The Structured Dialogue Committee has concluded and presented us with recommendations copied from previous agreements, offering nothing new. Foremost among the recommendations is the formation of a new transitional government for no more than two years that is tasked with preparing for the electoral process, postponing the constitutional debate, and adopting a “temporary constitutional basis.” That is, it has called for the extension of a renewed transitional phase that has been ongoing for 15 years in which the country has had two executive authorities- the essence of the Libyan crisis.
As for the constitutional track that has been stalled for many years, participants proposed a “temporary constitutional framework” to regulate the transitional period and prepare for elections, deferring the permanent constitution to a later stage: the deferral of the crisis, the attempt to bypass it, and the perpetuation of transitional phases. The 120 members of this dialogue committee offered nothing noteworthy, and no one knows the criteria by which they were chosen to represent the people.
The Structured Dialogue Committee is a forum that seeks to bring the various political and social actors together to discuss national issues in an organized manner; it is not a decision-making body nor an executive body with binding authority. The international mission, however, is trying to make the outcomes of the structured dialogue “binding” on all Libyan parties, which constitutes a dangerous deviation from the very concept of structured dialogue.
The stated aims of the Structured Dialogue Committee include restructuring the board of the Electoral Commission, amending electoral laws, and forming a unified government.
Its recommendations included a call to reform governance and extend the transitional phase amid bets on implementation, against elite and even militia rejection of the Committee’s conclusions. No one knows the mechanism by which its members were chosen. As had been the case with previous committees, there are no clear criteria for selecting members and representatives of the Libyan people in this committee.
The Committee was appointed by the international mission, which entrusted it with choice and with determining the fate of the Libyan people, who have been absent from the process since 2011.
The Libyan crisis continues, and everyone knows who is obstructing its resolution: Islamist factions that control the capital, Tripoli, and the Central Bank. These groups always come up with pretexts to perpetuate chaos and maintain their control over the capital.
Accordingly, the Libyan crisis is handled by equating the authority of democratic electoral choice with the coup option that lost the elections, as happened in the Skhirat Dialogue, which produced a hybrid parliament parallel to the elected parliament, the so-called “High Council of State,” aggravating the issue and turning it into a permanent, self-sustaining crisis.
The UN mission, from its first envoy, Tarek Mitri, to the Spaniard Bernardino León, the proponent of the carrot-and-stick approach, brought parties that rejected dialogue into separate rooms and discussed the crisis backwards, seeking a “consensus” government stripped of consensus. This made the solution inapplicable. It imposed a predetermined roadmap and dragged the dialogue into a Kissingerian swamp, where the fragmented is fragmented further, the cards are shuffled, and confusion prevails. Then came his successor, Martin Kobler, burdened by his failures in Afghanistan and Iraq, became a party to the conflict rather than a neutral mediator.
For dialogue to succeed, it must be returned to the people, and the reproduction of repeated, sterile solutions must stop. For this reason, we need local dialogue and consensus around it, not necessarily agreement. Diversity and differences are natural outcomes. We are people with national will, and we will not allow a guardianship government to be imposed on us under foreign mandate, nor a government of obedience. Those who believe that the solution must be imported seemingly believe “the local piper delights no one.”
Finally, the structured dialogue has failed to end the open-ended transitional phases. Its outcomes are no different from the Skhirat Agreement or the Geneva Agreement, all of which have demonstrably failed to address the Libyan crisis. The greatest challenge remains the move from paper to implementation; this will remain difficult to attain so long as the effective forces on the ground are ignored, and while a parallel track led by Massaad Boulos, Trump’s adviser, is also underway- a power-sharing roadmap that includes the influential forces on the ground in the east and west.
