Stephanie Williams, new UN Libya Mediation Officer
Elections in Libya will take place in just under three weeks' time. The long-awaited elections, set for Friday 24 December, are approaching, and are surrounded by controversy after the Libyan Supreme Electoral Commission initially refused to allow the candidacy of Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, son of the dictator Muammar Gaddafi, only for Gaddafi's appeal to be accepted by the Libyan judiciary to be accepted. And in the midst of this pre-election chaos, Jan Kubis, the United Nations special envoy for Libya, resigned from his post, forcing Antonio Guterres to find a replacement in the final stretch of this tense electoral race, who will be Stephanie Williams.
Deputy Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for Political Affairs in Libya is the full name of the post held by the American diplomat. Slovakia's Jan Kubis will officially step down this coming Friday to leave his post to a woman who already knows what it is like to be the UN Special Envoy to Libya. Stephanie Williams held the post on an interim basis following the resignation of Ghassan Salame in March 2020 due to "excessive stress", until the arrival of the now outgoing Kubis.
Despite holding the post on an interim basis, Williams stayed for almost a year - almost as long as the Bratislava-born diplomat has held the post - from March last year until January 2021, when Kubis was appointed. This new phase begins with the words of Stephane Dujarric, UN spokesperson, who assured that the new envoy "will lead good offices and mediation efforts, and engagements with regional and international stakeholders in Libya to achieve the implementation of the three intra-Libyan tracks of dialogue - political, security and economic - and support the holding of presidential and parliamentary elections in Libya".
However, Stephanie Williams was not Antonio Guterres' first choice for the post, sources have told Reuters news agency. The first name on the table was that of Nicholas Kay, a British diplomat, former UK ambassador to Afghanistan, Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo, and UN special representative for Somalia between 2013 and 2016. It was Russia that strongly opposed Kay's appointment, although the same sources say that Guterres had already suggested the post informally to the British diplomat.
The 15 members of the UN Security Council must approve the appointment of the new envoy, something Guterres avoided by appointing Williams as his special adviser, which does not require the Council's approval. In any case, the announcement of Jan Kubis' resignation after only 10 months as special envoy in Libya has precipitated the rapid appointment of a new diplomat due to the urgency of the elections in 17 days' time, which should put an end to a process that began to take shape in Geneva with the holding of the Libyan Political Dialogue Forum (LPDF) from which Abdul Hamid Dbeibah emerged as Libya's prime minister.
The still leader of the Libyan government was chosen by the international community to bring closer together positions in a country divided since the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, and to prepare the ground for the elections at the end of the year. However, one of the promises made at the time of his appointment, that he would not stand in the next elections, has become a dead letter. Dbeibah will be among the candidates on 24 December, as will Saif al-Islam Gaddafi. The days leading up to the elections are looking very long, while Libya is already waiting for its new mediation officer.
