 Welcome to this event entitled Libyan General Elections 2021, a discussion series with Libyan leaders. This event is offered in both English and Arabic on the event page. Please choose the player which works best for you. The event is being live streamed and recorded. I am Michael Yaffe, Vice President of the Middle East and North Africa Center at UFD United States Institute of Peace, USIP. For those of you who have attended prior USIP events, let me welcome you back. And for those of you who are new to USIP, welcome, and permit me to say a few words about the Institute. USIP was created by an act of Congress in 1984 to serve as an independent, nonpartisan institute dedicated to peace building, particularly the prevention, mitigation, and resolution of violent conflict. We conduct research, training, and convening and work in conflict zones around the world with a presence in 16 countries. USIP has been working in Libya since 2012, where we conduct research for informing policymakers and practitioners about conflict-related issues and help build a local peace infrastructure to strengthen the capacity of key stakeholders like women and youth and institutions like the Ministry of Justice. USIP recently began a project with funding from the U.S. State Department to increase election security by working with the Ministry of Interior to strengthen the police's ability to partner and problem solve within communities. Now, I would like, in light of the upcoming election set to begin next month, today's event is a timely conversation with Dr. Baraf Ali Anayid. This event is the third in a series of moderated discussions USIP is hosting to provide a neutral platform for Libyans seeking to play a critical role, including potentially high office, in a future permanent government. Recordings of the previous interviews with Fatih Bashaga and Fatih Lameen are available at the USIP website. The elections are scheduled for the end of December, are not just any elections. They will provide Libyans with an opportunity to have their say in the representational government, including the first elected president of Libya. Making sure that the elections are fair and safe will be very important. For those of you who are interested in learning more about preventing election violence, we would like to invite you to take one of USIP's online courses on the subject. Available through our online global campus at www.usipglobalcampus.org, the preventing election violence full-length and microcourses in English are available for free access. Anyone who would like to have these course materials in Arabic, we hope to have that up online soon. In the meantime, please reach out to us at the USIP at the academy at USIP.org to discuss receiving a copy of these Arabic language materials before they are officially put online. Elections of course are only the beginning of the journey to set Libya on a path to deal with complex issues of governance and sovereignty. Issues like the presence of mercenaries in the country, foreign meddling, institutional disunity, minority inclusion, transitional justice, and other matters are to be decided by a representational government. In the spirit of fostering dialogue, each speaker we host will have several minutes to give opening remarks that address some of these issues, after which I will ask them questions in order to explicate their positions and views. I would try to ask the same questions to all speakers in this discussion series so people can hear and compare the unique responses. After that, I will turn to the audience members for their questions. For the audience watching online, we encourage you to send questions for Dr. Naid through the chat box. We can also you can also send questions through Twitter at hashtag Libby elections USIP and we will try to get to as many as possible. Now, I am pleased to introduce Dr. Naid. Dr. Naid is a former Libyan ambassador to the United Arab Emirates and is currently chairman of Kamal Research and Media Company and chairman of the Libya Institute for Advanced Studies. During the Libyan Revolution, he was also the chief operations manager of the Libyan stabilization team. He has taught and lectured in Islamic theology, logic and spirituality at the Restored Uthman Krushna Matrasa in Tripoli. He is a senior advisor to the Cambridge Interfaith Program, a fellow at the Royal Alawat Institute in Jordan and a member of the Board of Advisors of the Templeton Foundation. He was a professor at the Pontifical Institute for Arabic and Islamic Studies in Rome and the International Institute for Islamic Thought and Civilization in Malaysia. He previously headed an information technology company based in the UE and Libya. And he received a Bachelor's of Science in Engineering and Master's of Philosophy of Science and a PhD in Hermanine Hermeneutics from the University of Golov in Canada. He has published on a wide range of topics from Libyan-Russian relations to ISIS in Libya to the theology of neighborhoodness. With that, let me turn the floor over to Dr. Niyid and we look forward to your opening remarks. Thank you. Thank you very much, Michael, ladies and gentlemen, greetings. And thank you very much to USIP for this opportunity. These neutral platforms for discussion are immensely important for democracy. Yesterday there was an initiative initiated by a couple of young Libyans at the Libya desk that saw the meeting of several candidates to the presidency or aspirants to the presidency of Libya. And it was the first of its kind. This platform of USIP also is the first of its kind. And we are in a period of what Hannah Arndt calls the natality, a new beginning. And these platforms are very, very important. And I am grateful to be given an opportunity to participate with you in this exciting experiment in many ways. I am glad that I have been preceded by two colleagues, fellow candidates to the presidency of Libya. I wish them well. I wish all my colleagues well. The very fact that we have an election is a joyous moment. Yesterday, when I submitted my papers for the candidacy for the presidency, it was probably the most exciting moment of my life. I felt a particular joy at the fact that we have presidential elections and parliamentarian elections. For your information, these presidential elections have been postponed and postponed for multiple years now. Since 2011, we've only had parliamentarian elections. And the presidential elections kept getting postponed. In 2014, decree number five established that there should be direct presidential elections. But they have been constantly postponed year after year, even after the Paris Accord in 2018, summer of 2018, when it was decided that elections will happen in December 2018. Again, there have been postponements and procrastinations. And the reason for these postponements and procrastinations are very simple. It is basically what I call tyranny of the minority. John Stuart Mill in his famous works warned of tyranny of the majority in democracy. What we've had in Libya is tyranny of the minority, a minority that's benefiting from the chaos that we are living in. And they have been able to postpone and procrastinate over the elections for multiple years. So it is a particular joy to actually finally have these elections. And a great honor to have an opportunity to participate in them. I look forward to these elections. I hope that they will be fair and balanced and transparent and well monitored and that the results will be respected by everyone concerned. As a candidate, I hereby commit and I have done it in writing to respect the results of the election no matter what the results are. And I hope that all our colleagues will do the same and that everybody will uphold their commitments in order to give Libya an amazing opportunity to live a life of democracy and to choose its leadership for the very first time in its very long and arduous history. I am running for the presidency on a platform that is actually not a single person's creation, but actually the ideation of a community of young women and men from Libya and also with the help of various international consultants and friends and advisors. We have been able to put together a vision for the country, which is called Echia Libya. Echia is a word that means reviving. It comes from the word for life. Echia Libya is reviving Libya. And it is our vision is published on EchiaLibya.com. I hope you will get a chance to consult the website to see the details of our vision. And this vision was developed through our institute, which is called the Libya Institute for Advanced Studies over a number of years. It is an open project, which is continuously being improved and re-articulated. And I am very happy to say that this vision is also adopted by multiple parliamentarian candidates. So it's not only the platform for my own candidacy, but it's actually shared by several young people who are running for the parliament as well. Without any further ado, let me just tell you the very basic elements of this vision. And then I will open the floor and be able to respond to particular questions. I would like this to be more of an engagement rather than a talk. Our vision is based on a vision of Libya that is actually combines its honor and dignity as a sovereign state, a United State, with its beauty and sublime beauty and sublime values. It has four foundations. The first is what we call Syrian Libya, Libya Hania and Arabic. And this is a vision of a country that lives in peace and the security with a unified army based on the five plus five committee work, which we salute here, unified police force, unified border security and with an independent judiciary that is respected and protected and kept safe from interference by the other arms of government and the legislature. The second foundation is what we call thriving Libya in Arabic. It's Libya as Zahira. And it is basically a vision of a circular economy that is sustainable. It sees the focus is on sustainable development with lots of opportunities for young women and men through small and medium sized businesses and partnership between the private and the public sector with major reform of the public sector, digitization and basically trying to be at the forefront of new developments, including communications, blockchain technology for establishing networks of trust and various other solutions that we'll be introducing. The third pillar of this vision is what we call compassion at Libya or Libya Samha. It's a vision of a compassionate and forgiving Libya with an idea of national reconciliation being foundational. And when we talk of national reconciliation, we mean real national reconciliation based on mutual respect and respecting the grievances and the worries and the fears of others and not just systems of compensation as has been unfortunately done for the last few years. We are looking for a real truth and reconciliation process with the deep forgiveness and amends to the people who have been hurt so that we can have a true national reconciliation. Lastly, the fourth pillar is that of a clean Libya. Libya that's clean, not only environmentally, but also clean from violence and clean from corruption, which is a real big problem in Libya. A corrosive problem that is like a cancer eating the body politic and the very state and has led to multiple problems in all the sectors of Libya. We look forward to a pristine Libya that will fight corruption and organize crime, drug trade, the trade in humanity, the tragic abuse of immigrants and various fragile and vulnerable human beings. So on the basis of these four pillars, we have a complete vision for the country and its completeness is because of its open-endedness and its openness to continuous revision through discussion. We do invite you to visit our website and to send us any suggestions. Your suggestions will be incorporated as much as we can and the further attrition of division. We try to combine throughout division rootedness in our long history, diverse history, pluralistic history, respecting all the cultures of Libya, the Amazigh, the Arab, the Taboo, the Tuareg cultures and other cultures. We also combine this rootedness with openness onto our horizons, the horizon of the Mediterranean. We try to revive our classical heritage of connecting the European continent with the African continent. And we also focus our vision on humanity and humanism, recognizing that the human being is the center of our vision and the center of ultimate value. And we do recognize that this humanity is 50 percent women and 50 percent men. We have publicly committed to making sure that women have at least 50 percent of all high offices and key positions in our future government. We also have a youthful vision in that we recognize that Libya is mostly young people, 70 to 80 percent. And that's why we will be actually appointing young ministers to the tune of 70 percent of all ministries and high offices to young people, women and men. This is in a nutshell our vision for the country. I hope you do take the time to study it. We welcome your suggestions. And at this, I will stop and open the floor to any questions you would like to ask. Great. Thank you. Thank you, Dr. Nayed. That was a comprehensive opening statement, and I hope to pick up on some of those points. I'd like to ask you some questions, and I'm actually going to try to combine my questions with some of them you're already receiving online. The first question I want to talk about would be concerning the elections themselves. And as you know, the presidential election is scheduled to be on December 24th. What is your assessment about whether the election actually will happen and whether what happened on time? And also about your views about the following parliamentary elections, about whether those elections will also happen on time? I think that the pulse of the Libyan people is the thing to pay most attention to and the expressed will of the Libyan people. There have been multiple surveys of public opinion through polling and various other means online and telephone polling and various institutions have done that. And the overwhelming majority of the Libyan people in these polls and public opinion surveys not only say that they want elections, but are emphatically insistent on them. I take great comfort in that, because I think it's ultimately the will of the Libyan people that will make sure the elections happen. And we have also seen articulated statements by multiple political parties over 25 political parties and blocks and youth movements and women unions have expressed themselves multiple times demanding these elections, demanding that they are both parliamentarian and presidential. We are also comforted by the fact that for the first time a total alignment between the will of the Libyan people to have these elections on time and the will of the international community, which has expressed itself in UN Security Council resolutions, the last two of which were quite emphatic about the date and quite emphatic about the fact that the present temporary government ends on December 24th and cannot have any further legitimacy. The elections are the only means for refreshing and renewing legitimacy. And because of this combined union between the will of the Libyan people as expressed by various opinion polls and also the will of the international community as expressed in UN Security Council resolutions that are binding and also through the outputs of Berlin 1, Berlin 2, the Paris meeting that just happened last week, we are quite confident that these elections will happen on time and that they will be both presidential and parliamentarian. We at Libya, or reviving Libya movement, we feel that it's important for these elections to be simultaneous. And we understand the most important part of being simultaneous is the president and the parliament swearing the oath and their allegiance to the constitutional basis of this country on the same day. It's very important to prevent a gap happening whereby there is a parliament with no president or a president with no parliament because we have tried this before and each time there was a parliament without a president, the presidency got canceled somehow or postponed. We feel that the checks and balances between the three branches of government are essential to good governance and to democracy and we feel that part of the reason we have been in almost continuous chaos for the last 10 years or so is the fact that the parliamentarian branch or the legislative branch has made pretenses to the executive branch and have actually interfered in executive governance and we feel that the separation of powers and the balance between these powers is of the utmost importance. In 2013, the February committee actually wrote a very important document which has been rendered part of the constitutional declaration through various amendments in which they did separate these powers and explained them quite clearly. We feel that the elections will happen on time and will produce a fresh parliament and a fresh presidency both on the same day because taking oath will happen on the same day and we feel that plus an independent judiciary and we are very proud of our judiciary in Libya. We feel that we will take our first steps to a balanced democracy where nobody can abuse anybody and where the branches of government are kept in check by each other. Great, thank you for that. Just sticking with the elections themselves, as I mentioned in my opening remarks, there's a lot of interest in preventing election-related violence. Certainly my institutes and others are very concerned about that and you as well in your opening remarks talked about election integrity and safety. What measures do you think should be taken in order to ensure a peaceful election cycle? A cycle which begins, of course, not just with election day, but before and after election day? I think there are some measures that are domestic and purely Libyan and the most important of these is the commitment of local communities. These electoral centers are always placed in the middle of communities, normally in schools and it is the responsibility of each community to make sure that the center in its midst is protected and is kept sanctified from any interference or violence or attempts at sabotage. Communal securing of the electoral points and the communal monitoring of the electoral points is of the utmost importance and also the commitment of local police, local armed forces. Everybody has to chip in and make sure that the elections are secured. This is at the local level. At the international level, the most important thing is to very vocally, emphatically, clearly and systematically express zero tolerance towards any attempt to corrupt these elections or delay them or postpone them or basically sabotage them in any way. And the UN has been very clear, the UN Security Council has been very clear the output of the Paris meeting has been very clear that saboteurs of the elections will be held responsible and that sanctions may be implemented against them. This is very, very important, especially when the saboteurs happen to hold high office, be it executive or legislative or advisory, there should be no tolerance of utterances that are irresponsible and that are invoking violence. Over the last week, unfortunately, we've had some expressed speeches by some politicians who are in power trying to play games with the laws and trying to use a kind of a populist line enthusing the youths through giveaways and trying to get them to agitate against the existing laws of the elections. This should not be acceptable, it should not be tolerated at all. We have also seen people trying to redesign the law so that they can fix some mistakes they made by not resigning in time, this should not be tolerated. We have also seen a head of an advisory board or body that is pretending that it's a second legislature and trying to even threaten the use of force by saying that he has forces behind him and so on to actually intimidate the electoral commission. We've even had some commentators on Clubhouse and Facebook and other places directly threatening the head of the electoral commission. This kind of behavior should not be tolerated. Platforms like Facebook should monitor for such threatening discourse and should shut down these people and also people who actually make such utterances should be held responsible legally within Libya and also internationally. I believe a combination of communal commitment to the elections plus international monitoring and implementation of sanctions against people who try to sabotage them are necessary in order to have timely, transparent, clean and peaceful elections. Great, thank you for that. As you mentioned in your opinion, Marks, as well, you talked about submitting your papers who become a candidate for the president, the first elected president of Libya. If you were elected, how would you envision your role as the first president and leader of the country? Do you have a general philosophy of leadership? I believe that leadership in Libya in this very first presidency has to center around compassion, forgiveness and reconciliation before anything else. We have been torn apart through a sequence of civil wars that started in 2011 and have been relentlessly continuing. People always remember the last war, but there have been at least a dozen wars in Libya since 2011. And these wars have torn the country apart. They have separated communities. They have separated individuals, even within families. And this rupture in the social fabric is the most challenging problem before the new president. I believe that the presidency has to be first and foremost concerned with national reconciliation, national reconciliation, which is not based on a paint job or a throw money at grievances approach, but one that is genuinely based on truth and reconciliation and compassion and trying to amend the social fabric through mechanisms that are actually quite known to Libyans. It's very interesting that for the last 10 years or so, actually almost 11 years, all peace initiatives that have been successful have always been based on communally-based peace practices that have been inherited for centuries, elders and notables and tribal elders and wise figures in the communities, women also played a very important role in this, have been able to broker many peace talks and have been able to achieve peace in this vast country of very deep wounds. We need to tap into these expertise and these wise peacemakers who have not been celebrated enough and who have not been given enough of a chance, unfortunately. We need to invoke their wisdom through committees and groups of reconcilers and mediators. We need to mend the country and the presidency has to be, before anything else, a mending presidency, a presidency that is based on the compassionate reuniting of Libya through a bottom-up approach, through a communally-based approach that invokes the best of values that we have. Libya is a very deep country with very deep values, values of love and compassion and forgiveness and reconciliation that when we just need to tap into our values, rediscover our values, rearticulate them and give them a modern form and basically we have to revive our peace-loving values and develop a situation of peace rather than war, of love rather than hatred, of trust rather than fear and this is the top priority. Of course, it cannot just be sentiments or emotions and there is a lot of very hard work that has to be done on the nuts and bolts of the economy to introduce a prosperity for everyone instead of a very small elite stealing all the revenue of the country and leaving everybody else hungry. The country needs to tap into its resources, its vast oil and gas resources and other resources, including solar energy, including wind energy, including various mining riches, including the amazing cultural heritage of Libya, including most preserved Roman and Greek antiquities and even prehistoric caves and various other treasures of Libya. We need to invoke all that to introduce a prosperity that will make young people busy with making a living, making new families, creating happy homes and happy children who have the top education that they deserve and the top healthcare that they deserve, peace-making and prosperity-making through a thriving economy go hand in hand with governance through proper laws and the proper implementation of laws and with the use of the cutting-edge technologies to save time and to leapfrog over the lost time that we have unfortunately lost for the last 50 years. We need to make up time and we need to educate our young women and men on the technologies of today and of tomorrow and create a future together. To summarize, it's basically a presidency that has to be mending through compassionate praxis based on traditional values of this country, values of forgiveness and reconciliation, combined with the foremost technologies of today and trying to build a circular economy with sustainable development for young women and men in particular so that they can create a new future for the country. Great, thank you. You mentioned earlier that you have this vision which was called reviving Libya and I believe the first pillar of that was dealing with the issue of unity. There are various aspects to unity. There are aspects relating to unifying state institutions. There's unifying the people with symbols and public and culture and aspirations. I was wondering if you could talk a bit more about how you would put those articles into effect in terms of bringing unity. At the same time, there's been a heavy emphasis of centralization of governments, particularly within Tripoli. And I wondered how you view decentralizing power and diffusing it throughout the rest of the country so the rest of the country shares that power. Thank you for that question, Michael. That's very, very important. You know, our capital is called Tripoli and it's called Tripoli for a reason. It's three polis, it's three cities. The city of Oyat, the city of Lepsis Magna and the city of Sabrata and they were combined in a kind of a confederation of cities and they were called Tripoli. The Serenaika, which is in the east of Libya is actually what's called the Pentopolis which is the five cities because of five classical cities. It is very interesting that in the history of Libya, the polis or the city-state was the basis of our political practice for many, many centuries and not only in classical antiquity, but even in medieval times, even Khaldun talks about this in his famous book, the Muqaddim or the Prolegomena to History. And if you look at every community in Libya, you'll find a very rich tapestry, kind of a mosaic of a very colorful culture at the village level, at the city level, at even the street level and the area level. Even within Tripoli, you know, Tajoura has a particular culture, Subjumma has a particular culture, the old city has a particular culture and so on. The oasis of the vast desert, you know, Jaqboop or Jalu and also the south, you know, the small towns like Garefa, for example, or amazingly historical cities like Ghat or like Adamus or like Morzok have vast histories and are very worthy of respect, you know, the great cities and towns of the Nafusa mountain with the deep Amazif culture, the Ghatrun with its deep Tubu culture, the Tabisti area also, the Tuareg culture in the southwest of Libya. What we need to do is to respect locality, you know? And locality is very, very important. We need to actually make sure that most of the governance happens at the local level. And we believe that the way to decentralize Libya is to actually pay attention to the historical facts, respect the locality, respect the particularity, respect the very sensitive and fragile culture of all these communities, give the budget to the actual municipalities, not to just one individual who can be corrupt and steal all the money, but to boards of municipalities and of villages and of towns so that people can make a collective decision on how to spend their money locally. The central government can have a quality assurance role. It can have standards and policies and procedures role. It can have a kind of a monitoring role to make sure that there is equity and that there is fairness and that there is proper public tendering for all the public tenders that the praxis is free from corruption and marginalization of local minorities. That's the role of central government, but it is not the role of the central government of Libya to dominate everyone's life and to make everyone go to the capital to do even the simplest of things. Everybody's passport should reach them in their hometown. And now, you know, with advanced technology services and all the things that the citizen needs can be delivered very easily at the local level if we have strong municipalities and also if we use the state-of-the-art technologies with networking now and with blockchain technology, with geographic mapping systems, with land registry systems, with the smart contracts, we can actually have a kind of a technologically-empowered revival of the Polish. You know, Thomas Jefferson saw the little republics as being foundational for true democracy. And if you look at the history of your own country, Michael, if you look at the history of America, you will find that the greatest democratic praxis was in the town hall. It was at the local municipality, at the small villages and towns and the responsible citizens that got together in order to design their future together and to design their expenditure together. We believe that the centralization of Libyan governance is one of the key reasons for conflict in Libya, including the 2011 conflict and all the conflicts since. We believe that a decentralized model but with a responsible central government that keeps things on track and keeps at least minimal policies and procedures implemented standards of health, standards of environmental responsibility, making sure that there's no abuse of our environment and of people, I think is the right combination. A kind of a decentralized governance plus a kind of a centralized quality assurance is, I think, the way to go in Libya. And I believe that there have been some tremendous efforts. There was a study by Brookings on this. There have been also tremendous efforts by Germany and by Holland in particular to help the municipalities. There were also some French and UK projects in the city guard. And we have been very proud at our television channel, Libya's channel, to host a program called Moutany, which means my home, which was based on the municipality. We have been engaging 103 municipalities. We have over 1,200 episodes in which we visited local towns and villages to see what their needs are. And we have been very happy to see that there have been some international assistance programs in the city guard. If I do become the president, this is one of our top priorities to make sure that these programs are grown into a full-scale localization of governance plus responsible quality assurance by the central government. Okay, thank you. I want to turn to the issue of transitional justice. You had talked about reconciliation and what that means within the Libyan context. There were some people that say there should be a general amnesty for Libyan, support Libyan so they can move forward, while others are saying that's just re-litigating the past. And others advocate for a truth and justice center approach where perpetrators of human rights abuses are held accountable. In victims' field, the justice has been served. How do you see this path for transitional justice in Libya? You know, in Libya, we've had pockets of justice and we've had very selective justice. And this has been our, I think, biggest issue. You know, when justice is selective, it's actually injustice. When justice is, how can you say, attentive to certain grievances while completely being oblivious to other grievances, it's a problem. When we discriminate, you know, between the grievances of people, so the dead of some communities are not important and the dead of other communities are of the utmost importance, where the tortured of certain communities are important but the tortured of other communities are not important. This kind of selectiveness has been deadly for Libya and it has been the kind of a generator of further and further grievances. The most important thing for justice in Libya is equity, parity, and to make sure that there is a single justice for everybody and that there is no discrimination between victorious cities and defeated cities, between this tribe or that tribe, between that community and that community, between the victims of this war versus the victims of that other war. All the wars were horrendous. All the wars were deadly. All the wars caused losses of life and property and limbs and have caused immeasurable suffering. Libya is a traumatized country. Libya has been suffering from trauma after trauma and nearly the entire population has been traumatized and the symptoms of post-traumatic syndrome are actually so prevalent, even in the public discourse, even if you look at Facebook narratives and discourses and analyze them, you can see the symptoms, they are glaringly clear and there aren't enough therapeutic practitioners in Libya. There isn't enough attention to therapy in general. The country needs a therapeutic approach where we actually address this trauma and where we actually address these grievances and transitional justice should be not just a justice of the letter of the law, but of the spirit of the law and that is a very important point. So far, we have had a very artificial way of approaching it, a very selective way of approaching it, truth-finding commissions that begin at a certain date and a cut-off date and forget about the grievances before or focus on a single city versus the other cities, we need a comprehensive approach where all violations of human rights are treated in the same way and are rejected in the same way, where all abuses of human beings are rejected in the same way, where justice is done against those who perpetuate criminality indiscriminately and if there is forgiveness and if there is reconciliation, the community that has been grieved has to be given the priority and has to be asked. You cannot force forgiveness of people. People have to forgive from the bottom of their heart and normally people would only forgive if people actually show some degree of repentance or at least express regret over what they have done. So far, unfortunately, for the last decade, our approaches to transitional justice have been very selective, very narrow-minded and quite superficial and oftentimes have actually been part of the corruption so people actually try to assign large sums of money as compensation and then they ask for compensation for communities who haven't really been injured and then you'll find it becomes like a spoils of war kind of situation rather than true reconciliation. Reconciliation, forgiveness cannot be facile. It cannot just be a blanket forgiveness check for everyone. There has to be a serious discussion and it's painful and it will take years and it will be not so easy but we need to go through it in order to heal our hearts and our minds and to go forward. Great, thank you. Let's turn a little bit now to more foreign affairs and issues related to foreign fighters. Wonder if you could tell me about how you view what should be done to remove and withdrawal of foreign fighters from the country and if you think all foreign fighters should be removed in general? I think that Libya belongs to Libyans. Libyans are more than capable of defending their own country. Libyans are more than capable of making peace with each other and the clear and luminescent example is the committee of the five plus five. These are officers from across Libya, east, west and south who have been very diligently working at brokering not only a ceasefire but have been able to establish the reopening of roads and laying a solid foundation for the political life that we are now enjoying. The fact that we are now going to register for presidential elections and parliamentarian elections is largely due to the efforts of these soldiers basically who sat together and recognized that they're all Libyan and that Libya should be our foremost concern over all other concerns, regional or personal or tribal or otherwise. I believe that this work must be built on and I truly believe that the five plus five work is foundational for this piece that we seek and for going forward. So in bringing that kind of sense of peace and unity within the country, there's also the issue of the strongly influences of the militia. How should a future leader of Libya dismantle the militia? How do they look about how to incorporate them or integrate them into the state apparatus? How do you envision dealing with this issue? You know, the philosophers have always warned about categorization. You know, once you categorize, you can make category mistakes, as some philosophers say, and categorization can lead to whole sale judgments that can be quite harsh. Libya's armed groups are of a tremendous variety. There are armed groups that are basically just criminal smuggling rings. There are armed groups that are basically local mafia. There are armed groups that are basically drug mafias. There are armed groups that are basically human trafficking concerns. There are, so, and there are groups that were simply young people trying to defend their streets and their community from the violence that could be perpetrated by others against them. And there are some ideologically based armed groups, religiously based armed groups. So it's very important to do a typology of these groups, to study them very carefully and to dismantle them very carefully, integrating some of the young people in these armed groups into the army and the police in a systematic way after proper vetting and after proper training, completely rejecting any armed groups that have terrorist leanings or are ideologically radically based, other groups can be negotiated with and basically being restructured so that they can do other things in life. The fact that for many young people, there are no opportunities in Libya, except by carrying a gun and getting a big salary by killing other Libyans. It's very important to give opportunities. The giving of new opportunities for young people is of crucial importance for the dismantling of these armed groups. There isn't a single blanket solution for the armed groups problem. There needs to be a typology and there have been many mapping exercises that have just not been used by the successive governments, unfortunately. Many countries have actually helped by mapping these armed groups and trying to do DDR properly and trying to advise but have not been listened to. I think we need professional advice on this and we need to all cooperate. Solutions have to be ultimately community-based and they have to be based on the rebuilding of the Libyan army, a united army, an army that doesn't belong to a certain person or a certain family or a certain tribe or a certain political party or a certain ideological line or a certain region, an army that is able to defend Libya and forgive me, I didn't address the foreign fighters issue, an army that will make sure that there is no need for any foreign fighters. Libya should have no foreign fighters, whether they are, how can you say, regular forces or mercenaries. All foreign forces, all foreign fighters have to leave Libya from all regions of Libya. And this has been bravely articulated by the five plus five. I began to speak about them and then I maybe truncated the discourse too short. It is the five plus five work that will lead to the exiting of all these forces. But we need help and the help we need has to be collective help. It cannot be one country helping us at the cost of other countries. It has to be an international-based help, a UN-based help. And this help needs to keep the pressure on. In Paris, the outcomes were very, very important and everybody was very clear that everybody has to leave all foreign forces and all foreign mercenaries have to leave. It is most unfortunate that Turkey decided to put a little star and to put a condition on the Paris outputs. We believe that Turkey is an important player in the region, but that Turkey has better chances of having better relations with Libyans and safeguard its economic interests in Libya if it actually takes away all the mercenaries and the forces that has brought into the country, just as other countries have to do the same from the east and from the south from all parts of Libya. There can be no selectiveness about this. All foreign forces, all foreign fighters, all mercenaries have to leave from all regions of Libya, all parts of Libya. And a united Libyan army has to be established based on the Five Plus Five initiative. And by the way, that initiative was based on at least six sessions in Egypt of very difficult negotiations. But I really salute these Libyan officers from across the nation who have been able to build a solid basis for a unified Libyan army and an army that, inshallah, or God willing, will be able to defend the country in a united way, not politicized army, an army that can actually make sure that no foreigners, fighters, I mean foreign fighters or mercenaries ever set foot on our soil. So this is our approach to this. Thank you. Great, thank you. So I've kind of gone through my list of questions and I'm gonna turn more to the questions we are getting in our chat room. And we have received a lot of questions with regard to the candidacy of Sayid al-Islam Qaddafi and people are asking about your views on his candidacy, should he be allowed to go forward with accusations from the International Criminal Court on him, how do you see his candidacy, how should this be judged? Libya is a sovereign state, it's a united sovereign state and it has an independent political will. Libya's laws are the laws enacted by its legitimate parliament, duly elected by the Libyan people. What I say about this case and all other cases, including myself and any other candidate, is that everybody must be subject to Libyan laws, thoroughly. It is Libyan laws that will decide who participates and who doesn't, who's excluded and who isn't and we must all abide and respect these Libyan laws. I believe that the laws are sufficiently rigorous and that the Electoral Commission is sufficiently independent and fair and I believe that the Libyan judiciary is a trust for the body and I believe that there are enough clauses of the laws that will determine the particulars of any particular candidate whether he can run or he can't run. We all submitted our papers and I'm sure that there are more people who will submit their papers and safely Islam also submitted his papers. These papers will be scrutinized, including my papers, including the papers of all the defined people who submitted today and yesterday in Tripoli and previous days and in Benghazi and everybody's papers will be submitted and I am sure as we hear the Commission will send them to the judiciary, to the public prosecutor, to the taxation officers, to the immigration officers and they will do their thorough investigation according to Libyan laws. They will do the vetting. This vetting must be accepted by all Libyans and it's very important that we are all peaceful. I commit myself if I'm excluded for any reason by the Electoral Commission to respect that decision. Even if I feel grieved, I can have, I can appeal and if that appeal is struck down I will accept the judgment of the Commission and of Libyan judiciary. Everybody must respect the law. If we make it and put it in that objective and neutral way and not personalize it, it isn't, we should not be using the law against people that we dislike or feel uncomfortable with. We should try to make sure that the institutions are respected and their judgments are respected and through that we take the personalization out of it. We take the vehemence and the hatred out of it and we make it all very objective. So my answer, my long answer to your question is, he applied, let the Commission do its work, respect its decision, positive or negative on any of us. And if we do that and we support the Electoral Commission and the Libyan judiciary and the Libyan Parliament and by the way, that Parliament is a single chamber Parliament. The State Council is not a second chamber and the laws of the Libyan Parliament must be respected as they are. Thank you for that. I received this question and I'll read it to you. It's, Dr. Eris, as a Muslim scholar and thinker, do you think the problem with the Western model of democracy in Islamic nations is due to the Islamist groups in the Muslim Brotherhood or does it have something to do with Islam itself? Do you agree that Islam, although it is a religion, it has ideological aspects? That's a very complex question. What I can tell you is the following. If you look at the Constitution of Medina, which is a very interesting document produced during the time of Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, at the establishment of the very first Muslim polis, the Medina, the Medina Munawwara. If we look at that Constitution and you look at what Jefferson wrote many centuries after, but regarding small communities and the commitment of communities to all its members and the responsibility for the mutual respect and mutual defense within communities, you can see that Jeffersonian democracy is actually quite reconcilable and is quite consistent with many of the very deep values in Islam. Libya is a Maliki nation, historically, Maliki jurisprudence. The Amazigh communities in the mountain are Ibadi communities, but both the Maliki and the Ibadi school have very deep roots in jurisprudence and our political jurisprudence is actually very democratic. It's actually, if you look very carefully at the juridical basis of our communities, you will find that there's no contradiction between them and democracy in any way, shape, or form. And this is not a coincidence because Jefferson's ideas were, as you know, built on previous scholars like Locke and the entire actually enlightenment has to do with Andalusia ultimately and Andalusia was also a Maliki. So there are actually historical ligaments for this similarity. What I'm trying to say, lack of democracy has nothing to do with Islam. Tyranny and fascism have to do with the imposition of a human ego and other human beings. And tyrannical tendencies are present in all cultures and in the history of all nations. In the 1920s and 30s, Europe saw the rise of fascist groups in Spain and Italy and in Germany with catastrophic results for all of humanity. And it's a historical fact that there are tyrannical tendencies. I refer again to Hannah Arndt in her beautiful book on totalitarianism. She explains the dynamic. Also, if you look at the writings of Eric Fromm on Escape from Freedom and how it happens, you can see that these mechanisms for tyranny are actually indiscriminate. They can be present in a Muslim culture, in a Christian culture, in a Hindu culture, in a Buddhist culture. It has nothing to do with religion. It has to do with the imposition of ego and also of certain elites and cliques and groups wanting to monopolize all power to themselves and to basically become a state within the state. The fact that democracy has been crippled after the Arab Spring has a lot to do with these fascist tendencies. And these fascist tendencies are present in multiple ways. I've actually written about this in a book called Radical Engagements, and you can read further on it. And it's a historical phenomenon, and it leads to what we call the tyranny of the minority, where a small minority actually monopolizes the state, especially if it gets its hands on its coffers, as it's happened in Libya, where the central bank of Libya has been basically monopolized for the last decade. And it uses its privileged status to actually dominate everybody else. The need for presidential elections in Libya and the need for a fresh parliamentarian set of elections is precisely to break the tyranny of the minority and to actually have the rule of the majority that still respects the minority without the tyranny of the majority, but we really need to get away from the tyranny of the minority. Now, there have been very clever ways of imposing tyranny of the minority lately. One of them is to demand consensus on everything, what we call in Arabic, Tawafak. So people say we can't have elections because there is no Tawafak, there is no consensus. Well, if a small minority, like really dozens of people, not more, insists on being consulted and insists on having a veto on the will of the entire Libyan people, it's not exactly democracy, is it? It becomes a form of tyranny hidden under the velvety words like consensus and the Arabic Tawafak. So I believe it has, tyranny has nothing to do with Islam, has nothing to do with Christianity, it has nothing to do with Buddhism or with Hinduism. Tyranny has to do with human ego that imposes itself on fellow human beings and that actually violates the most important thing, which is the dignity and inherent value of the human being. Emmanuel Kant, the great German philosopher, says that there is a difference, very simple difference between things and persons. Things are for others. So you can use them as tools, you can use a thing, but persons are in themselves, they have to be respected as having inherent value. And I believe that democracy is based on this idea, based on the idea that the human being is inherently valuable. And this is a basic Muslim idea because it is precisely what we call an Arabic Horma, which is the sanctity of the human being. And democracy is based on this idea. This is a very basic and fundamental idea, but if we have thorough respect for human rights, human dignity, human value, then we will have a democracy. Well, great, thank you, Dr. Naye. That was an expansive response and one that we're gonna end on today. We've actually reached the end of our hour together and I appreciate your time and for your comprehensive answers to our many questions. And of course, we all wish you the best for the future. And I also wanna thank the 19 here at USIP for helping to put this together, this event and this series. We hope others will join us in future series and interviews as we continue to talk to the leaders of Libya. So again, Dr. Naye, thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you for listening and thank you for your engaging questions and thank you for your time and thank you for this platform. I look forward to hearing what other candidates have to say and this is really a great platform and thank you very much for setting it up. Thank you.