Libyan Military chooses Egypt as starting point to reunify

CAIRO – 19 September 2017: The Egyptian National committee on Libya led by the Chief of Staff of the Egyptian Armed Forces Mahmoud Hijazi welcomed the two Libyan military communication committees on Monday as the Libyan Military Institution has chosen Egypt as a starting point to reorganize the Libyan army.

This is in line with the continued efforts Egypt exerts to put an end to the division in the Libyan army and to bring the viewpoints closer together to solve the Libyan crisis, the Military Spokesperson Colonel Tamer al-Rifai said.

The Libyan military has discussed in the meeting the phases of the crisis in the army and the problems hindering its cohesion and unity over recent years.

They underline the principles to build Libya’s unity, sovereignty and safety and the ways to enhance comprehensive national reconciliation without dragging the disputes among the different regions in Libya, stated al-Rifai.

During the meeting, they committed to establish a modern democratic civil state based on the principles of transferring power peacefully, accepting other, and rejecting the marginalization and exclusion of any of Libya’s parties.

Among the principles they pledged to follow are working on the unity of the Libyan army, shouldering the responsibility to maintain the state’s security and sovereignty, combating all forms of terrorism and extremism, rejecting any foreign interference in their affairs and seizing intellectual, ideological and regional conflicts.

The Libyan military agreed on establishing a joint technical committee that will be held in Cairo soon to discuss and review mechanisms to unify the institution.

At the end of the meeting, they urged Libyan people to support this consensual effort which helps in accelerating Libya’s stability, and called upon Libya’s media to assume their ethical and professional responsibility to serve the objective of unifying the military, and avoid all forms of discord and provocation.

Following the ouster and killing of former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, Libyan factions engaged in a state of civil war that escalated in 2014 and resulted in splitting power between two rival governments in capital Tripoli and Tubruk supported by self-proclaimed Libyan national army led by Field Marshall Khalifa Haftar.

President Abdel Fatah al-Sisi formed the Egyptian National Committee on Libya in 2016 that will cooperate with the United Nation to take the lead on the initiative and sit at the dialogue table to reach a Libyan agreement.

It hosted a three-day meeting starting from June 7, 2017 with two delegations from the Libyan eastern region and Misrata to urge all parties to comply with the deal brokered by the UN in December 2015 to create a unity government and to heal the division in Libya.