government of National Accord (GNA) and the Libyan National Army (LNA) to resume ceasefire talks and related security arrangements based on the 5 + 5 Joint Military Commission (JMC) talks. The new round of negotiations would occur through video communication due to the coronavirus pandemic, however, no date for the talks was given. In the statement, UNSMIL noted that the resumption of the JMC talks will mark the beginning of “a calm on the ground and a humanitarian truce to allow the opportunity to reach a final ceasefire agreement.” UNSMIL stressed the need for the parties to “commit to fully authorizing their representatives in the negotiations to enable them to complete the ceasefire agreement”, and also called on states that support the parties to the conflict to respect what they agreed upon in the Berlin Conference and various Security Council resolutions, notably the cessation of all forms of military support permanently.The UN-mediated 5+5 Joint Military Commission (JMC) meetings in Geneva began in early February 2020 as an output from the Berlin Conference in January 2020. The JMC talks were between five senior military delegates from the GNA and five from the LNA – the representatives did not meet in person. The first round concluded on 8 February after 6 days of talks. On 23 February, the second round of discussions concluded and produced a draft permanent ceasefire agreement that included the return of civilians to their homes and a joint monitoring mechanism supervised by the JMC and UNSMIL. The process has been stalled since then, in part due to the UN Envoy to Libya Ghassan Salame resigning from his post, with the conflict significantly escalating in the meantime.Given no date has been set for these talks yet, it is likely that any ceasefire talks will take some time to organise and likely even longer for any sort of agreement to be potentially made. Even if a ceasefire agreement were made through the JMC representatives in the coming weeks, it remains unclear if and how this would translate into reality on the ground. For the GNA, it does not effectively control the various forces that are aligned to it, so coordinating a full ceasefire or pullback of forces that encompasses multiple social and armed group interests will be challenging, if not impossible. On the LNA side, Haftar has shown that ultimately the “buck” stops with him and that he will not be beholden to any agreement without his signature, and in some cases even with his signature. As has been shown in many other cases, his agreement to a ceasefire or political agreement has largely been disingenuous, and as long as he remains the head of the LNA, there is no reason to believe this pattern would change because he is on the backfoot.