Libyan-sponsored IRA Terrorism

James Cartlidge Excerpts

Thursday 10th May 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mr Laurence Robertson (Tewkesbury) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House calls on the Government to take steps to obtain the required international authority to use a proportion of the assets of the Libyan Government that were frozen in the UK to compensate the relatives of people murdered and injured as a result of Libyan-sponsored IRA terrorism and to fund community support programmes in areas affected by that terrorism.

I thank the Backbench Business Committee for allocating time for this debate and all right hon. and hon. Members, and indeed the Minister, for attending a debate on a subject that should have been finalised and closed a long time ago.

During my time as Chairman of the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee, we had the opportunity of holding an inquiry into Her Majesty’s Government’s support for UK victims of IRA attacks that used Gaddafi-supplied Semtex and weapons. That was an opportunity not only to hear from the victims of those attacks and the families of those who, sadly and tragically, lost their lives, but to draw attention to a series of missed opportunities to secure compensation for those victims. Today, we call on the Government to make amends for the inaction of previous Governments by securing justice for those victims and their relatives.

[James Cartlidge (South Suffolk) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing the debate. Does he agree that it is very timely given the Attorney General’s statement earlier, which revealed—and it may be entirely justified—that a Libyan citizen who was wronged by this Government has received £500,000 in compensation?

[Mr Robertson]

My hon. Friend makes a very good point. As I get deeper into my speech, I will refer to other compensation awards, but the Government should certainly follow that guiding principle.

The role of the Libyan Government in bolstering the activities of the Provisional IRA should not be understated. When he appeared before the Select Committee, the former Foreign Secretary, the right hon. Jack Straw, stated:

“In the 1980s and early 1990s, Libya was probably the most serious state sponsor of terrorism in the world.”

Those were very strong words. From the early 1970s through to the 1990s, the Gaddafi regime in Libya supplied arms, funding, training and explosives to the Provisional IRA, which is accepted by many to have both extended and worsened the troubles.

Through a series of shipments that took place in the mid-1980s, the regime supplied the Provisional IRA with up to 10 tonnes of Semtex, a highly powerful and virtually undetectable plastic explosive. The Semtex supplied made possible a deadly bombing campaign from the late 1980s, resulting in a horrific loss of life across Northern Ireland and the mainland. These include the attacks in Enniskillen, where a bomb was detonated that killed 11 people during a Remembrance Sunday ceremony, the bombings in Warrington that resulted in the deaths of two children—Tim Parry and Johnathan Ball—and the attack at docklands in this city, where a bomb killed two people and injured about 100 more. This is to name just a few of the atrocities carried out by the Provisional IRA using the Libyan-supplied Semtex. It does not come close to illustrating the extent of the devastation caused. While that loss of life is a tragedy, those attacks also had far-reaching implications for those who were injured and for the families and loved ones of those who sadly lost their lives.

During our inquiry, many victims emphasised not only the physical effects of the attacks, but the emotional, psychological and financial difficulties caused. The testimonies of those victims have been highlighted in previous debates, but it would be valuable to the House to consider them once more, to illustrate the sheer loss, heartache and pain caused by those attacks.

Colin Parry, whose 12-year-old son, Tim, died following the Warrington bombings in 1993, told the Committee:

“Describing the final moments of your child’s life is beyond words…because, as a parent, there is no greater pain or loss than the death of your child.”

Suzanne Dodd’s father was the inspector on duty on the day of the Harrods bombing. She told the Committee that, on the day of the attack, she and her siblings had been waiting for their father to come home to put up the Christmas tree when their mother told them that there had been a bomb at Harrods and that their father would be late. It emerged that her father had been seriously injured. Her mother returned from hospital on Christmas eve, telling Suzanne and her siblings that her father had died.

The urgency of this issue is possibly best illustrated by Mrs Gemma Berezzag, whose husband was left blind, paralysed and brain damaged by the docklands bombing. For 20 years she cared for her husband’s complex needs on a daily basis. She sadly passed away in 2016, before any resolution could be found. I ask the Government: how many more individuals affected by those atrocities will not see justice in their lifetime? Those cases provide only a snapshot of the suffering caused by Libyan-sponsored IRA terrorism, and time is running out for many of the victims.

Losing any loved one through natural causes is bad enough. Losing someone through an accident is perhaps even more shocking, but how much worse must it be when that life has been deliberately taken through terrorism? Add to that grief the involvement of a foreign, rogue state, and the victims’ relatives and friends must suffer more than any of us could ever imagine.

The Northern Ireland Affairs Committee heard how victims have been repeatedly let down by successive Labour, Conservative and coalition Governments, owing to their failure adequately to pursue compensation on their behalf. At times, it seemed that during periods of improved relations the concerns of victims were secondary to other considerations. The Committee concluded that there had been a series of missed opportunities to raise the issue of compensation, particularly during a period of deepening relations between the UK and Libya in the 2000s.

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[James Cartlidge (South Suffolk) (Con)]

It is a great pleasure to speak in this debate and I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Tewkesbury (Mr Robertson) on securing it. I was fortunate enough to persuade the Backbench Business Committee to grant a Westminster Hall debate on this matter in my name in September 2016. There have been developments since then, although I would not quite say that there has been progress. I want to focus on what has happened recently, which I believe means that the matter is even more pressing.

There is background to why I take such an interest in this matter. A constituent of mine, Charles Arbuthnot, is one of the campaigners; his sister was a 22-year-old WPC killed in the Harrods bombing in 1983. When I first heard about that, I wanted to help as a constituency MP, but the following really struck me about that case, and it is at the core of the matter. I found out—as finally admitted in correspondence to me from the Foreign Office—that a United States citizen who was one of the victims of that Harrods bombing was compensated to the tune of several million pounds by the Libyan Government, yet UK victims have to date received not a penny.

Indeed, I do not comment in any way on the following case and whether the money is justified, but I am bound to say that we heard today from the Attorney General that in the case of Belhaj and Boudchar, two Libyan citizens whom we failed as a country—they suffered harm as a result of the actions of this state—the wife, Fatima Boudchar, will receive £500,000 in compensation. We must look at that and ask how our own victims of Libyan-sponsored terrorism would feel about that. I hope we will get an answer to that from the Minister.

I want now to look at some of the things that keep moving this issue forward. With a group of MPs and Lord Empey, I went to see the Foreign Secretary in October last year, and he promised us in a letter by return that he would be “more visibly proactive” in standing up for victims. I know the Minister is supportive and wants to see progress on this, so my key question to him is what does “more visibly proactive” mean? Does that mean more engagement with the Libyan Government? We know there is great difficulty in terms of the credibility of that Government and the lack of firm government in Libya. Does “more visibly proactive” mean we will get more regular updates, and more discussion between our Government and the Libyans? That is what I want to know: what exactly does that phrase mean in terms of coalface action?

The other point concerns the issue of assets, as set out by my hon. Friend the Member for Tewkesbury. It is hard to ignore the fact that billions of pounds of Libyan money is held in this very city. One of the great features of this country is the reliability of our legal system, and I understand why the Government would be reluctant to look at this issue and in any way undermine the reputation of the City by appearing to be weaker in terms of security to those who might want to put their money here. However, we must also recognise that that Libyan money is frozen under UN mandate, and there will have be a vote in the UN Security Council for those assets to be unfrozen. That would be at the request of Libya once there is a stable Administration, and they would be asking us, in effect, to vote in the UN Security Council to unfreeze those assets. We have already heard from my hon. Friend how the French threatened to use their veto to favour their victims of Libyan terrorism, and it astonishes me that we would not consider at all in any sense using that veto.

In fact in that same letter from the Foreign Secretary, he said:

“At our meeting, we discussed the feasibility of the UK using its veto in the UN Security Council, when the time comes, to prevent the unfreezing of assets until the Libyans had agreed to pay compensation to UK victims. While I sympathise with the intention behind this approach, I need to explain that I believe it highly unlikely that any Foreign Secretary would wish to do this.”

I would like to think that he is not “any Foreign Secretary”; he is a Foreign Secretary who believes in standing up for Britain, and who says he will be “more visibly proactive”, and I would like to think that, “when the time comes”, there will be discussions about that possible procedure.

Lord Empey is bringing forward a Bill again. I sponsored it when it came to the Commons last time; the Government objected and it fell. We must give that Bill at least a chance to be debated in this Chamber.

I want to finish with a really important development in the United States. This concerns a piece of legislation I referred to in the Westminster Hall debate: the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act. It was vetoed by President Obama, as I was informed in that very debate, but I can tell the House that Congress overrode that and it is now an Act in America. In March 2017, 1,500 injured survivors and 850 family members of 9/11 victims filed a class action lawsuit against the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. We have, then, a situation where a Libyan citizen is to receive compensation for what they experienced at the hands of the UK Government, while we know that an American citizen received compensation following the Harrods bombing and that the United States is empowering its citizens to take action against state sponsors. We have to ask ourselves what the British Government are doing for British citizens slain on British soil by a terrorist organisation that was aided and abetted by a brutal regime. The scales of justice have yet to weigh in their favour.

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[Bob Stewart (Beckenham) (Con)]

In 1999, “Bandit Country: The IRA & South Armagh” a book by Tony Harnden, outlined in some detail the links between Libya and the Provisional IRA. The Provisional IRA’s campaign was given huge stimulus by the series of vessels full of weapons that arrived in places such as County Wicklow from the mid-1980s onwards. We are talking about missiles, ammunition and explosives. We make a mistake if we think it was just explosives, because people were killed by Kalashnikovs, rocket-propelled grenades and so on; they were killed by Libyan-inspired weapons. I wish to outline one shipment, to give colleagues an idea of what was coming in.

In about October 1986, a deal was arranged between Thomas “Slab” Murphy of the Provisional IRA, who is pretty well known to people like me, and Nasser Ali Ashour, a Libyan intelligence officer and diplomat. It took about 30 Libyan soldiers two nights to load up a converted Swedish oil rig replenishment ship called the Villa. Some 80 tonnes of weapons and explosives were put about the Villa, including seven RPGs, 10 surface-to-air missiles, a huge number of Kalashnikovs and one tonne of Semtex H, which is an incredibly powerful plastic explosive. It is far more powerful than the normal fertiliser-based bombs used up until that time. The Villa slipped through international waters and landed at Clogga Strand in County Wicklow. From there, its load was spirited away to long-term hides and then secretly distributed to Provisional IRA active service cells for use to kill indiscriminately.

It is indisputable that the Gaddafi regime—let us not say Libyans—supplied weapons and explosives used by the Provisional IRA. It is indisputable that so many innocent people died as a result of Provisional IRA activity using Libyan-supplied arms and explosives. It is indisputable that other nations have ensured compensation for victims of Libyan-backed terrorism. It is indisputable that huge sums of Libyan cash are frozen in London’s banks—we have just heard that there is nearly £12 billion of it. Surely the Government can find a mechanism that can compensate victims, perhaps in advance for those who are getting older, sometimes living in agony or in poverty. Get some money to them!

[James Cartlidge]

My hon. Friend is making a fantastic speech. I was not even aware of the figures cited by the hon. Member for Poplar and Limehouse (Jim Fitzpatrick). Do those figures not suggest that when the request is made, we could return the assets to Libya with some kind of indexing so that it got the full value of its assets, and there would still be billions left with which it could pay recompense?

[Bob Stewart]

They do indeed—my hon. Friend is so right. We could use just a little of the interest. That is all it would take: just a little of the interest to compensate our citizens for this criminal terrorist activity. I am quite sure that decent, honourable Libyan citizens would want that to happen. The Government have a duty to do something about this.

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[Lady Hermon]

rose—

[James Cartlidge]

rose—

[Alistair Burt]

I will give way, but I need to finish at 4.57 pm to give my hon. Friend the Member for Tewkesbury time, and I cannot make progress if I am constantly responding to interventions.

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[Alistair Burt]

I do not think that the presently constituted Libyan Government is in any position to make a decision in relation to such compensation or to pay it. In answer to the hon. Lady’s question, that is one of the practical issues that we are dealing with at the moment.

[James Cartlidge]

I am delighted that the Minister is raising this issue. Did he discuss with Libyan representatives any aspect of the frozen assets issue? Did he remind them that, if those assets are to be unfrozen, that will require a resolution of the UN Security Council, in which we have a vote?

[Alistair Burt]

No, I did not raise that at this time. Our position on the frozen assets is known, but let me come back to that in a moment. If I may, I will make a little progress so that I can present some conclusions.

One or two colleagues raised the issue of visibility, which the Foreign Secretary has previously raised with the Prime Minister of Libya. As far as visibility is concerned, we will continue to raise the matter at the highest level with Libyan counterparts. However, I must say that my conclusion from such meetings and from meeting Ministers myself is that I just do not think they are in a position to deal with this or to put forward anything at present. I am not sure that we can put any timescale on this process, which means that we may have to think about it differently. Progress is likely to continue to be difficult and slow until the situation in Libya changes significantly for the better.

Hon. Members have raised the question of Libyan assets. I do not want to take too much time, but I must repeat that the advice I have been given is that there is no lawful basis on which the UK could seize or change the ownership of any Libyan assets, whether they are owned by the Gaddafi family or by the Libyan state. The UN Security Council resolution under which these assets were frozen is clear that they should eventually be returned for the benefit of the Libyan people, and to breach the resolution would be a violation of international law.

We set out our position on several of the issues that have been mentioned in the Government response to the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee report last year, and in substance the position has not changed, but let me look towards the future. The Government will continue to help victims engage directly with the Libyan authorities to pursue their campaign for compensation. The Foreign Secretary and I have previously met victims groups and the hon. Members who support them, and we remain committed to keeping them and the House updated on any developments.

In view of the likely absence of any progress within a reasonable timescale, I will now write to my colleagues across the Government to explore whether there is anything else the UK Government can do to support victims, their families and their communities. Hon. Members have previously suggested the idea of a community fund to provide assistance with physical, emotional and mental rehabilitation. I will discuss this with my colleagues across the Government and explore what further support may be available under existing Government schemes. I will strongly take into account what hon. Members have said about the way in which we must approach relationships with a friendly Government in Libya who are, at present, unable to respond.

In conclusion, I am quite clear that the concerns raised today have been raised for far too long. We have a long tradition in this House of eventually getting around to things which, under successive Governments, ought to have been done—Hillsborough, contaminated blood and the matter raised by my right hon. and learned Friend the Attorney General earlier this afternoon—and, except for the victims themselves, there are very few clean hands. I and my colleagues are being urged to do more, and I will do my best to keep open all channels of pressure on the Libyan Government, as we help them with stabilisation and for the future. With other colleagues in the Government, I will also try to be as imaginative as possible in dealing with the current situation and with requests for us to do more.