Any increase in the membership of the upcoming conference on Libyan settlement, which will take place in the Italian city of Palermo on November 12-13, will prolong the discussion and is thus unwanted, Libyan presidential candidate Aref Ali Nayed told Sputnik on Tuesday.
MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 31st October, 2018) Any increase in the membership of the upcoming conference on Libyan settlement, which will take place in the Italian city of Palermo on November 12-13, will prolong the discussion and is thus unwanted, Libyan presidential candidate Aref Ali Nayed told Sputnik on Tuesday.
Khalifa Haftar, the commander of the Libyan National Army (LNA), has already confirmed his participation in the conference. Russian President Vladimir Putin and his US counterpart Donald Trump have been officially invited to attend the conference.
"What I have offered to my colleagues in Italy and to some Libyan participants involves limiting the conference membership to the four members who took part in the Paris conference, namely, counselor Aguila [Saleh, the head of the LNA-backed Libyan House of Representatives]; Marshal Haftar; Mr [Prime Minister Fayez] Sarraj; and [head of the High State Council, Khaled] Mishri," Nayed told Sputnik on the sidelines of the congress dated to the 200th anniversary of the Russian academy of Sciences' Institute of Oriental Studies in Moscow.
He went on to say that the increase in the conference membership would trigger "useless discussions" that would "drag out the process."
Nayed added that the Palermo conference should start where "the Paris [conference] ended," which means that a decision on presidential and parliamentary elections in Libya should be taken.
"The question is how we conduct [the elections], how we assure ourselves of their objectiveness, how we can hold them in the near future, and how we apply their results," Nayed concluded.
Libya has been in turmoil since the overthrow and killing of its long-time leader Muammar Gaddafi in 2011. The country is divided between two governments, with the eastern part controlled by the LNA, and the western part governed by the UN-backed Government of National Accord, led by Sarraj.
In late May, Paris hosted an international conference on Libyan settlement, during which representatives of the two rival political groups agreed to conduct parliamentary and presidential elections in the country on December 10 after having established the constitutional basis for the votes by September 16, while this deadline has not been met.
