I want to highlight a wider aspect of this issue: the ongoing conflict within Islam, which is taking place not only in north and west Africa; it is a global struggle. It is not helpful to refer to moderates and extremists, because there are complex historical religious disputes and power struggles in which individuals are using religion to try to gain political or economic power.
There was a justified intervention in Libya in 2011, to save the people of Benghazi from being killed, as Gaddafi intended, house by house, like rats. One unfortunate consequence of that intervention was that the country, which was in many senses an artificial creation—as are many countries in the middle east, too, lines having been drawn on maps in the colonial period—has ceased to function in any way as what we would regard to be a state. Because of the weaponry stockpiled by Gaddafi’s regime, and the way he used mercenaries and citizens of other states as part of his elite forces, an unintended consequence of that intervention has been that masses of weaponry have come out of Libya, much of it going to other parts of north and west Africa, but some is going to Syria, Iraq and elsewhere in the Muslim Arab world.
We have already heard mention of the instability in Mali as the Tuaregs swept across the desert and reinforced the incipient disaffected insurgency in the north of the country. I went with the Select Committee to visit both Mali and Nigeria, and we also visited Algeria. It is very revealing to visit a country and get the sense that the lines on the map have created an absolute nightmare. In terms of its borders, Mali must be the strangest country of almost any. There is a round part at the bottom and a triangle going out at the top. There is a completely ungovernable desert area, called Azawad, and the River Niger bending round. All the population lives alongside the river, and there are huge areas of desert and ungovernable space. In any state where the mass of the population is in the capital in the south, I do not know how any Government would be able to govern areas hundreds or thousands of miles away, with virtually no people—except small communities living in areas with access to water, and nomadic populations—and lots of poverty. How any Government, even the most advanced, with massive economic resources, would be able to govern that space effectively is beyond me.
The Chairman of the Select Committee, the right hon. Member for Croydon South (Sir Richard Ottaway), quite rightly referred to the attack on the BP facility in In Amenas in Algeria. People swept across from desert areas and launched a terrorist attack; workers were taken hostage and killed, and there was the terrible long-term consequence of instability in the region.
We now have a nexus of robbers, bandits and criminal bands who would normally be smuggling tobacco or other products across the desert, or smuggling people to the coast to try to board the very same vessels heading across the Mediterranean that were referred to earlier, and that nexus is linked to Islamist ideology and the weaponry that has come out of the Libyan conflict. The Governments in the region face enormous, insurmountable problems.