Libya

Lord Hannay of Chiswick Excerpts

Friday 1st April 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick]

My Lords, it is customary in this House to welcome the holding of a debate on a subject as important as the one that we are discussing today and to thank the initiator of the debate, in this case the Government in the form of the noble Lord, Lord Howell of Guildford. I do so all the more because the noble Lord introduced the debate with an extremely wide-ranging and thoughtful contribution which set us off on the right foot.

I do so, though, feeling that the timing of the debate has been a bit dilatory. We should have had a debate on a matter as significant as the commitment of the Armed Forces of this country to active service at the latest on the same day as the House of Commons, which was 21 March. That we did not shines an uncomfortable light on the relative inflexibility of our procedures in comparison with those in another place. Be that as it may, I believe that I spotted in the Statement of the right honourable gentleman the Foreign Secretary that the Government intend in future to put decisions about the engagement of our Armed Forces on either a conventional or a statutory basis. That surely means that we in this House will need to adapt our procedures accordingly or be completely marginalised. My own view is that we should respect the primacy of the other place, which would mean not taking a vote on the matter here, but that we should ensure that our views are taken into account. That can be done only if we hold a debate no later than any proceedings in the other place. I hope that the Minister can say that these issues will be considered carefully by the Government and that they will revert to the House in due course.

It is striking that, amid all the acres of newsprint that have been devoted to the issue of Libya in the past few weeks, so little reference has been made to the watershed nature of the decision taken by the Security Council in Resolution 1973. Five years ago, the whole membership of the United Nations, all 192 of them, signed up to the principle that, where a regime was unable or unwilling to protect its own citizens, the international community had a responsibility to protect them, if necessary and as a last resort by the use of force. I suppose that I should declare an interest as having been a member of the panel which made the recommendation for that decision to the Secretary-General of the UN, who passed it on to the membership.

Since that time, 2005, there has been much verbal commitment but considerable controversy and absolutely no real action to give effect to the responsibility to protect, if one leaves on one side the rather welcome efforts which the international community made to prevent Kenya slipping into anarchy after its contested elections. Many believed, and quite a few hoped, that the responsibility to protect would remain just so many words on paper—an empty aspiration but not a reality. Well, now Resolution 1973 has given the lie to that, and has done so in the most solemnly legal and legitimising way, in a resolution aimed at protecting the citizens of Libya, who were being grievously repressed by their own ruler. In my view, that resolution is every bit as important a Rubicon to have crossed as was Resolution 678, which authorised the use of force to reverse Iraq’s aggression against Kuwait in 1990. Both will be seen as important landmarks in the post-Cold War history of the UN, of much wider significance than the issues at stake in Iraq or Libya themselves.

Success in the operations which are being undertaken under Resolution 1973 cannot be guaranteed. Many have already spoken in this debate about the challenges we face—the costs, the risks of failure and the risks of stalemate. But it is surely legitimate to ask them, and to ask all those worldwide who have raised their voices in criticism, what alternative they would have favoured. How were they prepared to prevent the inhabitants of Benghazi and other cities in the east of Libya to whom Colonel Gaddafi had promised no mercy? Would they have preferred us to watch and wash our hands of the whole matter—to have stood by, as we did during the Cold War when civilians were slaughtered as, for example, they were in Hama in Syria by President Hafez al-Assad? In my view, great credit is due to our Government and to those other Governments who make up the coalition and voted for Security Council Resolution 1973, and who are now working to implement it.

We should not overlook the wider benefits that could accrue if this operation is successful—the precedent that will be created by making the responsibility to protect a living reality and the deterrent effect that that could have in future on those rulers who might be tempted to oppress and massacre their citizens.

How should we be defining success? Clearly, it is crucial to stick firmly to the mandate that we have to protect as many of the citizens of Libya as we can from the tender mercies of Gaddafi and, on the other hand, to avoid any occupation of the country. If carrying out that mandate imposes constraints on us, they are surely worth accepting as a necessary price for keeping together a wide coalition including, above all, the Arab League. That is the argument against being drawn into loose talk about targeting Gaddafi or speculating on the case for allowing mission creep to bring us towards regime change. Although I am no lawyer, I have had a good deal to do with drafting and interpreting Security Council resolutions, and I find the assertions that Security Council Resolution 1973 in some way overrides or provides a way round the arms embargo on Libya in an earlier resolution fairly dubious and not very convincing.

We should also be doing everything we can to help those Libyans who have escaped from Gaddafi’s grasp to create and build up the institutions of civil society needed to make a market economy, so that in due course they can stand on their own feet and decide their own future in free and fair elections. That is what was done successfully in the Kurdish-populated parts of Iraq in 1991 and thereafter, once the northern no-fly zone had deterred Saddam Hussein from overrunning them. It was underpinned by earmarking a proportion of the resources from Iraq’s oil exports, and it was done without challenging the future territorial integrity of the country. There could surely be a lesson there for Libya and a task for the UN's humanitarian agencies to help the population in those parts of the country where they can work freely and in security. I doubt whether it is wise to look too far ahead at this point at the situation in Libya. It is extraordinarily fluid. I suggest that we need to avoid setting artificial deadlines and agonising too much about exit strategies. The first priority is to implement the mandate which we have.

Of course, there will be lessons to be learnt and conclusions to be drawn—some of them nearer to home—from those events. The role we played at the UN and the role we are playing in Libya is appropriate for a country which is a permanent member of the Security Council and one of the two leading European states in working for international peace and security, but we cannot do that without providing our Armed Forces with the resources they need to do the tasks we ask them to undertake. I fear that in our preoccupation with the need for austerity we may have cut too close to the bone.

We also need to work harder to achieve European solidarity on big decisions in regions which are effectively on our doorstep. I very much regret the German decision to abstain on Resolution 1973, particularly as it was completely unnecessary. The German Government could have supported the resolution while making it clear that their forces would not be involved in any military action. Other members of the Security Council did that. However, it is more important to look ahead and avoid such divisions in future. That is all the more necessary given the clear US preference for working in future as a member of coalitions of a wider kind, not just coalitions of the obedient, as they did in the past.

We Europeans have been calling for such an evolution in US policy for years. We must not flinch from it or criticise it now that it is upon us—however unexpectedly. Europe has an important role to play in these game-changing developments in the wider Middle East, in the economic as well as in the political and military fields. The EU should surely be spearheading a wider international effort to offer assistance to those countries which emerge from autocracy and set themselves on the course of establishing democratic institutions and the rule of law. We should be providing better trade access, encouragement for investment and advice, where it is welcome. I very much hope that the Minister can set out what the Government intend to do to ensure that the EU rises to the occasion in that wider context.