Libya’s “Muslim Brotherhood” roadmap to be expounded during Algiers meeting

The Libyan “Justice and Building party”, linked to the Muslim Brotherhood trend in Libya has launched its own initiative for “finding peaceful outlets to the Libyan crisis and stopping the current fighting and ending the political rifts among the various parties at issue.”

The Libyan party issued a roadmap of which “Echorouk” got a copy, and which is to be expounded by the party’s representatives at the Algiers  troubleshooting meeting which opened on Tuesday with 15 Libyan party leaders and political activists in attendance.

The party’s initiative is based among other salient things on a combination of political legitimacy on the basis of the elections held in June 2014, and the enshrinement of constitutional legality, embodied by the Supreme Court which is entitled to scrap and reinstate the country’s House of Representatives.

The meeting of Algiers “is a promising starting point in the efforts made by our Libyan brothers that will get full support from Algeria and its far-sighted political leaders, for the achievement of a national consensus to which aspire the Libyan people, especially the formation a national unity government,” Algerian deputy foreign minister Messahel said in his opening address at the meeting.

Such a “solution would pave the way for further stability and allow Libya to efficiently fight terrorism, he underscored.

Libya has steadily descended into chaos since Gaddafi’s death. Disgruntled former members of the volunteer militias who fought against the dictator’s forces captured a number of the country’s most prominent ports, seizing tankers and oil shipments, earlier this year.

Libya’s then-prime minister, Ali Zeidan, was subsequently removed from office by retired Gen. Khalifa Haftar, who also dissolved Libya’s Islamist-dominated parliament, the General National Congress in March, blaming the Islamists for the deterioration in the security situation, and of being in control of some of the armed militias.

An armed Islamist group from the city of Misrata then took control of Tripoli in August, capturing the country’s main airport from another rival militia group from Zintan.

Islamist rebels have also seized control of parts of Libya’s second city Benghazi, with Haftar’s forces now engaged in daily battles with them in a bid to wrest control of the city back into government hands.

The country also now has two parliaments, the internationally recognized Tobruk parliament and the government of Prime Minister Abdullah Al-Thani, and another, based in Tripoli and made up of former members of the dissolved General National Congress, who were reinstated by the militias currently in control of the capital.

The meeting in Algiers is expected to include all the major players on the current muddled political scene in Libya, including Haftar, Ali Al-Salabi, a leading member of the Muslim Brotherhood, and newly-elected head of the parliament in Tobruk, Ageila Saleh.

Reports said the three key figures at the Algiers meeting would indeed be Haftar, Saleh and Salabi, representing the army, the government in Tobruk, and the Muslim Brotherhood and the rival government in Tripoli.

All three are reportedly agreed on the four main issues the Algiers meeting is hoping to resolve: the legitimacy of the parliament in Tobruk, the necessity of forming strict guidelines for differentiating between “revolutionary” groups that were present in the fight against Gaddafi and Islamist groups, in addition to reviving the country’s security apparatus and giving the Libyan state and its institutions the central role in the sustained fight against the extremist groups, and rejuvenating the country’s standing army.