The people of Libya desperately need peace. Since the dictatorship of Muammar Gaddafi was toppled in 2011, the country has not had a stable government at best and has endured bitter fighting at worst. All the exciting potential of an oil-rich nation so close to oil-hungry Europe has been destroyed by interminable fighting.
A few months ago, the tireless United Nations negotiators managed to get a rough agreement between the assemblies of the two main forces, but their leaders failed to turn that into reality. The Council of Deputies is the internationally recognised government that sits in Benghazi and controls half the coast and much of the interior and has the loyalty of the Libyan Army under General Khalifa Haftar. Their opposition is the Islamist coalition of the General National Congress that is based in Tripoli and works with a wider coalition called Libya Dawn.
A lot of the international analysis of the failure to get an agreement focuses on the risk of allowing Daesh (the self-proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) take advantage of the confusion to strengthen its grip on the small area of coast it controls around Sirte, and also increase the number of followers it manages to attract.
This danger is real and the crisis in Syria and Iraq is a direct precedent for what Daesh might hope to achieve in Libya, but the UN also needs to emphasise the wider benefits of peace to the two forces in Tripoli and Benghazi, rather than threatening them with more chaos.
