Somalia raises the welfare of its citizens in Libya at talks in New York

NEW YORK (SONNA): The Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, Abdisalam Abdi Ali, has met Libya’s Acting Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, Eltaher Salem Elbaour, in New York, for talks on the welfare and situation of Somali citizens living in Libya and on cooperation between the two countries on migration.

The two sides agreed to strengthen coordination and working relations between Somalia and Libya, with particular attention to matters connected with migration and with the care of citizens.

The meeting is the eleventh Somali bilateral engagement recorded during the 81st session of the United Nations General Assembly, and the first to concern the position of Somalis outside the country rather than relations between governments.

That distinction gives it a weight the readout does not spell out. Libya sits on one of the principal routes used by people travelling north towards the Mediterranean, and Somalis are among the nationalities found along it. A foreign minister raising the welfare of his citizens directly with his Libyan counterpart is consular work rather than diplomacy in the ordinary sense, and it is the kind of engagement that produces practical arrangements when it works.

The Ministry did not set out what those arrangements might involve, and neither side gave figures for how many Somalis are in Libya or in what circumstances. What was agreed was closer coordination, which is the stage before anything operational.

Somalia’s position on the movement of people has been stated consistently in domestic policy, where the government refers to irregular migration rather than illegal migration and treats those travelling as citizens with a claim on the state rather than as offenders. Raising their welfare with a transit country is the external expression of the same position.

The engagement forms part of an unusually wide week for Somali diplomacy. President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud held bilateral meetings with the leaders of Serbia, Senegal, Pakistan and Kuwait and with the United States Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, while the Foreign Minister met his counterparts from Egypt, Algeria, Morocco, Costa Rica and the Dominican Republic, signing an agreement with the last of those to establish diplomatic relations for the first time.

Libya and Somalia are both members of the African Union, the Arab League and the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, and both have spent the past decade rebuilding state institutions after prolonged conflict.