Russian President Vladimir Putin said yesterday he wants to see an end to the conflict in Libya and then talks between the two opposing sides to begin.
Speaking at an annual news conference in Moscow, Putin said he would discuss Libya with a Turkish delegation in Russia in the coming days. Moscow and Ankara have backed different sides in the conflict, which began in 2014.
Meanwhile, Pope Francis called for the closing of migrant detention camps in Libya yesterday, saying they were rife with torture and slavery. Francis, who has made defense of migrants and refugees a key part of his pontificate, made his comments in to a group of refugees, including women and children, brought to Italy by the Vatican from a transit camp on the Greek island of Lesbos.
“How can we fail to hear the cry of so many brothers and sisters who prefer to face a tempestuous sea rather than die slowly in Libyan detention camps, places of torture and ignoble slavery?” he said. More than 5,000 refugees and migrants are held in 19 official detention facilities in Libya, some controlled by armed groups, as well as an unknown number in squalid centres run by traffickers, according to the United Nations.
“We need a serious commitment to empty out the detention camps in Libya, evaluating and activating all possible solutions,” Francis said, adding, without elaborating, that “complicity by institutions” should be denounced. “The problem is not resolved by blocking boats,” Francis said, adding that this left them at the mercy of unscrupulous human traffickers.