Over a week after the rival Libyan parliaments in Tripoli and Tobruk announced a power-sharing deal, the terms of the deal remain a total mystery, a matter of some debate, and indeed, the path by which that deal would eventually get sorted out isn’t clear.
Indeed, there are two separate rounds of talks being held in two different countries, with two different sponsors, each aimed at being the final say on how a unity parliament would be decided. The UN is pushing talks in Malta, while a separate round of talks are to be held in Morocco.
The UN has been trying to get a unity government in place for months, though ironically it was the alternative track of negotiations which yielded the previous announcement of a deal. Still, it’s not at all clear what the difference between the two efforts is.
In both cases, however, there remains a considerable divide in both parliaments on the terms of any deal, and a lot of push-back at the idea of a unity agreement in and of itself, let alone one in which the two parliaments combine, inevitably costing some of the existing MPs in each body considerable influence. At most, progress may be announced after the new talks, but even then a deal is probably unlikely.
Even before Qaddafi was ousted I wrote that Libya is at least two states: Tripolitania in the West and Cyrenaica in the East. Philatelists know very well that there were once stamps from Cyrenaica.