All ready for the Palermo conference, doubts on the participation of Haftar

All ready for the Palermo conference. Small port of Acquasanta to be emptied at least in part, schools closed to the Arenella, streets forbidden from the center to the outskirts, where there are the hotels that will welcome the international guests. The neighborhood around Villa Igiea, transformed into a fortress.

Next Monday and Tuesday, therefore, an armored city ready to host the first ministers and heads of state for the conference on Libya. While already some illustrious defections, the organizational machine set in motion by the prefecture of Palermo does not stop.

In fact, according to an information site, General Khalifa Haftar will not be in Sicily for the meeting scheduled for next Monday and Tuesday. Sources close to the strongman of Cyrenaica are cited by The Address website and deny the news that Haftar "changed his mind about his participation in the Palermo conference after meeting the head of Italian intelligence in Moscow", the director of Aise Alberto Manenti.

According to The Address, the Libyan general "is still of his position and will not participate in the Palermo conference for Libya organized by the Italian government".

The news of his participation was disclosed by the director of Aise Manenti, according to whom Haftar had been persuaded by him to fly to Palermo after a meeting in Moscow. But Haftar had long said and made fun of (for example by his son) that he had no interest in attending the conference due to a lack of clarity about the goals of the meeting.

We will have to wait until the last moment to find out the truth about the general's participation in Palermo: it would have been impossible for Haftar to escape if the leaders of Trump or Putin arrived in Palermo, or even the American and Russian ministers, Pompey and Putin . But even in the absence of international leaders, the conference would still be a further step towards its definitive political legitimacy.

In view of Palermo in recent days instead his "rival", the head of the Presidential Council of Tripoli Fayez Serraj, flew to Istanbul to meet with President Erdogan and is also preparing to meet the French president in Paris. Serraj is maneuvering to try to survive even in the next political phase, the one that will lead first to a "great assembly" of all the Libyan political and tribal leaders at the beginning of the 2019 and then in the general elections.

All ready for the Palermo conference, doubts on the participation of Haftar

| EVIDENCE 2, ITALY |