The formation of an international contact group on Libya, which would include all actors involved in the crisis settlement, might prove effective in ending the hostilities in the Maghreb country, Chairman of the Munich Security Conference (MSC) Wolfgang Ischinger told Sputnik on the sidelines of the Primakov Readings international forum in Moscow
MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 11th June, 2019) The formation of an international contact group on Libya, which would include all actors involved in the crisis settlement, might prove effective in ending the hostilities in the Maghreb country, Chairman of the Munich Security Conference (MSC) Wolfgang Ischinger told Sputnik on the sidelines of the Primakov Readings international forum in Moscow.
"No, I think the first step is that we need to get our act together. The recipe was a joint recipe of Russia, and the West in wars and conflicts of the 1990s, when we created contact groups for example, on Bosnia; on Kosovo, meaning that all of us from now on are only doing things that are consulted among the members of the Contact groups. What is currently happening in the conflicts in Yemen, Syria, Libya is that all the actors, Russia, the United States, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and others act on their own and that is not a good recipe. We have this excellent model of high-level contact group. [Russian] former foreign minister, Igor Ivanov, was my counterpart when we had this very effective cooperative efforts in the 1990s, there is no reason why it could not be reinvented today. That is what we need," Ischinger said, when asked whether military invasion could put an end to the ongoing hostilities in Libya, which have already claimed lives of over 650 people.
The situation in Libya, which has been suffering from unrest and been divided between two governments since 2011, deteriorated on April 4, after the east-based Libyan National Army launched an offensive on Tripoli, which is controlled by the UN-backed Government of National Accord. Two days later, the latter announced a counteroffensive dubbed Volcano of Rage.
Currently, there are no international collective efforts on Libyan crisis settlement, with Russia, the European Union and the United States, among others, holding talks on Libya separately. Moscow also maintains the Russian Contact Group for the intra-Libyan settlement.
