In his latest article published in SWP’s October report, Wolfram Lacher proposes a new negotiating framework to address Libya’s political and security issues in the aftermath of two major crises. First, Eastern-based General Haftar’s move towards oil resources in June 2018, and the violent militia fighting in Tripoli in September 2018. According to Lacher, Libya’s latest crises highlight the urgent need for renegotiating the current dysfunctional power sharing agreement to enable progress towards elections. Lacher writes :
Taken together, the current situation offers an opportunity to shed an institutional framework that has prevented political progress for too long, and to design a new negotiating process that closely links talks over power-sharing with efforts to reunify economic and security institutions.
Lacher describes his proposition for a new power-sharing framework, advocating that in order to be more functional, such an agreement should lay on Libya’s actual political and military forces rather than on the country’s defunct institutions. The aim of such a framework would be to create a new executive authority with detailed security arrangements, along with the provisions for the reunification of the sovereign economic institutions. Lacher argues :
New security arrangements for Tripoli should take the form of a roadmap, starting with immediately feasible steps and moving towards the gradual integration of rival local forces into common command structures and units. For the implementation of such a roadmap to succeed, it will be critical that Western and regional governments strongly support UNSMIL by exerting pressure on violators. […]This requires a departure from the approach that prevailed over the past two years, during which wary Western governments and the UN avoided challenging the status quo so that they could operate in Tripoli and have an official interlocutor in the GNA. The events over the past months have shown that this approach has now reached its limits.
In this article, Wolfram Lacher presents a well-thought argument for a viable solution to tackle Libya's political, security and economic issues, inspired from the realities of the ground.Click here to read the article