{"id":173646,"date":"2020-11-30T12:00:38","date_gmt":"2020-11-30T12:00:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=173646"},"modified":"2020-11-25T10:44:16","modified_gmt":"2020-11-25T10:44:16","slug":"sidelining-africans-the-us-imposes-its-own-choice-for-un-envoy-to-libya","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2020\/11\/sidelining-africans-the-us-imposes-its-own-choice-for-un-envoy-to-libya\/","title":{"rendered":"Sidelining Africans, the US Imposes Its Own Choice for UN Envoy to Libya"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

UN-led talks to draft plans for a new political, peaceful era in Libya were held in Tunisia last week, above. The post of UN special envoy and head of the UN mission in Libya remains filled by an \u201cacting\u201d representative, while two African-submitted candidates have been snubbed. UNSMIL<\/p><\/div>\n

16 Nov 2020 – <\/em>Ignoring two proposals from Africa to fill the United Nations special envoy post for Libya, the United States demanded that the secretary-general, Ant\u00f3nio Guterres, accept its own choice, several diplomats have told PassBlue. The maneuver could leave Africa with only a minimal voice in the mediation of a war in its own continent, spurred almost a decade ago by a Western military intervention that the African Union staunchly opposed<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Several African diplomats and political observers view the imposition of the US as another instance of colonial interference in their continent, now targeting an oil-rich nation whose turmoil is destabilizing neighboring countries and subjecting migrants<\/a>\u00a0passing through Libya to unlawful killings, disappearances, sexual violence and slavery.<\/p>\n

The US choice for the special envoy for Libya \u2014 the Bulgarian diplomat Nickolay Mladenov, currently the UN coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process \u2014 is expected to be announced any moment. The US mission to the UN said on Nov. 16, \u201cWe have nothing to announce on this right now.\u201d<\/p>\n

Both the envoy post and head of the UN mission in Libya, known as Unsmil<\/a>, is being filled in an \u201cacting\u201d capacity by an American, Stephanie Williams. She took on the role after Ghassan Salam\u00e9, a Lebanese academic, politician and diplomat, quit in March. He was disgusted, he later said<\/a>, over certain members of the UN Security Council \u201cstabbing him in the back\u201d and their \u201chypocrisy\u201d in undermining his mediation efforts in Libya.<\/p>\n

For months, Mladenov, a well-respected diplomat, has been rumored to be named the UN envoy for Libya. He would step into Williams\u2019s shoes to manage the UN-led political dialogue that began in Tunisia on Nov. 9 between the two main warring parties in Libya. The conference was preceded by four rounds of negotiations that have been held since February.<\/p>\n

The talks in Tunisia resulted in at least one major announcement: presidential elections for Libya are scheduled to take place on Dec. 24, 2021, a date marking 70 years of independence for the country. A cease-fire has been working for nearly a month as violence has subsided, Williams told the media, below, on Nov. 13.<\/p>\n

But since Salam\u00e9 left in March, African nations submitted candidates to no avail, they say: the former foreign ministers Hanna Tetteh<\/a> of Ghana and Ramtane Lamamra<\/a> of Algeria, who was reportedly<\/a> blocked by the US at the request of Egypt and the United Arab Emirates. Both of those countries have been playing proxy roles in the Libyan war.<\/p>\n

Tetteh is the UN special envoy to the African Union and head of the UN office to that body. Lamamra is a new member of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute\u2019s governing board.<\/p>\n

The US insisted that the dual roles of the UN post be filled separately: one to head the UN mission, based in Tripoli; the other to lead the mediation. Earlier in the year, the US asked Helle Thorning-Schmidt, a former Danish prime minister, but she reportedly declined.<\/p>\n

A Security Council resolution approved in September formally divided the functions of the UN representative in Libya into a special envoy and a coordinator in charge of \u201cday-to-day operations and management\u201d of Unsmil. An African diplomat could be appointed as the mission\u2019s coordinator, diplomats said.<\/p>\n

But the lack of an African in the mediation role has irked Africans.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere have been two previous candidates from Africa who received overwhelming support from the majority of the members of the Security Council, and we are yet to receive feedback on the status of these nominations,\u201d reads a letter dated Sept. 24 addressed to Rosemary DiCarlo, the UN under secretary-general for Political and Peacebuilding Affairs.<\/p>\n

The letter \u2014 a copy of which was obtained by PassBlue \u2014 was signed by the permanent representatives of two of the three African members of the Security Council \u2014 Niger and South Africa, plus their Caribbean ally Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, another elected Council member. (Tunisia not only hosted the recent negotiations but as the third African Council member, it reportedly backs the Mladenov candidacy.)<\/p>\n

The letter stated, \u201cWe are not in a position to support the nomination of Mr. Mladenov.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe position of the African Union has been clear from the beginning, and it has been the same for the African members of the Security Council, which is that the preference is to have an African envoy,\u201d said Fatima Kyari Mohammed, the representative of the Permanent Observer Mission of the African Union to the UN.<\/p>\n

Guterres presented the two African candidates to fill the envoy post to the Council. However, \u201cat the end of the day, neither candidate was backed, so he was basically forced to present a third candidate,\u201d Mohammed told PassBlue.<\/p>\n

The effort by Africans to promote their own candidates to lead the peace efforts in Libya \u2014 a country left in military and humanitarian chaos after the Security Council authorized a NATO-led aerial intervention in 2011 \u2014 is now over.\u00a0At this point, the African Union does not want to hinder or delay the mediation process, Mohammed said. The African nations will go along \u201cwith what the Security Council decides and what the SG [Guterres] is able to move forward on.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was a matter of principles,\u201d Mohammed said, referring to the original opposition, adding,\u00a0\u201cAll three candidates are highly experienced candidates, and any of them could do the job.\u201d<\/p>\n

Another African diplomat who asked not to be identified so he could speak candidly about the process told PassBlue that the US rejected both African candidates, even though they enjoyed the support of 14 of the 15 Security Council members, he said. \u201cAfricans are still being ignored, and the outside world comes in and they basically do what they want.\u201d<\/p>\n

The 2011 military intervention of Libya, enacted under the guise of protecting civilians amid a civil war, caused the mob murder of the leader Gen. Muammar el-Qaddafi, a nationalist symbol for African and Arab unity but deemed an unsavory figure by the West. He was a major founder of the African Union in 2002, and even proposed a United States of Africa.<\/p>\n

The intervention and ensuing escalation of violence killed and injured tens of thousands of people, though no accurate records of casualties are available; destroyed critical infrastructure and displaced tens of thousands of civilians. Thousands of migrants passing through Libya since then and in the renewed civil war have been detained, tortured, raped and killed.<\/p>\n

One side in the current battle is the UN-recognized and Tripoli-based Government of National Accord, bolstered by Turkey and created in 2012. The other side is the Interim Government, which controls eastern Libya with the support of the Libyan House of Representatives and the armed group known as the Libyan National Army, led by the field marshal Khalifa Haftar and backed by the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Russia<\/a> and, until recently, France<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s unclear why an African cannot help to solve an African issue,\u201d one diplomat said to PassBlue. \u201cIt\u2019s always strange when foreigners come in and want to solve an issue for us when they are often involved in causing the instability in the first place.\u201d<\/p>\n

The negotiations in Tunisia occurred after Haftar\u2019s Libyan National Army retreated in June from its position around the capital, Tripoli, which for 15 months their troops unsuccessfully tried to overtake. A process of peace talks for Libya was actually initiated a year ago, in September 2019, by Germany and Salam\u00e9, followed by a Berlin conference in January.<\/p>\n

Convened by\u00a0Chancellor Angela Merkel, it gathered the governments of Algeria, Britain, China, Egypt, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, Turkey, the Republic of the Congo, the United Arab Emirates and the US as well as Guterres and the heads of the African Union, the European Union and the League of Arab States.<\/p>\n

The talks in Tunisia carried the process forward, prompting Guterres to say<\/a> to the participants on Nov. 9, \u201cYou have the opportunity to end a tragic conflict and create a future of dignity and hope.\u201d He alluded to the foreign actors driving the conflict, which include Russian mercenaries: \u201cI call on the international community to provide its strong backing as well, including by ensuring full adherence to the Security Council arms embargo.\u201d<\/p>\n

The UN has opened more than 40 investigations of violations of the arms embargo imposed by the Security Council on Libya. Williams has described<\/a> the arms embargo as \u201ca joke,\u201d bypassed by land, sea and air. She also called for the immediate closure of migrant detention centers in Libya, saying the conditions were \u201cabhorrent.\u201d<\/p>\n

Indeed, the situation in Libya has generated \u201ca great degree of instability,\u201d said Gustavo de Carvalho, senior researcher for the Institute for Security Studies, a think tank in Pretoria, South Africa. \u201cWhile many UN member states see the issue in Libya more as an issue related to the Arab or European worlds,\u201d wrote de Carvalho to PassBlue, \u201cthe impacts of the conflict are seen throughout North Africa and the Sahel.\u201d<\/p>\n

_______________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Maurizio Guerrero is the senior writer in New York and at the United Nations for <\/em>Proceso, a political newsweekly based in Mexico, for which he writes on topics ranging from international diplomacy to immigration and criminal justice. Guerrero also regularly publishes in <\/em>Forbes Mexico. For 10 years, he was the New York bureau chief for the Mexican newswire agency <\/em>Notimex. Guerrero studied journalism in Mexico City, followed by postgraduate work on print media at the Thomson Foundation in Cardiff, Wales.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original – passblue.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

16 Nov 2020 – “We came, we saw, he died” ha ha ha – thus cackled the unrepentant sponsor of US state terrorism, Hillary Clinton, following the brutal, inhumane murder of Muammar Gaddafi the Libyan revolutionary head of state: supported by Joe Biden, by the way. The US is the last country on earth that should be allowed to impose an envoy on any country, least of all Libya. — Roger Kotila, President DWF<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":173652,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[127],"tags":[237,131,867,1126,1050,178,124,70],"class_list":["post-173646","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-africa","tag-africa","tag-africom","tag-anglo-america","tag-hegemony","tag-imperialism","tag-libya","tag-united-nations","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/173646","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=173646"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/173646\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/173652"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=173646"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=173646"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=173646"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}