On 20 November, the Head of the Libyan National Army (LNA), Khalifa Haftar, gave a speech from the Ouagadougou Convention Centre in Sirte. In his speech, Haftar said that he hoped that Sirte would become ‘an incubator for national reconciliation’ and that the city could act as a driving force for the ‘construction of the [kind of] state to which all Libyans aspire’. Haftar said that the current political stalemate in Libya ‘urgently requires the Libyan people to take a serious position’, deciding their own destiny while avoiding ‘the repeating of failed experiments’. He also commented on Libya’s arms embargo, stating that the LNA ‘is ready to assume full national responsibility, despite the unjust ban on arming the military’.
