Consiliul CSC
Last days, Libya`s long-awaited legislative election has been postponed until January 2022.
As the Libyan parliament spokesman said ”The election for members of the House of Representatives will take place 30 days after the presidential vote”, which are still scheduled for December 24.
The elections have the role of unifying the hard-fought country, which for years has been divided into its own territory, with major violent disputes resulting in thousands of deaths, between the Libyan people`s own representatives.
This is a step towards democracy, and most important towards a legitimate state and is supposed to help unify the country after years of conflict and division, but disputes about their legal and constitutional basis have laid bare the extent of the split between the countries east and west – Tobruk and Tripoli.
Libya has endured a decade of violence since the 2011 fall of Muammar Gaddafi in a NATO backed uprising, which unleashed a complex civil war that dragged in multiple foreign powers.
The rupture between the two was felt at the level of the population, this being determined to leave their home for a better life in Europe, choosing to risk their lives in the Mediterranean Sea.
The avalanche of foreign fighters who arrived on Libyan territory to support one of the two camps involved in the civil war or to join militias and terrorist groups, is considered one of the major problems facing the country at the moment.
The latest UN report on the Libyan civil war concluded that both camps, the LNA and the GNA, are being involved in war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity. As one of the mission`s representative said in a statement ”There are seasonable grounds to believe that war crimes have been committed in Libya, while violence perpetrated in prisons and against migrants there may amount to crimes against humanity”.
They also added that ”All parties to the conflicts, including third states, foreign fighters and mercenaries, have violated international humanitarian law, in particular, the principles of proportionality and destruction, and some have also committed war crimes”. According to the investigators there has been identified some of the groups – Libyan and foreigners that are responsible for the crimes, but their identities will remain secret until a law suit will begin.
However, analysts consider UN report a first step towards the process of identifying, incriminating and bringing to justice war criminals who have acted on Libyan territory.
Although small steps are being taken, every action by the Libyan authorities to establish a new political regime is a progress that citizens have been waiting for a decade.
With the support of international actors and good intentions from its own politicians, Libya can once again become one of North Africa`s economic powers as it once was.