By Al-Nayer Al-Yaqoubi
Since the UN mission set foot on Libyan soil in September 2011, it has scrutinised the wounds, not to heal them, but to observe them festering. It watches, leaning back, then pelts Libyans with a barrage of statements.
Statements whose water does not quench the thirst for stability and security, nor remove from the shoulders of all Libyans some of the nightmares of transitional laboratories. Thus has the mission been for bitter years, and thus it remains, proposing roadmaps to contain a never-ending bleed, so they collapse one after another. And the UN representative exits through the same door he entered, declaring bankruptcy like his predecessors, and Libya is driven back to square one as if nothing had happened.
Squares managed by nearly ten heads who have successively occupied the mission’s chair to date, with a monthly salary approaching $20,000. Analysts believe they have punished the common people with harsh living conditions, brought about by the crisis’s persistence. A life below the poverty line affects about 40% of Libyans, according to local and international human rights organisations and estimates from the Government of National Unity’s Ministry of Economy, which was later denied by Prime Minister Abdul Hamid Dabaiba .
These days, here is the mission resuming parts of its series. It proposes paths and asks various segments of society, without exception, in an electronic survey, to choose the form of future problems!!
Four paths the mission has placed before Libyans, and no room for a fifth, however decisive in treating suffocating impasses. As if the Advisory Committee, endorsed by the mission, is skilled in diagnosis and prescribing treatment. Dual elections, simultaneous with legal patching, or parliament, then constitution, then presidency, or constitution first before any ballot box, or a new dialogue committee like previous committees that takes us back to the start.
Four paths, differing in letters, and meeting in doom. Observers say: it is a soft recycling of a crisis in the same vein as other Arab peoples who preceded Libya to the same fate. What about the fate of the citizen who tosses on the bed of waiting? He waits for the state, but it is not born, and he anticipates exiting a short corridor, but he is pushed into a long tunnel?!!
What mission is this that seeks a solution? It creates the crisis, then presents a survey to determine the angle of collapse?!! And what mind accepts that the people be consulted: what type of extension do you prefer?!!
Libya is not in need of paths but of a course far from the mission, from its futility, and from its suspicious lingering presence that prolongs stages and does not shorten them, legitimises bodies and does not end them, changes faces and maintains stagnation.
As for the mission continuing to inject painkillers into a “suffering street,” the latest being the sterile Berlin statement, this is like someone throwing life jackets onto a cracked ship and asking the passengers their opinion on the colour of the jacket.
In conclusion, the lifeboat is not crafted by foreign heads from the “League of Nations,” nor is its rudder steered by contractors of extension. Rather, the descendants of Omar Al-Mukhtar – those with firm resolve – are the only ones who weave their country’s garment and mend its vulnerabilities with a flawless robe.