Morocco Hampers The Algerian-Tunisian Initiative To End Libya’s War

After the Speaker of the Libyan Parliament, Aguila Salah Issa failed to obtain what he was looking for in Algeria, he turned his face towards neighbouring Morocco, which he visited on Sunday, accompanied by the Foreign Affairs Minister of Tobruk government, Abdul-Hadi al-Hawaij, which is not recognized internationally, and that is loyal to the Retired General Khalifa Haftar.

Media adviser to the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Fathi Al-Marimi, said that Aguila Salah will discuss in Morocco “the Libyan crisis and ways to find solutions to it in light of the initiative of the Speaker of Parliament and the Cairo Declaration, and the outputs of the Berlin Conference”, Libyan media reported on Sunday.

It was expected that Saleh Aguila would visit Algeria on the eighteenth of this month, in the hope that he would meet President Abdelmadjid Tabboune, but the visit was cancelled at the last moment, without explanations, while some leaks talked about Algeria’s refusal to receive him.

These leaks justified the failure to receive Aguila Salah in Algeria, by engaging the Libyan East camp to arm the tribes and calling for (Egyptian) foreign interference, which was warned of by President Abdelmadjid Tabboune in his interview with a foreign channel, because this leads to the “Somalization” of Libya.

On the same day, the head of the Supreme Council of State in Libya, Khaled al-Michri, also visited Morocco at the head of a delegation consisting of the head of the dialogue team, Fawzi Al-Oqab, Ali al-Sweih and Abdessalam al-Safrani, to conduct an official visit to the Kingdom of Morocco, to exchange views and opinions on Common issues and interests between the two countries”, a statement issued by the Libyan State Council said.

It is known that Morocco hosted the rounds of negotiations between the Libyan parties in the city of Skhirat in 2015, under the auspices of the United Nations, which resulted in the agreement that gave birth to the Libyan state institutions, at the head of which is the Presidential Council led by Fayez al-Sarraj.

The sources that reported the movement of representatives of the two parties to the Libyan conflict to Morocco did not talk about the backgrounds of the synchronization of this visit, whether the “Makhzen Regime” would bring the parties together at the same table, and whether it was related to a new initiative by Morocco to bring the points of view closer for hope to end the ongoing fighting in the eastern neighbour.

These developments come at a time when Algeria announced an initiative to solve the Libyan crisis that has the support of the United Nations, and President Tabboune said in his recent meeting with journalists that his proposal is accepted by the United Nations and will be presented in coordination with Tunisia.

Previously, Tabboune had met the Acting Special Representative and Head of the United Nations Support Mission in Libya (UNSMIL), Stephanie Turco Williams, and had discussed with her about the crisis and called for an acceleration of the political solution.

The timing of the visit of Al-Mishri and Aguila Salah to Morocco in this particular circumstance gives the impression that the “Makhzen” is trying to keep pace with the developments in the Libyan crisis, even if it disrupts the Algerian initiative that is backed by Tunisia, according to what observers see, because it did not digest inviting Algeria to participate in the Berlin conference, while Rabat was excluded.