Italy is ready to sign an agreement on migrants also with the war criminal Haftar

The Libyan general Khalifa Haftar is in Rome where yesterday met with Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani. Today he could also be received by the Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. Italy would be ready to sign an agreement on migrants even with the general already convicted of war crimes. The general, a former officer in Colonel Gaddafi’s army, has for some years become the “strong man” of Cyrenaica. However, for some months now, thanks to an agreement with the prime minister of Tripoli, Abdelhamid Dbeibah, Haftar has once again become one of the decisive interlocutors in Libya, despite the fact that for months since 2019 he had tried unsuccessfully to attack the city of Tripoli , sparking months of civil war.

We wrote in the Foglio a few weeks ago that sooner or later it could “be necessary for Italy to sit down at the table and negotiate with Haftar and his men to stop the flows. Italy has an interest in keeping bridges open with the tomorrow, perhaps to sign another agreement on migrants on the – highly contested – model of the Italian-Libyan memorandum already concluded with Tripoli in 2017”. And we added that coming to terms with the general from Cyrenaica “is a necessary evil also for Washington, which at the end of March sent the US assistant secretary of state for the Middle East, Barbara Leaf, to Libya”, precisely to meet him. “The two spoke of the need to renounce the Russian mercenaries and to reach an agreement to call new elections, even if nobody seems to really believe in the feasibility of both proposals”.