Libya

Baroness Liddell of Coatdyke Excerpts

Friday 1st April 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Liddell of Coatdyke]

My Lords, I will keep off the dangerous subject of lawyers. I thank the Minister for the opportunity to have this debate today. He has addressed the House with his usual courtesy and respect in changing circumstances to fill us in on some of the issues that are not immediately apparent, and I am enormously grateful to him for that.

One point that the Minister made has come up in a number of strands in speeches made by noble Lords—the parallel between Libya and Iraq. May I enter a caveat here? People have a tendency to look at the most recent history of Iraq as a snapshot. It is not a snapshot. There are strong parallels between what is happening now in Libya with what happened in Iraq in the early 1990s. The first resolution that was passed at the United Nations in the 1990s was followed by 17 resolutions and 12 years of Saddam Hussein running riot around the world, and a divided international community. Indeed, Saddam himself made the point that it was the divisions in the international community that gave him the opportunity to do what he then set out to do. However, I do not want to get hung up on Iraq. I am very conscious of the fact that, with so many noble and gallant Lords and a former Secretary-General of NATO in the Chamber, I am very much the amateur in this matter. I hope to look later at the post-conflict plan that my noble friend Lord Soley has talked about.

The noble and gallant Lord, Lord Stirrup, made a very important point about how we know what victory looks like. How do we know what the end game looks like after Resolution 1973, which I support? We must be conscious of that. A number of noble Lords have spoken about the necessity to remove Colonel Gaddafi and the means whereby we do that within a legal framework. These are issues from which we cannot resile; they are also issues that it is not easy to debate in a public forum such as this.

I should like to take up a theme that my noble friends Lord Soley and Lord West raised about the nature of the rebels. My noble friend Lord West described them as a rabble; that sounded a little insulting, but in reality they are a rabble. It is a disparate group of people. We do not know who they are; we do not know what their backgrounds and capabilities are. Arming the rebels is a very serious issue. We know nothing about their background and, as we can see on our televisions every night, they are patently untrained, with no chain of command and no experience, particularly regarding modern and sophisticated weaponry. That is the issue that we have to address. How can there be a mechanism that brings together this disparate band of people?

Talking about disparate bands of people, we know very little about the Interim Transitional National Council. It is a group of 30, largely lawyers, businessmen and academics. I take the point of my noble friend Lady Kennedy that we are not hearing much about any women being involved, other than as victims. Yes, a group of people has to come together to create a leadership, but we do not know who they are and in some cases we do not even know their names for security reasons. Do we know whether they have the breadth and depth to lead a country to a new future? There is a vacuum, and that vacuum troubles me.

The Minister referred to jihadist activity and was very positive in his remarks on whether al-Qaeda and other jihadists were in the area. As we discussed in the House the other day, I think al-Qaeda has been caught on the hop by what has happened in the Middle East, but you can bet your boots that it will not be on the hop now. It will be seeing and seeking opportunities. I do not expect the Minister to be fulsome in any response on this matter. I am assuming that the intelligence and security community is looking hard at the activities in the region, not just in relation to Libya but particularly to Yemen and throughout the region.

One issue that I feel I have to raise, as a former Secretary of State for Scotland, is Moussa Koussa. I was dismayed at some of the remarks made by some of my friends, in this House and elsewhere, but also by members of the coalition, giving him an almost euphoric welcome to this country. I am not squeamish; I realise that in a situation of conflict, the opportunity to bring someone over from the other side is to be welcomed. There are many Members of this House, using their professional skills, who have dealt with defectors to the value of this country’s security. But, please, do not let us forget the consequences of Lockerbie, not just on the international community but on a quiet and respectable Scottish town that will for ever be known as the place of one of the worst atrocities that this country has ever known. I thank the Minister for his statement that there will be no immunity. I look forward to greater investigation of the role of Moussa Koussa in the Lockerbie bombing and in other atrocities, as mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Alderdice.

There is one area in which I am less sanguine than the Minister, and that is about oil markets. I want to talk about the post-conflict situation. People assume that oil is oil is oil. It is not. The oil from different countries is different. Libya was the world’s 12th biggest provider of oil, which is the most traded commodity in the world. Now there is barely a trickle coming from Libya. It is very useful that Qatar has agreed to be the marketplace for Libyan oil, but how is that oil to be transported out of Libya? The men and women who were evacuated from the oilfields have caused a reduction in output from Libya that may be very difficult to restore. We know from past experience how easy it is to disrupt oil supplies. Saudi Arabia has offered to step into the breach, but the oil that is produced in Saudi Arabia is of a different quality from that produced in Libya. You need to mix the sweet crude from Libya with the coarser oil from Saudi Arabia to produce the petroleum products that we all use.

The international community needs to address the issue of onward oil supply and, as it does so, to put together a post-conflict plan for Libya. If people have struggled in Libya and throughout the Middle East only to reach an end game that leads to poverty, despair and a lack of future, the prospects for democracy will be harder to maintain. I urge the Minister to consider the issues of the post-conflict plan and not to be so sanguine about oil prices, because I believe that they will go up. Saudi Arabia alone used half of its oil revenues from last year to pay off dissidents within its ranks. All is not well, but I hope that someone, somewhere, can give us an idea of what the end game will look like.