On July 17, Libya’s Government of National Unity (GNU) held the Trans-Mediterranean Migration Forum in Tripoli. Hosted by Libyan Prime Minister Abd al-Hamid Dabaiba, this was the largest and best-attended international conference held in western Libya since the 2011 revolution, with 16 delegations overall and high-level European and African leaders represented.
The attendees included Italian Prime Minister Georgia Meloni, Maltese Prime Minister Robert Abela, Vice President of the European Commission Margaritis Schinas, Tunisian Prime Minister Ahmed Hachani and Chadian President Mahamat Idris Deby.
A small press corps was invited along with the handful of foreign leaders and diplomats.
The rest of the attendees milling around the vast building – the lobby decorated somewhat improbably with a display of life jackets suspended from the ceiling, the circular conference hall itself bathed in blue from a wrap-around projection of lapping waves – came from western Libya’s myriad security and law enforcement bodies.
The forum produced a few concrete outcomes. Most notably, at a meeting the day before the conference, Abela and al-Dabaiba agreed to renew a bilateral memorandum of understanding between Malta and Libya to combat irregular migration originally signed in 2020.
Much of the forum took place behind closed doors so there may have been other substantial developments not widely publicised – for example, several contacts reported agreements to streamline the voluntary humanitarian return process.
But, even taking this into account, the energy put into organising and promoting the forum does not seem to tally with the outcomes.
There was a notable effort to attract foreign press to cover the event, which is out of character for the normally indifferent GNU (some journalists in attendance said they had never been able to secure a visa previously, despite years of trying).
The day after the forum, the Foreign Media Department arranged a visit to the headquarters of the Libyan Coast Guard at the Abu Sitta naval base, complete with a presentation on maritime operations and a ride in a patrol vessel. By the standards of recent years, this is extremely open and welcoming.
A cynic might wonder what reason there could be for all this effort, given the lack of obvious outcomes. One colleague’s repeated but forlorn attempts to find a decent hook for his article, any kind of headline – the terms of a new migration compact, maybe even a financial sum – seemed to epitomise the airy sense of purpose pervading the forum.
To my knowledge, no major agreement has been announced since – to match, for example, the outcomes of the Valletta Conference on Migration in 2015. There is reportedly a plan to convene a working group in October, at which murmurings about economic investment and development in source countries might bear fruit. But, given the acute political uncertainty in western Libya, that is far from certain. And, anyway, no one can seriously believe that even the most ambitious and well-resourced development plan in Africa could make a significant dent in the epochal migration pressures washing across the Mediterranean.
The forum may have slightly lacked material substance, but there is real political value in simply hosting an event- Rupert Horsley
So if it wasn’t really about concrete outcomes – let alone solutions – what was the forum for? An earlier migration conference, put on by the rival Government of National Stability (GNS) in Benghazi in May, provides a possible explanation.
An attendee at that rival conference reported that it was not nearly so well attended as the Tripoli Forum, with no significant European presence and very few people with any obvious expertise or interest in migration. But, while GNS may not have been able to attract such a stellar crowd to its conference, it was able to demonstrate remarkable efficiency in shutting down a booming maritime smuggling system that had been allowed to develop around the eastern port of Tobruk between 2022 and the middle of 2023. The conference in Benghazi was just one element (the least successful) of a wider diplomatic game in which eastern authorities used cooperation in stemming irregular migration as leverage with European countries.
The forum at the Rixos on July 17 was at least in part a reaction to the challenge laid down by the GNS; perhaps not so much its desultory conference as its remarkably effective intervention in Tobruk, which has quite obviously been noticed by concerned European politicians. The GNU wanted to make sure that it, and not its rival in the east, remains the centre of gravity for migration diplomacy in Libya.
This goes beyond point scoring. At the closing press conference, the Minister of State for Communications and Political Affairs, Walid Ellafi, observed that the forum marked the return of the Libyan state to hosting a diplomatic event at this level after more than 14 years absence. It was also the first time a European head of state had spent the night in Tripoli since the revolution. This poignant observation drives home just how long the Libyan state has been isolated by its own dysfunction and chaos.
The authorities in western Libya are entirely justified in their desire to host international peers in Tripoli. The forum may have slightly lacked material substance but there is real political value in simply hosting an event and having important people visit your capital.
In addition to the symbolism of legitimacy, this has an indirect bearing on actual levers of power and governance. As the unfolding crisis with the Central Bank of Libya shows, core institutions in Tripoli can only hope to function with the blessing of the custodians of the international system.
The Libyans recognise that European countries need their help in meeting the challenge of irregular migration and those aspiring to lead the country will continue using it as a point of leverage.
European countries, especially Malta and Italy, have no choice but to embrace this.
Rupert Horsley is a senior analyst at the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime.