Libya

Lord Parekh Excerpts

Friday 1st April 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Parekh]

My Lords, I must confess to a certain degree of unease about our Libyan operation. The Minister’s statement has gone some way towards attenuating that, but he has not assuaged my anxiety altogether. China, India, Russia, Brazil, Turkey and Germany were unsympathetic to the UN resolution and have remained highly critical of the way in which we have interpreted the resolution and are conducting the operation. I am also struck by the fact that the United States is discreetly distancing itself from how the operation is going. It is increasingly being seen in the world at large as an Anglo-French operation, an operation by two middle-ranking former imperial powers living out an imperial fantasy and struggling to find a role for themselves. I do not say that they are right; rather, I am simply alerting the House to voices outside our Chamber.

The story began in Benghazi. When the rebellion took place, Colonel Gaddafi said that he was going to hunt down the rebels from house to house and would show no mercy. There was no certainty at the time that he would have acted on those words, but nevertheless we could not take the risk, so we went to the United Nations and obtained Resolutions 1970 and 1973. With the memory of Srebrenica and Rwanda, we were absolutely right to do so.

Resolution 1973, in order to be effective and for our operation to enjoy global legitimacy, had to be minimal, and I think we are in danger of forgetting what it has committed us to. First, it allows us to protect civilians under threat. There must be a direct or indirect threat. Simply an assumption that Colonel Gaddafi has arms stored away somewhere does not entitle us to act on it. Secondly, Resolution 1973 commits us to respecting the,

“sovereignty, independence, territorial integrity and national unity”,

of Libya. Thirdly, the resolution excludes,

“a foreign occupation force of any form on any part of Libyan territory”.

Fourthly and finally, Resolution 1973 stresses the need to facilitate dialogue with a view to securing,

“the political reforms necessary to find a peaceful and sustainable solution”.

Instead, we have been busy interpreting the resolution in an extremely wide and extensive manner. The United Kingdom alone has conducted 160 aerial missions, has used missiles and has tried to destroy military facilities and ammunition stores. Personally, I do not see any basis for this because there is no guarantee that these were being used or planned to be used against civilians. There is nothing other than the potential capacity for them to be so used, which could be said about almost anything.

We have also gone a little further and talked rather loosely—although the Government have not—of regime change. Resolution 1973 makes it very clear, as does public international law, that this is not something within our authority. We have been talking about arming rebels, and I am told that CIA teams are already on the ground busy doing the job. I must confess that when I read and then supported Resolution 1973, I had no idea that this kind of interpretation could conceivably be put upon it.

What is more, what we have been doing is to throw almost all our weight behind one party in a civil war situation. The rebels make noises about committing themselves to secular democracy, which is music to our ears. We are supporting them but without asking, as the noble Lord, Lord West of Spithead, pointed out, who they are. I do not know much about them, but I do know one thing: Libya has sent a large number of people to fight with al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, and 80 to 85 per cent have come from the Benghazi area. The rebels have also been talking about administering justice to the “enemies of the revolution”, and handing out instant justice to black African soldiers. The Interim Transitional National Council through which they operate does not seem to have a clear policy. Let us also remember that when people come to power having been backed by foreign powers, they lack legitimacy. Put simply, they are so fatally compromised that one could not possibly expect them to deliver on their promises to create a secular democracy.

Let us consider the long-term damage of what we are doing. The United Nations is in danger of being discredited because it is being seen as supporting a particular group of powers rather than representing global opinion. The whole idea of humanitarian intervention runs the risk of being discredited. We are in danger of losing our credibility because we are giving the impression that we said one thing when Resolution 1973 was mooted and then went on to interpret it in the way we liked. It is also deflecting our attention from larger questions in Egypt, Tunisia and Yemen. I am also a little disturbed that, when the rebels engaged in violence, we could easily have said to them, “Resort to peaceful protest as the people of Tunisia and Egypt have done”. Instead we accepted violence as a fait accompli, a fact of life, and went on to support it; we have even talked about arming it. Where does that lead us?

I hope that I have said enough to indicate why I feel deeply disturbed. On the question of what we can do now, I want to end by suggesting at least three things. First, we should ask Colonel Gaddafi to pull back his troops from Ajdabiya, Misrata and Zawiya and restore the flow of water, gas and electricity to those areas. Once he has done that, our intervention should stop. We have done enough to create the conditions in which some kind of political dialogue and settlement can take place, and we should leave the Libyans to do this.

Secondly, as Resolution 1973 makes clear, the Secretary-General of the United Nations and the ad hoc high-level committee of the Peace and Security Council of the African Union are supposed to negotiate a settlement. Rather than trying to take over these affairs, we should expect these two bodies, regionally concentrated, to deal with the matter, and perhaps ask Egypt and Turkey to play an important role.

Thirdly and finally, since all this is being legitimised in the name of Resolution 1973, a question arises: who is going to interpret the resolution? Whose authority is to be accepted? We, who are a party to it? As I said at the time of the Iraq war, I would have thought that in situations like this when the interpretation of UN resolutions is in dispute, it should be possible for us or the United Nations to refer the matter to the International Court of Justice for an advisory opinion. If that proves to be difficult, it should be possible for the United Nations to set up a body of expert jurists on the matter and their interpretation of the resolution should be binding, not the kind of interpretation that a particular interested party might choose to put upon it.