Middle East & North Africa
Libya: Turkish intelligence chief Kalin in Tripoli with Dbeibah as Tripoli’s Foreign Ministry welcomes the Turkish–Libyan memorandum
Turkey’s MIT chief Ibrahim Kalin met Prime Minister Abdulhamid Dbeibah in Tripoli on the day Libya’s House of Representatives approved the memorandum, and Tripoli’s Foreign Ministry welcomed the decision as a “positive development”.
The head of Turkish intelligence (MIT), Ibrahim Kalin, was in Tripoli on Tuesday, October 20, where he met Prime Minister of the Government of National Unity Abdulhamid Dbeibah, the same day the House of Representatives in Benghazi unanimously approved the 2019 Turkish–Libyan memorandum. The same day the Foreign Ministry of the Tripoli government welcomed the House’s decision.
According to the Tripoli government’s statement, Dbeibah and Kalin discussed security, regional developments and migration. The meeting also considered maintaining peace, unifying the administrations and armed forces of eastern and western Libya under a single authority, and the country’s territorial integrity, with Kalin offering “every form of support” for unification. The quadrilateral format of Libya, Turkey, Italy and Qatar was also on the table. Kalin, a former spokesman for Erdogan, has in recent years become Ankara’s main interlocutor with Libya’s leaderships, both in Tripoli and in Benghazi, where Turkey has opened channels to the Haftar family.
A “positive development” for Tripoli
The Foreign Ministry of the Government of National Unity called the House’s decision a “positive development towards strengthening bilateral relations” with Turkey. The Arabic version of the statement also welcomes the repeal of decisions Nos. 1 and 6 of 2020, with which the Benghazi House had refused to ratify the memoranda with Turkey and had cut off political relations with it. For the first time, both centres of power in Libya thus back the same text with Ankara, something the Turkish side presents as legitimising the agreement.
The memorandum, signed in November 2019 by the Tripoli government and Recep Tayyip Erdogan, draws maritime boundaries that ignore Crete. From Ankara, Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan thanked Dbeibah and Saddam Haftar by phone for the approval. Athens called the memorandum “spurious, null and void”, and the presidents of the European Council and the Commission, António Costa and Ursula von der Leyen, said it is “null and void”.
