Libya

Charlotte Leslie Excerpts

Wednesday 26th October 2016 Westminster Hall

[Kwasi Kwarteng]

My hon. Friend makes an interesting point. I am trying to say—in many ways, it is the crux of this debate and nearly any debate about the middle east—that we have our own ideals and our own sense of what the rule of law and due process are, yet the realities on the ground in many instances bear no relation to the theoretical aspirations and structures that the international community constructs. I am trying to grope towards some way in which we can accommodate or harmonise our intellectual construct and method with what is happening on the ground.

The reality is that there are something like 1,700 militias. General Haftar is probably the biggest military presence, and many of our allies openly support him. My hon. Friend asks an interesting question: why do we not just support General Haftar? I do not propose to answer that definitely today. It is a difficult question and there are lots of balancing factors. The fact is that General Haftar is not universally popular. We have big issues with militias in Misrata. A number of other tribes on the western side have said openly that they are not prepared to tolerate rule by him. Their belief is that, if we support Haftar, we will be substituting one military dictator for the former military dictator, Gaddafi.

Be that as it may, I want to talk about my hon. Friend’s suggestion. Our strategy has not moved the country forward in five years. The financial situation is such that whatever oil reserves Libya had are rapidly dwindling. Libya’s GDP was something like $75 billion in 2011 and is now something like $41 billion—it is roughly of that order; that figure is from a couple of years ago, but it is the latest we have. We are talking about an economy that has essentially halved in five years. GDP per capita was something like $12,500 in 2011, at which point Libya was one of the wealthiest countries in Africa. It was seeing some degree of material progress. Today, GDP per capita is about $7,000. No country in Europe has seen such a diminution of its wealth, including Greece. That has huge implications for the security situation in the region and outside.

Not only have people become a lot poorer, but the political institutions in many instances have broken down. Whatever Gaddafi’s strengths and weaknesses were—let’s face it, he was a tyrant—he had a degree of control over the country’s borders. Those who know geography will know that Libya is an enormous country with something like 4,000 miles of borders. To stem the flow of migration, it was very important that a centrally constituted Government—a central authority—could control the borders. That has now completely collapsed, which is why hundreds if not thousands of people come from very poor countries in sub-Saharan Africa through Libya and find themselves on boats in the Mediterranean going to Italy, in many instances ending their lives there.

I did not want to talk about the EU—we have had plenty of debates in this place about it—but one of the failures it needs to address is the lack of a co-ordinated plan for Libya. There is no point pretending it is going to go away, because it is not. The problem will get worse.

[Charlotte Leslie (Bristol North West) (Con)]

I thank my hon. Friend for securing this timely, topical debate. Does he agree that, although focusing on Libya’s coastline is very important to prevent the tragedy of human trafficking, it is also important to look at Libya’s southern borders, where people are coming up from sub-Saharan Africa? Perhaps we could be doing more to understand what is going on there and to tackle trafficking at its source.

[Kwasi Kwarteng]

As is often the case, my hon. Friend is absolutely right. That goes to the heart of the question. There is no centrally constituted Government or central power to hold the country together and control the borders that she talks about, which are pretty porous.

I secured the debate because I have spent time in Europe speaking to German colleagues and MPs and politicians from other countries, and I am struck by the fact that there does not seem to be any real plan of action. Nothing has happened for five years. The country is not in a state of chaos—that would be an exaggeration—but it is certainly not stable. Its oil reserves are dwindling. It is still fairly rich by African and developing country standards, but its wealth is being depleted, and if it diminishes further the problem will get worse. It is no use pretending it is simply going to go away, because it is not.

--- Later in debate ---

[Charlotte Leslie (Bristol North West) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Chope. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Spelthorne (Kwasi Kwarteng). People always refer to debates as timely, but this debate has special merit because it shines a light on an area that is often forgotten in the shadow of the atrocities in Syria, but that has a huge role in the region’s stability.

I did not vote for a no-fly zone in Libya in 2011; I abstained. I wondered then whether that was to my shame. Sadly, on balance, I do not think that it was. Back then, as a new MP, I was not sufficiently confident that there would not be mission creep, I could not see a concrete plan for what Libya would look like were there to be mission creep, and I looked at the west’s track record of removing nasty dictators, and it was not good. It is easy to be wise after the event and rehearse mistakes that were made. We can say that lessons will be learned—that cliché is often used—but we can perhaps best demonstrate that we are going to learn the lessons by tackling the situation properly and realistically now.

I am often surprised that Libya does not feature more in the media and political discussion, particularly on compassionate grounds. Libya is well known as a haven for people traffickers, who often traffic people to their deaths in the Mediterranean. When I was in Sicily last year helping to redecorate and renovate a migrant hostel, some young men from Africa told me that they were kept locked like animals in storage containers in Tripoli for two weeks and were basically forcibly starved. One man speculated that that was to ensure that they were smaller so the traffickers could fit more people on the boats. Those are the kinds of human atrocities that are happening, but they do not seem to be attracting Twitter hashtags commensurate with appalling human rights abuses. What are we doing on Libya’s southern border to prevent such atrocities from happening at source? Once people are at the coast, it is in a sense almost too late, although we must of course take action there too.

Libya is obviously of strategic importance. We know that it has become a fertile breeding ground for IS and other violent Islamist groups. It would be a mistake to limit our attention solely to Daesh. We might eradicate Daesh, but the ideology that it espouses will be articulated in another way. Let us not be simplistic and attach ourselves to defeating just a name and not an ideology. The chaos—some call it chaos; some call it deep instability—in Libya is deeply destabilising for neighbouring nations. The last thing that we want is a destabilised Egypt, which has its own challenges. Having a neighbour in such a situation as Libya is in is deeply destabilising for Egypt. As a nation, we are partially responsible for creating that situation, so we have a responsibility to engage energetically in trying to return some form of stability to Libya.

I am far from an expert, and I am aware that I am in the company of far greater experts, so I will make a few observations and then ask some questions of the Minister. We backed a revolution, which is always a risky business. Revolution is very different from reform. In many ways, having taken the actions that we took, we cannot be surprised that we are where we are in Libya.

[Kwasi Kwarteng]

My hon. Friend mentions that we backed revolution. That is precisely the point: we had no idea what was going to come after the revolution. We simply thought that things would right themselves on their own, and that once we had destabilised the situation, Humpty Dumpty would somehow just come back and reform almost spontaneously.

[Charlotte Leslie]

My hon. Friend refers to a nursery rhyme; I was going to say that we have a slightly short attention span and in many ways a fairytale view of foreign policy—“It’s all going to be fine and everyone will live happily ever after once we’ve done the nice thing that the Twitterati will approve of.” We are where we are.

We in the west in general—I do not intend to label any one person as responsible—make two mistakes. First, we tend to see situations in a binary way. We are quick to call the good guys the good guys and the bad guys the bad guys. That has led us to be allies with questionable people just because we want to defeat Daesh. Does that really mean that we should align ourselves with Islamists who perhaps have ideas not that different from Daesh? The reason that they are anti-Daesh may be that they see it as a competitor in the region, not that they share our values.

[Alex Chalk (Cheltenham) (Con)]

I remember that those who advocated attacking Iraq back in 2003 pointed to an atrocity that Saddam Hussein had undoubtedly perpetrated against the Kurds in Halabja some 15 years or so before as a pretext for launching strikes. Do we not have to be clear that there is an ever-present opportunity in the middle east to make a horrendous situation full of human rights abuses even worse?

[Charlotte Leslie]

Absolutely. A theme that has arisen again and again in this Chamber is the tension between stability and freedoms, and the extent to which we match our concern with alleviating human rights abuses with a concern with maintaining stability. Once stability goes in a country, there are an awful lot more human rights abuses, however many there were beforehand.

[Daniel Kawczynski]

My hon. Friend was far too modest in her analysis of her abstention in 2011 when she was a new MP. I was not aware that she had abstained; I focused on my hon. Friend the Member for Basildon and Billericay (Mr Baron), who voted against the no-fly zone. I pay tribute to her for effectively scrutinising the situation. Does she agree that we must learn from the mistake of the speed with which we reacted to the crisis and intervened in the country at that time?

[Charlotte Leslie]

I thank my hon. Friend for his very kind intervention. Yes, we must learn lessons, but we do that not by sitting in this Chamber saying that we will learn lessons, but by doing things better, starting from today.

The second mistake that we often make, which feeds into the reference by my hon. Friend the Member for Spelthorne to nursery rhymes and fairytales, is that we forget that the middle east is not Tunbridge Wells, if hon. Members will forgive me for labelling that area of the country. The models of democracy and methods that would work in the home counties will not work in the middle east. It is a very different scenario. We seem constantly to make the mistake of putting ideology and our own ideals of how the world should be ahead of how it actually is.

I have just a few questions for the Minister that are based on observations. I am not an expert on this subject at all, but it seems to me that pursuing a 100% inclusive settlement for a Libyan Parliament is fantasy. It will not happen. I worry that, in failing to realise that, we risk making the best the enemy of the good. How possible does the Minister think it is for a sustainable majority to be gathered to govern—I am talking about bringing in recalcitrant Islamists and those in Misrata—such that Britain can then engage in maintaining the human rights of the minorities that are left outside?

It seems very hard to play the active role that we want to play in helping to reconstruct Libya if we have our diplomatic service based in Tunis but making forays—flying visits—into an occupied Tripoli. Is the Minister looking at putting an expeditionary diplomatic presence back on the ground in Tripoli, so that we actually have skin in the game, and so that we can perhaps stand alongside a Libyan Parliament in the same way as we did early in 2011, which is what we should do if we really want to see it gain traction and force?

What assessment has the Minister made of the effects of our efforts to displace Daesh from Sirte on the wider political situation in Libya? Has he made any assessment of the risk of our efforts on the ground boosting one side—the Misratan militias—and the potential effect of that, if it is happening, on the Parliament and the army? It would be a shame if unintended consequences from our efforts to displace Daesh from Sirte contributed to the destabilising situation that gave birth to it in the first place.

I am aware that we have limited time, but in the absence of clear and effective practical leadership in the country, I would value the Minister’s thoughts on our relationship with General Haftar. My hon. Friend the Member for Spelthorne rightly said that we cannot just ignore him and airbrush him from the picture because he does not fit in with our ideal of a GNA-led democracy. Whatever we think of General Haftar, he is really the only man who has managed to keep the army in one piece against an array of Islamist attacks. As my hon. Friend said, he is a controversial figure, but I struggle to think of any figure who has maintained any stability in the middle east who is not controversial. If we are looking for an uncontroversial leader to provide stability, we may have a very long wait.

To start to wrap up, I will borrow words reported to me by the former head of the British embassy office in Benghazi, Mr Joseph Walker-Cousins. He recalled words uttered by Salwa Bugaighis, a leading Libyan human rights lawyer. She had represented Islamists oppressed under the Gaddafi regime and had previously disagreed that Islamists posed a significant threat to Libya. Mr Walker-Cousins recalled how, shortly before she was assassinated by the Islamist militia group Ansar al-Sharia in Benghazi on the day of the general election in June 2014, she said of Haftar: “I hate that man. I hate everything he stands for. However, I have come to understand that he is the only one capable of containing and then destroying the extremists.”

Under threat of death, Salwa Bugaighis returned to Benghazi to take part in the elections and tweeted a picture of herself with an inked finger at the polling station. Her last tweet was of a convoy of Ansar al-Sharia breaching the gates of her villa compound. She was found the next day murdered in her kitchen, and her husband, a leading pro-democracy politician in Benghazi who was in line to be elected leader of the Benghazi local council the next day, was missing, presumed dead.

I ask the Minister what our vision is for Britain’s role in Libya. Will we regain skin in the game back on the ground with expeditionary diplomatic engagement and perhaps push for UN pro-consul level international engagement? Will we seek to work with General Haftar and the army, which are realities on the ground that we cannot ignore, or will we seek to step aside and create space for Russia to step in and start making decisions in Libya in the same way as it is now calling the shots in Syria? I would welcome the Minister’s thoughts on that.

I will finish with a quote attributed to Churchill:

“United wishes and goodwill cannot overcome brute fact”.