Libya’s Haftar will not attend African Union exceptional summit

Khalifa Hafter’s reported refusal to go to Saturday’s meeting of other Libyan political leaders in Brazzaville will have frustrated Congo-Brazzaville President Denis Sassou Nguesso who heads the African Union’s (AU) Libya committee.

Since the committee’s four-day mission to Libya in June, Nguesso has been trying to organise a meeting of all Libya’s leading players. This will be the third AU mini summit on Libya and reflects growing alarm in the Union at Libya’s enduring crisis.

Today, a Hafter aide is reported to have said that House of Representatives (HoR) president Ageela Saleh will be representing the interests of the east of the country.  Saleh has actually already arrived in Brazzaville and may be hoping for advance consultations with Nguesso and the other AU committee members from Ethiopia, Mauritania, Niger and South Africa. It is expected that the meeting will also be attended by Algeria, Chad, Egypt, Sudan and Tunisia.

Presidency Council (PC) chief Faiez Serraj has said that he will be attending as, it is understood, will State Council head Abdulrahman Sewehli.

Hafter’s absence will be seen at odds with the spirit of the deal he struck last month with Serraj in Paris at the encounter brokered by French president Macron. That seemed to break new ground in that both men agreed on a ceasefire, early elections and the pivotal position of the Libyan Political Agreement

But more than a month on, with no obvious fresh political movement,  three days ago Macron sent his foreign minister Jean-Yves Le Drian to press Serraj and Hafter for progress.

On the other hand, Reports that the border with Niger and Chad has been closed today by an independent force from Qatrun have been partially confirmed by a usually reliable Tebu source.

According to Fezzan Libya Org, the force consisting of army regulars, volunteers and revolutionaries from Qatrun, some 240 kilometres south of Sebha, closed the entire southern border. Confirming the closure, the Tebu source, however, says that the force is led by Barka Shedemi, who is normally based in northern Niger. The source said that Shedemi announced today that he was now blockading the border to end people-smuggling from Niger into Libya.

He is said to control some 700 kilometres of the border having free range on both sides, in southern Libya and in Niger as well as Chad.

A veteran Tebu militia leader, he is reported to have some 200 vehicles at his disposal. In the past, he was based in southern Libya and is said to have a longstanding hatred of the Qaddadfa tribe, having been captured in the 1980s in clashes with them and had his hand and leg cut off by the Qaddafi regime after being accused of being a brigand.

There is no further confirmation of the closure so far.

The Tebu source claimed that Shedemi was hoping to be paid by the Europeans for his actions.

A major Tebu leader in Qatrun, Sheikh Omar Sandou, meanwhile today toldthe Libya Herald that there has been a major drop in recent weeks in migrants passing through the desert town from the Nigerien border heading north to Tripoli. Although he did not have figures, he said that the decrease was “big”.

Most migrants, he added, stayed in the town for no more than a couple of weeks to earn enough money to carry on with the journey north. No migrants, he added, came via Chad.