United Nations Security Council Resolution 1973

Richard Burden Excerpts

Monday 21st March 2011 Commons Chamber

[Richard Burden (Birmingham, Northfield) (Lab)]

I apologise for my absence during the early part of the debate, but along with other hon. Members I had to attend a meeting of the Committees on Arms Export Controls. The House will probably understand that events in the middle east and beyond show pretty conclusively the importance of the work of that Committee, and others, in scrutinising UK policy on arms exports.

Many hon. Members have posed the very reasonable question of what we are getting into with the operation in Libya, and Iraq has come up time and time again. Indeed, the spectre of Iraq haunts us all. I was opposed to the invasion of Iraq—I remain of that view—but I also hold the view that the issues we are dealing with today are very different. This action was not preceded by speeches about axes of evil. There have been no off-the-shelf neo-con theories in which the answer was clear in advance and all that remained was the question that allowed that answer to be put into effect—the answer being that we would end up going to war.

In this case, the entire middle east is going through a transformation that we have never seen before—a huge upsurge in popular protest calling for rights and democracy—and the response in Libya was not only violent repression by the Gaddafi regime but a chilling warning that there would be the wholesale slaughter of civilians in Benghazi not in weeks or months but in days. Parallels are always dangerous at such times, but the parallel I thought of at the time was not Iraq but something that I came across soon after I was elected in the early 1990s—the scenes in Srebrenica and elsewhere in Bosnia. It seemed to me that we could not allow that to happen again.

In 2005, the United Nations, as a result of the experience of Bosnia, Rwanda and other places, agreed that the international community did and does have a responsibility to protect. That is right and this is a test of our willingness to do that. Our objectives must be clear. The UN framework established in the resolution passed on Thursday is open to interpretation, but it is more specific than many we have seen recently. We must also be aware that events are dynamic. We need a much clearer strategy of how to go forward and how to respond.

I hope that we will listen to the wise words of the hon. Member for Penrith and The Border (Rory Stewart) about the need to be humble as well as confident and to be limited in our rhetoric and in what we know we can achieve. We should listen to what the hon. Member for Milton Keynes North (Mark Lancaster) said about needing to think through the issues to do with stabilisation and our role in it.

We must be aware of the vital role of the Arab League and the Arab world. Without their support, the UN resolution simply would not have been possible, but now, after the events of the weekend, the comments that were made and the clarifications that were made on the back of those comments, we must have a much closer understanding with the Arab League about how we go forward. We need to recognise and put in place the liaison arrangements that will be necessary to enable and encourage the Arab League to play a much more active role in what transpires from now on rather than being cheerleaders for us. However, the Arab League must also accept that it has responsibilities so that not only Libya but Yemen, Bahrain and other countries in that part of the world can move forward.

We also need to understand, as my hon. Friend the Member for North Ayrshire and Arran (Katy Clark) said, that we need to address not just Arab Governments but the Arab people. When they express their objections to what is happening in this part of the world, the term “double standards” comes up time and again.

While it is right for people to speak of the importance of pursuing the middle east peace process at this time without soft-pedalling, it is also true that “process” is not enough. The former Palestinian ambassador to the United Kingdom, Afif Safieh, put it usefully some years ago when he said it was not enough to have an endless peace process, and that what was needed was an enduring peace. I think that what the people of the Arab world are looking for from us to counteract the impression of double standards that we have given is not just condemnation of, for example, Israeli settlement building, but a resolution to do something about it; not just condemnation of death and destruction in Gaza, but action to ensure that 1.5 million people are no longer forced to live in a kind of open prison.

We need to address those issues, not just for the sake of our credibility, but to establish an understanding with the peoples of the middle east that will allow them to transform their region in the way that they want and allow far more justice in the world—and that will allow far more stability in our world.