UK Support for Stability in Libya

Debate between Gregory Campbell and Daniel Kawczynski

Wednesday 18th October 2023 Westminster Hall

[Daniel Kawczynski (Shrewsbury and Atcham) (Con)]

Thank you for calling me to speak, Ms McDonagh. I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Leeds North East (Fabian Hamilton) for securing this important debate.

My strong interest in Libya stems from my childhood experiences. As the only Conservative Member of Parliament to have been born in a communist country—communist Poland, of course—it is difficult to explain to young people today how there was no food in the shops and everything was rationed. We could not get chocolate, exotic fruits or anything like that, but my aunt and uncle were sent to work in Tripoli and would send back cases of oranges. For a child in communist Poland, oranges were like something extraordinary from outer space, because we could not see them or buy them. I took them to school; we drew paintings of them; we made marmalade out of the peel. We talked about Libya, looked at it on the map and thought of it as some sort of paradise because it had these exotic fruits that we in communist Poland could not have. That is why I became chairman of the all-party parliamentary group on Libya in 2006, shortly after being elected.

I then decided to write a book on Colonel Gaddafi. It is in my office; I forgot to bring it, but I wish I had. I wrote that book about Libya because I was extremely concerned about the rapprochement that Mr Blair, the then Labour Prime Minister, was implementing in trying to bring Gaddafi in from the cold. We all remember the scenes of Mr Blair smiling with Colonel Gaddafi in the tent outside Tripoli. I felt that that was the wrong approach, bearing in mind all our outstanding issues with Colonel Gaddafi. Simply to bring him in from the cold without dealing with those issues was, I think, wrong. More importantly, the Arab world thought it was wrong. Colonel Gaddafi was perceived as a recalcitrant, unstable and highly unreliable individual within the Arab world and among Arab leaders. For the United Kingdom to have so clearly bent over backwards to accommodate this man was felt to be inappropriate by many in the Arab world at the time.

I tried to campaign on the issue with the then Labour Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary. I got absolutely nowhere, which is why I decided to write the book. I have to say it was a fascinating experience. As the hon. Member for East Londonderry (Mr Campbell) says, there are so many outstanding issues that were left unresolved. Lockerbie, the worst terrorist atrocity on UK soil, was a result of Colonel Gaddafi sponsoring the bombing of the airliner over Scotland in 1988. There is also the funding and sending of Semtex to the IRA. However, the most poignant issue that I came across during the time I was writing the book was the murder of PC Yvonne Fletcher in St James’s Square, just outside the Libyan embassy. When I go through the square now, I still pause for a moment in front of the beautiful plaque that commemorates her.

PC Yvonne Fletcher was a serving police officer who was guarding a demonstration outside the Libyan People’s Bureau when somebody from the embassy shot her. I have met PC Murray, who was at the scene and was with PC Fletcher in the ambulance as she was taken to hospital. He has led a decades-long campaign to find PC Yvonne Fletcher’s killer and have him brought to justice here in the United Kingdom. For her memory as a serving police officer, we must continue to raise the issue in the House of Commons.

The revolution came in 2011, one year after I wrote my book. I remember February 2011 so well: we had wall-to-wall coverage on our television screens of the revolution that started in Tobruk and swept across the whole of Libya. In the House of Commons, the scenario was that this disaster was happening and that something had to be done about it. I am not prone to criticising Conservative politicians, but I will on this occasion. Mr Cameron, the then Conservative Prime Minister, intervened; he planned the invasion with Monsieur Hollande, the French President, on the back of a fag packet, without any consideration. It is easy to kill the dictator, but what happens when we cut off the head? All the tentacles collapse. Like the hon. Member for Leeds North East, I have been to Libya on many occasions. The country was almost a carbon copy of President Saddam Hussein’s Iraq: everything—all the apparatus across the country—was controlled by one party and one man.

I remember well that we were whipped to vote for the invasion. From memory, I think that just a handful of Conservative MPs rebelled, and I very much regret that I was not one of them. The Conservative MPs who rebelled against Mr Cameron absolutely got it right, because there was not enough planning for the invasion of Libya. We bombed Libya back to the stone age. It is very easy to take on somebody like Colonel Gaddafi, who had obsolete Soviet-era equipment, poor radar and tanks and all the rest of it, but we bombed Libya with very little thought as to what would follow.

I asked to see Mr Cameron two or three days before Colonel Gaddafi was killed. I went to his office. I knew he was not listening to a word I was saying, because throughout the whole conversation he was signing bottles of House of Commons Scotch for raffle and auction prizes. One rather knows that somebody is not listening when, while one tries to raise important issues with them, they are doing a secondary task—signing their name on bottles of Scotch. [Interruption.] This is my book on Colonel Gaddafi, which I wrote in 2010; I spent over two years writing it.

[Mr Gregory Campbell]

Other books are available!

[Daniel Kawczynski]

I asked Mr Cameron, “What is going to happen to Colonel Gaddafi?” We all know how Gaddafi was killed: a convoy was leaving Sirte for the desert, and British and French military intelligence, in collaboration with the militants, got him in the tunnel and he was killed. Of course, he had to be killed. Some people said that he had to be silenced—that he knew too much. The hon. Member for Leeds North East will remember the allegations about all the funding from Colonel Gaddafi to Monsieur Sarkozy; apparently Gaddafi gave Sarkozy millions of dollars for political campaigns. He had to be silenced. I will never forget the words that Mr Cameron said to me. He sort of metaphorically patted me on the head and said, “Nothing to worry about—it’s all in hand, old boy.” Two or three days later, Colonel Gaddafi was killed.

I am no apologist for Colonel Gaddafi. He was a brutal, evil dictator who suppressed his own people, and my book chronicles the extraordinary human rights abuses that he implemented against his own people in Libya. Nobody here will shed a tear that Colonel Gaddafi is no longer running Libya or able to suppress his own people, but the reason I raise it is that we have to think about the mistakes we are making as a nation, whether that is in Iraq or Libya. Certainly in my time as a Member of Parliament, every time we have intervened in an Arab nation, rather than leaving it to the Arab League or the Arab people, and killed the dictator, what has ensued? Total chaos, total paralysis, internecine warfare, and brutality and killing that one could argue is of even greater consequence and destabilisation than what took place under the dictator. I very much hope that future generations of Members of Parliament will learn from our experiences and the mistakes we have made.

When I was on the Foreign Affairs Committee in that brief Parliament from 2015 to 2017, there was an attempt to investigate Mr Cameron. There was an attempt at that stage to investigate how he had brought us to intervene in Libya, but in reality it got us nowhere and little was done.

I would like to put it on the record how deeply disappointing it is that so few Members of Parliament are here. There is not one Conservative Member in this Chamber apart from the Minister and the Parliamentary Private Secretary, my hon. Friend the Member for Truro and Falmouth (Cherilyn Mackrory). Bearing in mind our responsibility as a party and as a Government for the intervention in that country and the extraordinary misery that the Libyan people continue to experience as a result, that is a very bad show from my party.

I thank the hon. Member for Leeds North East for bringing the debate here. Despite all the difficulties we are seeing in Israel and the Gaza strip and in Ukraine, we must not forget about Libya. These are our neighbours in the underbelly of the Mediterranean—in a country now being used, as a result of our intervention, for the massive trafficking of people from sub-Saharan Africa through Libya to Lampedusa and beyond. As British parliamentarians, particularly after our intervention in that country, we have a duty and a responsibility to continue to help the people of Libya.