Of Alberto Negri

Source: Alberto Negri
Italy also risks losing Tripoli? Fayez Sarraj's government, supported by the Islamist brigades but under constant attack from the other militias _ despite yet another fragile truce _ appears increasingly weak, General Khalifa Haftar in Cyrenaica is increasingly threatening towards Italy, Macron's France increasingly determined to pursue its agenda to call elections by the end of the year.
But what is Italian policy in Libya? No one is really able to answer despite Salvini and Moavero's visits to Tripoli. Indeed, Italy seems almost isolated, despite the Tripoli government being the one recognized by the international community as opposed to Haftar's power, backed by France, Egypt, Russia and the United Arab Emirates. In reality, American support for the Italian positions also appears very evanescent: the impression is that Trump told Prime Minister Conte the same nonsense about Libya that Obama told Renzi, that of our pre-eminent role in Libyan affairs which in practice the other powers do not recognize in us except in words. Even the publicized conference on Libya in Rome, to be held in October, it appears incongruent if the French and Haftar position prevailed in order to hold new elections, even just presidential ones (without legislative and constitutional reform).
In short, there is a risk of giving the green light, albeit in a confusing way, to the presidential ambitions of Haftar with whom Italy has strong difficulties in dialogue. Moscow's proposals to act as mediator with the general have always been dropped by Italian diplomacy which does not intend to legitimize the former Gaddafi officer who once commanded the Libyan African contingent in Chad before going into exile in the USA under the wing of the CIA. The general protects French interests in Cyrenaica, Egypt supports it with the clear aim of having a "security zone" in Libya while Russia does not hide its ambition to return to the area with a military base and to reopen the Libyan market to its war supplies.
But sooner or later the Italians will also have to really negotiate with Haftar and we will see if there will be a meeting with Foreign Minister Moavero soon: immigration, which part of the coasts of Tripolitania, is a fundamental issue for us but the stabilization of Libya, which passes through oil exports, it is no less so: without a recovery of the economy it is very difficult to convince the Libyan militias to give up the income from human trafficking.
In Libya the militias are mainly responsible for the process of industrialization and concentration of illicit trafficking - including that of human beings - which we have witnessed in recent years. There has also been a progressive concentration of migrant trafficking. From a geographical point of view, until the beginning 2015 the departures, although still concentrated in Tripolitania, they were even more evenly distributed along the Libyan coast. From that moment on we have seen their concentration in areas of a few tens of kilometres, alternately west of Tripoli, between Sabratha and the surrounding towns, or immediately east, between Misurata and Gasr Garabulli. In short, the places from which migrants depart have shrunk, evidence of an ever-increasing control of traffic by the militias of specific places along the west coast.
As Arturo Varvelli of ISPI claims, one of the leading experts on Libya, we also need to rethink the role of the militias in the negotiations: the time has come to ask ourselves whether the entire political process needs to be revised, involving in particular those actors who have often been excluded or at least formally relegated to the margins. Otherwise the risk in international meetings is that of dealing with political exponents who are "presentable" to public opinion but who have partial if not zero control of the territory: this is why most agreements either remain waste paper or are ratified on the "word", like that of France at the Paris summit in which it was decided to go to elections. But to counter Macron's ambitions, Italy must also rethink its role and to what extent it is still appropriate to support Sarraj, well-liked by Islamic and Salafist militias but very little by his powerful Libyan and foreign enemies.