Libya

Graham P Jones Excerpts

Tuesday 19th April 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hammond]

I am afraid that I cannot, really. I can give a personal view: I would expect that we would be talking about a training mission of the sort of scale of those that we are carrying out in other countries around the world. I therefore would expect there to be between tens and hundreds of trainers, not thousands of trainers.

[Graham Jones (Hyndburn) (Lab)]

The Foreign Secretary says that we must tackle Daesh, but Prime Minister Sarraj only operates with the permission of the militia. Does not the Foreign Secretary think that in certain circumstances some of the militia are aligned with malevolent forces, particularly in other parts of the country, and is he not concerned that the militia are at the heart of the Government and of the future process of government? Where will that leave Libya in the future?

[Mr Hammond]

I think that there is a misunderstanding about what the militia are. After 2011, Libya fragmented. Every city, every town and every region had its armed forces—armed men who were protecting their communities. That does not make them bad people. They are not extreme Islamists in most cases; they are simply people who have formed home defence units, and they are the only force on the ground. It is not possible to talk about raising new Libyan armed forces that will then take on all the militias—that would be a completely unrealistic project. The only way forward is to co-opt militias into a nascent Libyan armed forces, backed by a political system that is highly devolved and that assures them of autonomy and fair shares of Libya’s wealth for the communities they seek to back.