The Tripoli Post
Benghazi— The Parliament-appointed Prime Minister Osama Hammad has announced the suspension of all forms of dealings and coordination with the United Nations Support Mission in Libya (UNSMIL) due to its “blatant and unacceptable overreach of the mission’s mandate,” according to an official statement on Monday following the signing of a Libya-related funding agreement with the Qatari government.
The UNSMIL’s head, Hanna Tetteh, claimed in a post on her X platform that the funding would “contribute to advancing UN efforts to implement the UNSMIL-facilitated Roadmap presented to the Security Council on 21 August 2025.
PM Hammad demanded that the mission retract the agreement and apologize for this uncalled for step, calling upon the Secretary-General of the UN, Mr. António Guterres, “to assume full legal and moral responsibility for the Mission’s completely unacceptable conduct, which runs contrary to the supreme interests of the State of Libya and its people,” said the statement.
“The Government of Libya expresses its strong condemnation and denunciation of the serious and unprecedented action undertaken by UNSMIL, through its signing of an agreement with the State of Qatar to fund the so-called Structured Political Dialogue,” the statement said.
According to the statement, UNSMIL’s “action constitutes a blatant and unacceptable overstepping of the powers granted to the UN Mission, a direct assault on Libyan sovereignty and a clear deviation from the international standards that obligate UN missions to remain neutral and to fully respect the authorities of the host state.”
There has been so far no official reaction to the latest UNSMIL’s fiasco from the Government of National Unity (GNU) headed by PM Abdulhamid Dbeibeh in Tripoli.
However, what seems to have deeply angered the government in eastern Libya, in particular and the Libyan people in general, is that UNSMIL had “pursued” foreign financing for political operations within Libya “without any prior consultation or notification to official Libyan entities, constitutes a grave breach of diplomatic conventions,” according to the release.
“The Government regards the Mission’s actions as a deliberate and detrimental circumvention of nationally-led Libyan initiatives. It represents a clear attempt to resuscitate and re-impose externally-driven political frameworks that operate independently of the will of the Libyan people and its legitimate institutions,” the government’s statement added.
This is fundamentally incompatible with the principle of “Libyan ownership and leadership of the political process,” a tenet the UN Mission itself has frequently endorsed yet demonstrably failed to uphold in practice, stressing that this UNSMIL’s approach “raises profound concerns regarding the Mission’s adherence to its designated role and calls its true intentions into serious question.”
UNSMIL’s move remains incomprehensible to many observers in that it resorts to Qatar to ask for funding for a rather very sensitive internal vital political process that requires transparency, avoidance of any suspicion of corruption and respect of the will of the people.
Libya, meanwhile, has the largest proven crude oil reserves in Africa, holding approximately over 48 billion barrels and huge untapped gas reserves. Not only that, Libya’s funds that are currently remain under the UN Security Council sanctions are estimated to be over $70 billion for the Libyan Investment Authority alone.
The Government of Libya’s demand UNSMIL of the following:
- The immediate suspension of all interaction and coordination with UNSMIL until such a time as it fully retracts this behavior and offers an official apology;
- A detailed explanation concerning the motivations behind this serious step.
- An immediate annulment of any financial or political arrangements concluded in the agreement without the knowledge and consent of the Libyan state.
- The Government of Libya holds the Mission entirely accountable for the erosion of trust, the undermining of the political process, and the loss of opportunities to establish a genuine, nationally-owned path forward.
- The Government unequivocally affirms that no political initiative, roadmap, or dialogue process shall be recognized or granted legitimacy unless it originates authentically from within Libya and remains entirely free from external financing or improper influence.
