United Nations Security Council Resolution 1973

Caroline Lucas Excerpts

Monday 21st March 2011 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

I give way to the leader of the Green party.

[Caroline Lucas (Brighton, Pavilion) (Green)]

I am grateful to the Prime Minister. I am sure he would agree that any military action needs to be principled and consistent, but last year, the UK issued £231 million-worth of arms exports licences to Libya and £55 million of licences to Saudi Arabia, including the very personnel carriers that were rolling into Bahrain just last week. Does he not agree that our position would be a lot more consistent and a lot more principled if we stopped selling arms to repressive regimes anywhere in that region?

[The Prime Minister]

The hon. Lady makes an important point, which we have discussed several times during statements and questions. We are having a proper review of not just arms exports, but training licences and other relations. Of the 118 single and open licences for Libya, we have revoked all licences that cover equipment of concern. However, I agree with the hon. Lady that there will be lessons to learn from the conflict for the future.

--- Later in debate ---

[Caroline Lucas (Brighton, Pavilion) (Green)]

I welcome the opportunity to contribute to this crucial debate. I also welcome the opportunity to pay tribute to the men and women in our armed forces, whose courage and commitment are beyond question. However, I think we owe it to them, and indeed to all in the middle east and north African region, to ensure that the role that Britain plays is beyond reproach or misunderstanding. That means that it must be consistent, that it must be principled, and that it must be likely to do good rather than harm. Measuring the military intervention that has taken place so far against those benchmarks, I am not sure that they are being met.

Let us take consistency. I have heard no serious answers to the charge that we are being enormously selective in the battles that we are choosing to fight. The Prime Minister has been asked whether military intervention in Libya signals a new direction for British foreign policy, and whether we might expect similar action to be taken against other oppressive regimes. Libya, we are told, is special. We are also told that the fact that we cannot do good everywhere should not be an argument against doing whatever we can. I consider it critical that if we choose to move in this direction, we should do so with clear principles that are as independent of self-interest as we can possibly make them. The fact that we are operating in the same week as invading Saudi forces are executing unarmed democracy protesters on the streets of Bahrain raises serious questions.

In considering whether our action is truly principled, we surely have to say why we think it appropriate to continue to sell arms to the region. I do not apologise for returning to that issue, because the Colonel Gaddafi who has been rightly described today as a murderous dictator has not suddenly become one. He was already a murderous dictator a few months, or weeks, ago, when we were happy to sell him tear gas, crowd control equipment, ammunition for wall and door-breaching projectile launchers, and plenty of other military equipment as well. In the nine months leading up to September last year, the United Kingdom issued millions of pounds’ worth of arms export licences for Libya, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain.

We cannot ignore our own complicity in arriving at this point. We cannot continue to arm regimes that abuse their own citizens, and try to claim the moral high ground when addressing the conflicts that those same arms have helped to perpetuate. As recently as last month, Ministers attended the IDEX—international defence exhibition—arms fairs in Abu Dhabi, and in less than six months the United Kingdom will host its own arms fair in London, where, no doubt, regimes that abuse their own people will once again seek to buy the tools of their repression. I hope very much that the commitment that we are hearing today—the commitment to upholding human rights in the middle east—will extend to our policies on arms exports, so that we can finally not just review but end the policy of selling arms to repressive regimes.

We need to ensure that intervention has a better chance of doing good than of doing harm. The motion asks the House to support the Government

“in the taking of all necessary measures”.

Like United Nations Security Council resolution 1973, it commits us to a course of action that is dangerously open-ended. It does not define success, unless it is the over-simplistic success of removing Gaddafi, but if that is our measure we risk simply repeating the errors of our recent history. UN resolution 1973 does not appear to rule out the use of ground forces in support of the rebels or in helping to protect civilians. That is a fairly wide definition. Earlier in the debate, we heard an interpretation of the resolution that suggested it provided for the arming of rebels as well. It is extremely over-optimistic to expect an air campaign to be decisive; hence, presumably, the scope to escalate any campaign further. I believe that could be fatal to the chances of an early peace and I am deeply concerned about the falling away of support so early in this mission. I refer not only to the secretary-general of the Arab League, but to the fact that Egypt and Algeria do not want to be involved in this action, that the US does not want to lead on it and that France’s speed of action seems to suggest that President Sarkozy is motivated at least in part by his domestic concerns.

There is a real risk of our making matters worse. If there is a stalemate—if Gaddafi does not fall in the next few weeks—we could face a civil war, a partitioned Libya and even a potential breeding ground for al-Qaeda. Given the west’s colonial past, its history of adventurism and support for dictatorships in the region, its failure to enforce UN resolutions in Palestine and the legacy of the invasion of Iraq in 2003, I think its motives in Libya will always be in doubt. The Prime Minister himself said a few days ago that a no-fly zone was not a simple solution but one of a series of steps needed to make sure that we

“get rid of this regime.”—[Official Report, 16 March 2011; Vol. 525, c. 291.]

How can that be that be read as being anything other than, in effect, support for regime change, which falls well outside the terms of the UN resolution?

I hope that in the Government’s summing up there will be further clarification of the inconsistencies between what is in the UN resolution and what is in the Government’s motion. I hope that they will review their trade and foreign policy through the screen of a genuinely ethical foreign policy and I hope that we can support the urgent convening of a middle east peace conference.