Libya

Lord Gilbert Excerpts

Friday 1st April 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Soley]

My Lords, I want first to congratulate the Government and the Prime Minister because they acted rightly and effectively. It is important to put that on the record and have it known. I also take the view that, as always with these situations, military intervention is uncertain; you do not know what is going to follow. Both the Minister and other people have said that we must not put boots on the ground and that we must exit quickly and so on. The problem is that, once you start a military action, knowing how and when it will end is incredibly difficult. It also raises the issue of what we do in the post-conflict situation. The failure in respect of Iraq was not the issues around the United Nations but the absence of a workable post-conflict plan. Colin Powell had such a plan, but when he was replaced by Donald Rumsfeld it went out of the window and we paid a very high price for it.

The temptation in these situations is to compare one intervention with the previous intervention. Making comparisons with Iraq is not particularly helpful. What matters is looking at this intervention as part of a historical process. I have made the point on many previous occasions that it is not just the West that intervenes. I have discussed these arguments with my noble friend Lord Parekh in the past, but I remind the House that India thought that it was absolutely right to intervene and remove the East Pakistan Government and replace it with Bangladesh. What was happening in East Pakistan then was very similar to what is happening in Libya now. In other words, intervention is carried out by others. I have referred in the past to debates in this House in the 19th century on the ending of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, which cost us 12,000 military lives and released some 200,000 slaves. Those debates reflected many of the arguments now, particularly about international law. Intervention has a long history.

What fascinates me about this situation is that, with the collapse of the Cold War, the acceleration towards a wish for democracy, freedom and the rule of law has become clear. People in the Maghreb and the Middle East are not going on to the streets crying out for al-Qaeda or another dictator; they are going on to the streets crying out for democracy, the rule of law and human rights—they know what they want. The problem for them is delivering it, and our problem is helping them. Libya has had for 42 years a particularly brutal dictatorship. I sometimes think that we fail to get over the message that there is a very important difference between extreme and efficient dictators such as Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein, Adolf Hitler and others and those Governments, of Saudi Arabia, for example, who may be authoritarian but are capable of being moved. If we see the current events in the context of a historical process of people crying out for democracy and recognising that you cannot have a modern, stable state without democracy and human rights, we begin to understand them a bit better.

It is important to remember that, following the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003, Gaddafi feared the same would happen to him. That is why he came to the British Government and said that he had a weapons of mass destruction programme, that he was—as the noble Lord, Lord Alderdice, said—supporting terrorism and that he was going to stop. The previous Government got a lot of criticism for trying then to engage with him, but they were exactly right. If a dictatorship looks as though it is changing and breaking down, you need to help it happen, but when it fails, as it so dramatically did when Gaddafi turned his guns on his own citizens, you have to intervene.

The noble Lord, Lord Teverson, referred to the European Union. My frustration with the EU is along the lines of that of the noble Lord, Lord Robertson: it is an economic giant but a political and military pygmy. I do not have time to develop the argument, so I shall use, as always, a rather casual analogy. It is like a family being brutalised and beaten up, with the kids being killed, and the next door neighbours—Europe in this case—sitting down, calling a case conference and discussing whether they should stop the benefits of the guy who is doing it. You have to have a police force and you have to be able to intervene. If we had been able to remove Saddam Hussein in 1993 after the first Gulf War, there would not have been a second Gulf War. Nor would there have been 10 years of sanctions, which all brutal and efficient dictatorships manage to redirect on to their opposition within their own country. That is why sanction regimes can often be inefficient.

We should look at this as a process where our role is to encourage and promote, without being embarrassed about it, democracy, the rule of law and human rights. These are not just western concepts. Many societies throughout history and around the world have shown these attributes; they might not have used the same words or the same structures, but that is what they have done. There is bound to be a natural desire for freedom in people, and we need to stand up and speak for it.

Law has been mentioned often in this debate; it is a very strong issue. Lawyers have failed to grasp the problem, and continue to fail to grasp, that if we do not deal with brutal dictators and give ourselves a power to remove them, however difficult it might be to draw up that law, we enable them to continue—in whatever country, whatever culture and whatever society. It is not easy. I do not pretend for one moment that you can have a law up your sleeve which you can pull out and put into effect, because, at the end of the day, the political reality is that the world is not ready for it. The political aspect tells you that you cannot do it. But let us just imagine if, in late 1944 or early 1945, we had said, “Well, we’ve expelled the Nazis from all the countries they’ve invaded, but we’re going to let Hitler stay in power and we might apply a few sanctions”. We would have been laughed out of court. It would have been politically impossible and morally disgusting. Lawyers fail to face up to that, which is why I get so cross with them when they argue the moral case about removing brutal dictators. Yes, it is difficult, and, no, we do not have a way of doing it at the moment—I acknowledge that—but you cannot just duck the problem.

The key issue for us now is the post-conflict situation. We cannot say, as some have done, that we will simply withdraw. We may get pulled further in. If this battle continues, we may have to have boots on the ground. We have to face that reality. We will not walk away if, suddenly, Gaddafi gets even stronger and refugees start pouring out of the area and coming over to Europe.

I desperately hope that the rebels win, but, as has been indicated, we do not really know very much about them, so, by God, we need to put in an effort to help build the institutions of a state which begins to provide some stability, because 42 years of brutal dictatorship breaks down community relations at all levels. All forms of brutal dictatorships do that and we forget it at our peril. People are not often aware—indeed, I was shocked when I heard it—that, at the end of the Second World War, infighting among the French resistance cost more lives of French resistance fighters than were lost to the Nazis during the whole occupation.

[Lord Gilbert]

Before my noble friend sits down, would he not agree that everything that he has just been saying about lawyers was said by Edmund Burke?

[Lord Soley]

I shall have to go away and read Edmund Burke; I am not 100 per cent sure about that. I am not entirely against lawyers, although I have a long list of names of lawyers whom I would pay not to defend me.

Under evolving international law, we need to think a lot harder about the reality of politics. We need some way of facing up to the fact that leaving extreme dictators in power is not really a morally acceptable position.

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[Lord Gilbert]

My Lords, when one has at some time in one’s career been exposed to classified papers one recognises how little one knows when the stream of classified papers dries up. I have had that experience twice. I did not enjoy it on either occasion but I feel rather naked talking about these matters at a time like this when so much is changing so fast.

Two issues are being discussed today. One is whether we should or should not arm the very brave young freedom fighters in Libya. It seems to me that if Mr Gaddafi is to be defeated by military means—that is not the only possibility, of course—we have only two choices: either we arm them or we do it ourselves. I do not detect much appetite among your Lordships for doing it ourselves. Therefore, we need to think very carefully about giving the means to do it to other people.

It has been said that we do not know anything about these freedom fighters. I dispute that. I think that we know a great deal about them. First, they are very brave. I am very grateful to the Minister for his remarks about al-Qaeda. He pointed out that through all this turbulence in the Middle East there has been virtually no support for al-Qaeda. People are not shouting in the streets for al-Qaeda, they are shouting for democracy, freedom of assembly and freedom of speech—things they have learnt from us. That is marvellous. From everything I can see, events in the Middle East over the past few weeks have been nothing more than a disaster for al-Qaeda. It has not got very far with its recruiting campaigns among the young men on the streets of Sanaa or Damascus or those battling Gaddafi in Libya. I very much agreed with the comments of my noble friend Lord Soley. I will give him the reference to Edmund Burke later. Burke advised us not to ask what the lawyers tell us we may do but to find out what peace, honour and justice tell us we must do. My noble friend and I, and I am sure a lot of other Members of this House, agree with those sentiments.

I will not spend long talking about the military side of this. We have a marvellous opportunity with the arrival of Mr Moussa Koussa. His name sounds like a very bad Greek dessert. No doubt he will have been talking. If he has not been, I suggest that we tell him that we have a seat in a C-130 waiting to take him back to Tripoli as soon as we can get him on board. He would then start to sing quite quickly. We should make a recording of everything that Mr Moussa Koussa says to our interrogators and play it back to Libya. Given the comments that some of his colleagues in Tripoli have made recently, it would be interesting if this came to the ears of Colonel Gaddafi, and it might encourage quite a few others to follow Mr Moussa Koussa as quickly as possible.

I will make a couple of more general points. It has been said, not least by the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Stirrup, that Libya is not of vital interest to us. I am sorry that I have the temerity to disagree, but Libya at the moment is of absolutely vital interest to us. If things go wrong there, it will have an appalling effect on the rest of the Middle East, with consequences for our interests as well. I am not suggesting that we change the deployment of forces, but we should concentrate our diplomatic efforts on Mr Moussa Koussa and Libya, to the detriment of other diplomatic activities that we have been engaged in recently. I hate to think what will happen if Libya goes wrong.

We have tended to view the situation in Libya too much through the prism of UK interests. We are understandably concerned about the case of policewoman Fletcher and about Lockerbie. However, those issues do not play strongly on the streets of Yemen, Bahrain and Syria. What to them is the loss of one policewoman? What is the loss of 130 people in an aeroplane? It is terrible to us, but they are not as interested because of the number of corpses on their streets every day.

My noble friend Lord Robertson said that what is happening in Libya is a wake-up call for the European Community. I heard my noble friend say the same at the time of Kosovo. I do not think that there is a full recognition in this country of the enormity of the military contribution of the United States to what is going on in the Middle East. Two hundred Tomahawk missiles have been launched, with brilliant accuracy. My noble friend said that the only people who had these were us and the United States. He did not point out that we sent three winging through the air while the United States sent 200. It is rather reminiscent of Kosovo, where 85 per cent of the attack missions were flown by American aircraft. What is happening now is that the Americans are using B-2s—a brilliant piece of kit—all the way from Kansas, not Norfolk. We read that other European NATO nations are supplying hundreds of planes, but I have not seen any sign of them in action.

I am glad to see my noble friend Lady Turner in her seat. She was very distressed by what happened in Kosovo. She spoke of indiscriminate bombing. I was the Minister responsible for approving every target that we attacked in Kosovo and I assure her that the bombing was not indiscriminate. I am sure that I will not persuade her to my point of view as to its utility, but I assure her that it was far from indiscriminate.

I have one question for the Government and I should be very obliged if the Minister would take it on board. With this, we come to political matters. I do not understand why this Government, most of whose activities over Libya I sincerely applaud, are still recognising Gaddafi’s administration. There was an answer to that in another place on 18 March. The Prime Minister said in reply to a question from Mr Chishti, Member for Gillingham and Rainham:

“My hon. Friend asks a good question. As he knows, in this country, we recognise countries rather than Governments”.—[Official Report, Commons, 18/3/11; col. 632.]

I read that sentence countless times and I still do not understand it. What the devil is the difference between a country and a Government? How do you withdraw recognition from Canada or Nigeria? That sentence is absolute gobbledegook. There is no reason whatever why we cannot withdraw recognition. In this country, as I understand it, we recognise who is in control of a country, whether we like them or not. To say “we recognise countries” is blithering nonsense. Can the Minister define what the Prime Minister meant and say why on earth we cannot follow the French, the Qataris and many others in giving recognition to the interim council based in Benghazi? I think that that would be a major contribution to isolating Gaddafi in Tripoli even further than he is already.

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[Lord Howell of Guildford]

That is a fair point, which I think the noble Lord recognises is a point of argument rather than of policy, and I accept it.

The noble Lord, Lord Stone, comes forward in these debates with marvellously constructive proposals for really making things hum on the ground. He spoke about opening small businesses, retail shops and so on, which are the lifeblood of almost all the economies that we are talking about and without which they will never prosper again. He said that our powerful supermarket chains in this country could help. These are fascinating proposals; I shall take them away and study them as closely as his earlier proposals in a debate that we had a few weeks ago about Palestine.

The noble Lord, Lord Gilbert, wanted to know what the Prime Minister meant on the recognition issue when he said that we recognise countries, not Governments. I would use almost the same words although perhaps I would say that we recognise states, not Governments. I do not see the difficulty that the noble Lord is having over this. States have Governments that are lawful; if there is not a lawful Government or no clear Government, there is no basis for recognition. At the moment we recognise those countries that have a lawful Government. Even if they are in a state of hostility, we still recognise them. I am not too sure that I see the problem. Perhaps he can explain it.

[Lord Gilbert]

The Minister just talked about lawful Governments but he has agreed, as everyone else has done, that Colonel Gaddafi has lost his legitimacy. Does it not follow from this that Gaddafi is not a lawful Government?

[Lord Howell of Guildford]

My noble friend Lord Wallace of Saltaire, who is a considerable expert on these finer points, tells me that it is a question of being in control of territory. That is the judgment. In many of these areas there is a neat formula and there is real life, and when it comes to real life one has to use a bit of judgment in assessing who to recognise and who is in charge or control of any Government in any country at any one time. The position is that it is states that we recognise, not Governments.

All the speeches today were good so comparisons are odious, but my noble friend Lord Alderdice put the matter with wonderful clarity when he said that the answer to “What are we doing?” is that we are doing our duty as a responsible nation: policing international law. That is a matter that all nations which want to play in the responsible league and not wash their hands and step aside or be freeloaders have to face as well. On that basis, we shall be seeking more and more coalition co-operation from a wider range of nations, all of whose interests, including ours, are affected by having a potential rogue state, or a state promoting illegal violent acts which destroy other states, in our midst. That is what a rogue Libya could do. It is a big oil state near our own continent of Europe which is very influential in being able to damage trade routes and whose influence could even extend down towards the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean area. This affects everyone’s interests increasingly, in this globalised, integrated trading and energy system on which we all depend.

The noble Lord, Lord Hannay, in a characteristically fine speech, asked the big question about Benghazi and what we have done in the past few days. Could we have stood by? Suppose we had done nothing, and just watched while the Gaddafi troops rode into Benghazi, shot down the women and children, piled up their bodies, and said, “This is the way it is”. The world would once again have allowed a crazed dictator to exert his evil will on innocent people. Of course we could not have done that; of course we had to act, and of course other countries had to act with us. I believe that that case will sink in even to those countries that have stood back from the UN resolution or actually opposed it. However, nobody on the Security Council did that—there were abstentions but no opposition.

As for the defectors who have arrived here and made all the headlines in recent days, including Moussa Koussa, I said at the beginning of the debate that he will not be given immunity. Nevertheless, he is in a way a symptom or evidence of a trend which one feels may be helpful—the desertion of Gaddafi by his immediate gang. How he would hang on and whether he would hang on, whether he would seek peace, are all questions that have been raised and will be debated. If all those around him, one by one, or maybe in twos and threes, desert him, that would, in a sense, be one of the most satisfactory ways of moving out of this dark situation, resulting in the total abandonment by all his advisers of this unpredictable and dangerous man.

Those are my comments on the detailed points raised by your Lordships. In the short term, we will continue to take measures to isolate this man and his regime and to secure their departure. We will continue to support the opposition, to prevent attacks on the civilian population and to prevent humanitarian crises. We will see this through—that is our aim. Our long-term objective is a unified Libya under a central Government who represent the will of the people for more openness and democracy, which is not run by Gaddafi and does not pose external threats either in the region or more broadly.

I tried at the beginning of this debate to place events in a wider strategic context. As your Lordships have echoed and recognised, a wind of change is blowing through the Middle East. Every BBC broadcast that one listens to on waking up brings news of more dramatic developments in countries we have not even mentioned in the debate, such as Kuwait, Jordan and, indeed, Iran. It is the responsibility of civilised nations across the world to react to these calls for change and to play our part in taking humanitarian action, safeguarding human rights and promoting democracy. That is why the United Kingdom will continue to be at the forefront of the international efforts to assist the Libyan people and those across the Middle East more generally.

The pace of change across the world is very fast and unpredictable. If the UK is to prosecute a successful foreign policy in future, one that protects and promotes our interests and our nation, our approach must reflect the reconfigured international order that is now emerging. That means working not only bilaterally, to build new links with both established and emerging powers, but also multilaterally, to make our engagement with multilateral institutions much more effective. The way in which we have responded to the Libya crisis and the wider change in the Middle East that we have discussed today is evidence that we are successfully rising to the current challenges in foreign policy.