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Libyan Rival Officials Discuss Unifying 2021 Budget

A fisherman along a promenade in Tripoli, Libya, November 25, 2020. (AFP)
A fisherman along a promenade in Tripoli, Libya, November 25, 2020. (AFP)
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Libyan Rival Officials Discuss Unifying 2021 Budget

A fisherman along a promenade in Tripoli, Libya, November 25, 2020. (AFP)
A fisherman along a promenade in Tripoli, Libya, November 25, 2020. (AFP)

Officials from Libya’s rival governments met Tuesday in the strategic eastern oil town of Brega for talks aimed at unifying the national budget, officials said, another step forward in efforts to end the yearslong conflict in the oil-rich country.

Finance minister of the Government of National Accord (GNA) based in the capital Tripoli, Faraj Bumatari, and his counterpart from the eastern Libya-based administration, Muraja Ghaith, attended the meeting.

Also attending was Tripoli-based Foreign Minister Mohammed Tahir Siyala.

A statement by the Tripoli-based Finance Ministry said the sides would work on a final draft for the 2021 national budget in the coming days. The draft would be presented to a transitional government that will be established to lead the country to presidential and parliamentary elections late this year.

Siyala said in video comments posted by the ministry’s official account that a joint team would carry out the agreed-on budget arrangements according to estimated resources this year. He did not elaborate.

The UN support mission in Libya, or UNSMIL, called the meeting an “encouraging and much-needed step” and urged both sides to prepare the budget in “a transparent manner.”

“The unification and rationalization of the national budget is crucial to establishing a more durable and equitable economic arrangement,” it said.

Tuesday’s meeting came a month after Libya’s Central Bank approved a single official exchange rate for its currency at 4.8 dinars per US dollar.

The advisory committee of the Libyan political dialogue forum, meanwhile, was to meet Wednesday in Geneva to provide recommendations for resolving disputes over a mechanism to choose the transitional government, the UN mission said.

The forum reached an agreement late last year to hold presidential and parliamentary elections on Dec. 24, 2021. However, it failed to break the deadlock on the selection mechanism for the executive authority despite numerous online meetings since their face-to-face talks in Tunisia in November.

The mission called for “genuine efforts” in the political track of the UN-brokered talks to form a unified government.

The forum is part of the UN efforts to end the chaos that has engulfed the oil-rich North African nation since the 2011 overthrow and killing of ruler Moammar al-Gaddafi.

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After Decades in Assad Jails, Political Prisoner Wants Justice

For many years, Ragheed Tatari's family assumed he had died in Syria's hellish prison system. LOUAI BESHARA / AFP
For many years, Ragheed Tatari's family assumed he had died in Syria's hellish prison system. LOUAI BESHARA / AFP
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After Decades in Assad Jails, Political Prisoner Wants Justice

For many years, Ragheed Tatari's family assumed he had died in Syria's hellish prison system. LOUAI BESHARA / AFP
For many years, Ragheed Tatari's family assumed he had died in Syria's hellish prison system. LOUAI BESHARA / AFP

Syrian fighter pilot Ragheed Tatari was 26 when he was arrested. Now 70, the country's longest-serving political prisoner is finally free after Bashar al-Assad's fall, seeking justice and accountability.

Tatari, arrested in 1981 and sentenced to life behind bars, was among scores of prisoners who walked free when longtime ruler Assad was overthrown on December 8 in an offensive led by opposition factions.

He has made it out alive after 43 years in jail, but tens of thousands of Syrian families are still searching for their loved ones who disappeared long ago in Syria's hellish prison system.

"I came close to death under torture," Tatari told AFP in his small Damascus apartment.

Since a military field court gave him a life sentence for "collaborating with foreign countries" -- an accusation he denies -- Tatari was moved from one prison to another, first under late president Hafez al-Assad and then his son Bashar who succeeded him in 2000.

Showing old pictures of him in his pilot uniform, Tatari said he was not seeking revenge, but stressed that "everyone must be held accountable for their crimes".

"We do not want anyone to be imprisoned" without due process, said Tatari.

More than two million Syrians were jailed under the Assad dynasty's rule, half of them after anti-government protests in 2011 escalated into civil war, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitor.

The Britain-based monitor says around 200,000 died in custody.

Diab Serriya, co-founder of the Association of Detainees and Missing Persons of Saydnaya Prison, said that Tatari was "the longest-serving political prisoner in Syria and the Middle East".

Rights group Amnesty International has called the notorious Saydnaya prison outside Damascus a "human slaughterhouse".

Tatari had been detained there, but he said his 15 years in the Palmyra prison in the Syrian desert were the most difficult.

'Wished for death'

The Palmyra facility operated "without any discipline, any laws and any humanity", Tatari said.

Detainees were "not afraid of torture -- we wished for death", he added.

"Everything that has been said about torture in Palmyra... is an understatement."

"A guard could kill a prisoner if he was displeased with him," Tatari said, adding that inmates were forced under torture to say phrases like "Hafez al-Assad is your god", although he refused to do so.

In 1980, Palmyra witnessed a massacre of hundreds of mostly Islamist detainees, gunned down by helicopters or executed in their cells after a failed assassination attempt on Hafez al-Assad.

Tatari said he was completely disconnected from the outside world there, only learning of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union through a prisoner who had returned from a hospital visit.

In Sweida prison in the south, where Tatari was transferred after the 2011 revolt began, some inmates had phones that they would keep hidden from the guards.

"The cell phone gets you out of prison, it makes you feel alive," he said, recalling how he used to conceal his device in a hole dug in his cell.

But after his phone was discovered, he was transferred to a prison in Tartus -- his final detention facility before gaining freedom.

Dreams of escape

Tatari was one of several military officers who were opposed to Syria's intervention in Lebanon in 1976, and to the violent repression in the early 1980s of the Muslim Brotherhood, Syria's main opposition force at the time.

"Many of us were against involving the army in political operations," he said.

After two of his fellow pilots defected and fled to Jordan in 1980, he escaped to Egypt and then on to Jordan.

But he returned when security forces began harassing his family and was arrested on arrival.

His wife was pregnant at the time with their first and only son.

For years, the family assumed Tatari was dead, before receiving a proof of life in 1997 after paying bribes, a common practice under the Assads' rule.

It was then that Tatari was finally able to meet his son, then aged 16, under the watchful eye of guards during the family's first authorized prison visit that year.

"I was afraid... I ended the meeting after 15 minutes," Tatari said.

His wife has since died and their son left Syria, having received threats at the start of the protest movement, which had spiraled into war and eventually led to Assad's overthrow.

During his time behind bars, Tatari said he "used to escape prison with my thoughts, daydreams and drawing".

"The regime getting toppled overnight was beyond my dreams... No one expected it to happen so quickly."