Libya

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 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. Motion agreed.