adminTunis – Libya’s rival parties met in Tunis on Thursday for talks on a disputed UN-brokered deal backed by the international community to set up a unity government in the conflict-ravaged country. The talks were to focus on moving the process forward ahead of an international meeting on Libya scheduled for tomorrow in Rome, the United Nations Support Mission in Libya (Unsmil) said.
The UN envoy for Libya, Martin Kobler, and representatives of rival parliaments took part in the discussions at a hotel in a Tunis suburb, with foreign diplomats invited as observers.
Kobler, who only took over from his predecessor last month, said he felt “very encouraged” by what he heard in the talks. “I’ll go with big confidence in our meeting tomorrow because we are going to define the messages for the meeting in Rome,” he said.
“The international community is very interested in this process, in particular the threat emanating from terrorism,” he said.
“There must be a legitimate government very soon”.
US Secretary of State John Kerry will co-chair tomorrow’s talks in Rome with his Italian counterpart Paolo Gentiloni.
Representatives from Russia, Britain, China and France will also attend the conference, which comes at a time of growing international concern that ISIS has been exploiting the chaos in Libya to take root in the country. – AFP
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