Wednesday, July 18, 2018

Libya Calls for Unified International Position to End Political Division
2018-07-19 06:20:34|Editor: yan

TRIPOLI, July 18 (Xinhua) -- Libya's UN-backed Prime Minister Fayez Serraj on Wednesday called for a "unified international position" to end the state of political division in the country.

Serraj made his remarks during a meeting with ambassadors of the United States, the United Kingdom, Italy, France, Germany, Russia and China, the UN envoy and the representative of the European Union to Libya, in Tunisia, according to a statement issued by the prime minister's information office later on Wednesday.

"Whenever we take a step towards reconciliation, we are faced with those who bring us backwards," Serraj said, pointing out that the recent Paris meeting on Libya was "the latest attempt for consensus, to which international attitudes varied."

"Some of those who participated in the conference took advantage of this disparity to renounce their decisions and escape from their obligations. There are also those who seriously violated their decisions, such as what happened in the port ports," he added.

"The political division wouldn't have continued if the obstructers were faced with a firm, decisive unified international position," Serraj said, saying that "negative interference from regional and international countries extend the current state, and the obstructers rely on the contradiction of those positions."

He pointed out that some countries "take sides with some parties to the conflict, and some even provide some of those parties with arms despite the arms embargo."

"Patience is beginning to wear thin against the slackness of the international community, which has lost much of its credibility in the Libyan street for its policy of double standards sometimes," Serraj said.

Despite signing a UN-sponsored peace agreement by the Libyan parties later in 2015, Libya remains politically divided between two governments in the east and the west, both competing for legitimacy.

France hosted in May a meeting on Libya with the participation of different Libyan parties to end the political crisis in the country.

The parties agreed to hold and commit themselves to "credible" presidential and parliamentary elections slated for Dec. 10.

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