Statements by Minister of Foreign Affairs Nikos Dendias, following his meeting with Minister of Foreign Affairs of Libya, Najla El Mangoush (06.09.2021)

N. DENDIAS: Dear Minister, welcome to Greece, welcome to Athens. It is a great pleasure for me to welcome you here, a few months after our meeting in Tripoli when I accompanied Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis.

I would like to start by expressing our support for you. You are, as far as we know, the first female Minister of Foreign Affairs of Libya and in fact a female Minister who took office in a very difficult period.

You face a series of challenges demonstrating courage and bravery. Minister, Greece is a friend of Libya, a friend of the Libyan people. Historically, we have been friends. We have a relationship that goes back many centuries.

It is a relationship that continues through the presence of the Greek community in Libya, a community that, as we discussed privately, did not wish to leave Libya, even under the most adverse conditions.

The frequent contacts of the Mitsotakis government with President al-Menfi, with the Speaker of the House of Representatives Saleh, with you and other officials, are an indication of the great importance that we attach to our relationship with you.

As I mentioned before, the Greek Prime Minister recently visited Libya and I personally have visited your country several times and I hope that I will carry out even more visits. Also, my colleague Kostas Fragogiannis was there a few weeks ago and will be back in Libya soon.

Greece, dear colleague, is not attempting, unlike other countries in the region, to turn back time and make Libya a de facto colony of foreign interests.

We do not seek anything that will not be accepted and supported by the Libyan people, by Libyan society. We do not seek to impose any illegal agreement on Libya, any agreement that the Libyan House of Representatives itself has rejected.

We are interested in the stabilization, growth and prosperity of your country. We want Libya to participate in the new architecture for an understanding of stability and security that our region needs.

Geographically speaking, we are immediate neighbours. Crete is a 20 minute flight from Libya and the stabilization of Libya, stability in Libya, affects our whole region.

The prevalence of extremist ideologies in a country so close to Europe and Greece, of ideologies that do not endorse our values, is something extremely dangerous.

Unfortunately, extremist ideologies are spreading across the world today. Medieval perceptions and ideologies that, for example, would never accept a female minister, not even a working woman who walks unaccompanied in the street.

So we have a moral duty to help Libya. We were one of the first countries to re-open our Embassy in Tripoli last February. We were the first country to inaugurate a Consulate General in Benghazi. To be precise, we re-opened it, because we had to close it in 1998.

We try to assist in any way we can. We have already donated 200.000 vaccines to address the corona virus pandemic and if you need extra help with it, we are entirely at your disposal. We wish to assist the Libyan people in their daily lives.

We are trying to help operate the Tobruk power plant and we hope that, with our encouragement, Greek businesses will come and help, will work for the reconstruction of Libya.

Our assistance is not limited to bilateral level only. We contribute to the European Union’s operation “IRINI” with vessels and aircraft and we encourage as much as we can the strengthening of EU-Libya relations.

In fact, it will be my pleasure to ask Josep Borrell, even tomorrow, to invite you to a lunch or a breakfast with the European Union Foreign Ministers, in order for you to explain in your own words the enormous challenges the Libyan government is facing.

We also offer assistance, through the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, to the community of the internally displaced in Libya.

The most important issue for us is to ensure the independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity of your country. An essential condition for this is the holding of fair elections on December 24. We hope that this will be possible, as provided for in the United Nations resolutions.

We hope for the emergence of a representative government in Libya, able to free itself from the burdens of the past, such as the invalid, non-existent and illegal “Turkish-Libyan Memorandum”; a “memorandum” that, apart from the international community, is also rejected by the Libyan House of Representatives itself.

We take the view that it is a legal paradox, a legal absurdum that disregards any notion of International Law and the Law of the Sea. It disregards common sense as well as geography.

However, in order for fair elections to be held, dear colleague, I believe that all foreign troops, all paramilitary, all mercenary forces must withdraw from your country. There should be no foreign military presence.

And I would like to say that the European Union should clearly realize that Libya is not a distant country of Africa but a neighbour, a Mediterranean country, which the European Union and of course Greece have both a responsibility and an obligation to help.

Instability at the southern shores of the Mediterranean affects all the states in the region and that should be clearly understood by all the countries in the region.

This is exactly why I will visit Tunisia tomorrow, as I told you privately. We will also assist Tunisia with vaccines, but I would also like us to assist the effort for the stabilization of the country.

Tunisia is a bit further away from Libya, but we also consider it our neighbouring country. It is a country that strives to consolidate a democratic regime. And we would also like to contribute to their effort to establish a democracy.

Dear colleague, I would like to thank you once again for your presence here and tell you that we will continue to make all the effort for the stability, security and democracy in Libya.

We believe that this is in the interest of the Libyan people, but this is also in the interest of our wider region. We share common values and common expectations and we will stand by your side in the effort that the government, as well as you personally, is making to create a new reality in Libya, after the past tragic years.

Thank you so much for your visit here.