Middle East & North Africa
Dbeibah answers Trump’s “s***hole countries” remark: “Libya is a sovereign state”
Libya’s Government of National Unity prime minister Abdulhamid Dbeibah rejected, without naming Donald Trump, any insult to Libya after the US president included it among “s***hole countries” at a Republican rally in Georgia.
In a short but pointed post on Sunday, October 25, the prime minister of Libya’s Government of National Unity, Abdulhamid Dbeibah, responded, without naming US President Donald Trump, to the speech Trump gave a day earlier at a Republican campaign rally on Saturday, October 24 in Perry, Georgia, days before the November 3 midterm elections.
“Libya is a sovereign state and we reject any insult to it or to its people, who made great sacrifices in the fight against terrorism,” Dbeibah wrote on X. He went on to leave the door open to Washington, but with a condition: “We seek to maintain our relations with the United States on the basis of mutual respect, and we will not accept that the dignity of Libya and its people become material for electoral disputes.”
What Trump said in Georgia
Trump turned on Georgia’s Democratic senator, Jon Ossoff, accusing him of backing a bill that would bring to the US “armies of migrants from countries full of terrorism, like Libya, Yemen, Haiti, Somalia”. Right after, he returned to the term that caused a storm in his first term: “Remember what I called them? S***hole countries,” he said, asking the crowd whether they remembered the “fire” he took from Democrats at the time.
The bill he referred to is S. 4814, introduced in the Senate on June 17 by Ed Markey and other Democrats, asking the Secretary of Homeland Security to designate Haiti for Temporary Protected Status (TPS). Ossoff is among its co-sponsors. In the same speech the US president attacked Somali immigrants, claiming that 98% of those living in the US do not work, and repeated that the US should accept people from Norway, Sweden and Denmark.
Tripoli between Washington and Ankara
Dbeibah’s reaction comes at a time when his government is active on the diplomatic front. In recent days Tripoli hosted Turkey’s intelligence chief İbrahim Kalın, while Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan thanked the Libyan prime minister by phone after the Libyan parliament approved the illegal Turkish-Libyan memorandum; Greece has written to the UN about it, and the United States has called the ratification provocative.
The Government of National Unity, based in Tripoli, is the one recognised by the UN, while eastern Libya is dominated by the House of Representatives and the forces of Khalifa Haftar. Washington maintains channels of communication with both sides.