You. Good evening, everyone, and welcome.
My name is Michael Willis. I'm one of the fellows here at the Middle East Centre since these college.
And I'm very pleased to welcome you to our event this evening.
Now, Tuesdays this term, we have been dedicating the Middle East centre to looking at important new books on the Middle East and North Africa.
Both of you came this time last week.
You would have heard Jeremy Bow in the BBC's Middle East editor talk about his new book, The Making of the Modern Middle East.
And this evening, I am pleased to say we are very privileged to have another very prominent speaker address us about his latest book.
Ian Martin is a distinguished human rights activist and international diplomat who has held some of the most important roles in both fields.
From 1986 to 1992, he served as secretary general of Amnesty International.
He went on to work for the United Nations, serving a large number of senior roles in missions in Haiti,
Rwanda, East Timor and Nepal, to name just a few of them.
However, he's probably best known to those of us who worked on and familiar with the Middle East and North Africa.
With his work in Libya in April 2011, in the wake of a popular uprising against the regime of Moammar Gadhafi,
he was named special advisor to the Secretary General of the United Nations on post-conflict planning for Libya.
He then went directly on to serve as Special Representative of the Secretary-General and Head of the UN Support Mission in Libya.
From the 11th of September 2011 until a 17th of October 2012.
He was therefore very much at the heart of efforts to fashion a response from the outside world,
the international community, whether we can call it the international community.
I wondered over what was the best phrase response to the uprising in Libya and its aftermath?
And now the role played by outside actors in events in Libya during this period attracted significant
debate both at the time and also since then over issues of whether too much was done or not enough,
whether it was done by the wrong people at the right time or the right people at the wrong time, or indeed the wrong people at the wrong time.
The prolonged civil conflict that Libya has found itself in and experienced over much of the past decade has often been
attributed to the events that took place and decisions that were made in the first year or so after the uprisings began in 2011.
Not all of this debate has been as informed or as rooted in in what actually happened as it could have been.
That is why it's so valuable to have someone who was actually there and at the centre of
what was happening to give his considered view an assessment of this important period.
Ian Martin has now written and published his reflections and assessment and a new book, All Necessary Measures Note for Question Mark,
which I think is important for the United Nations and international intervention in Libya.
We are therefore very pleased and honoured. I'm going to thank you for coming to speak to us tonight here about this book.
Ian. Thanks very much, Michael.
In my appreciation to Atlanta, this Middle East centre for inviting me here.
Most important question about Libya is what on earth to do now about the mess that Libya is in?
And yesterday I watched the eighth special representative of the Secretary General in 13 years.
Mr. Abdulai Bartley, briefed the UN Security Council for the first time after taking on picking up the baton in Libya.
I'm afraid that's not what this book is about and you won't find the answers to that question in it.
It's about the intervention in 2011 and the immediate aftermath.
And while I wrote it, apart from in order to keep myself somewhat occupied during the COVID lockdowns,
because I have become increasingly irritated with references to Libya at that time,
which I think either distort what happened or at least don't fully reflect the reality.
And it's not uncommon these days to hear Afghanistan,
Iraq and Libya mentioned almost in the same breath as examples of disastrous Western intervention.
Whatever one thinks about each of those interventions that are radically different and in their nature for sure.
And so I wanted to look at what I think is the reality of how both of your intervention came about and which carried through.
I also wanted to reflect on, I suppose, my own role because I left Libya after its first post-Gadhafi election,
its first election for more than 40 years, and in some ways its worst election ever.
In July 2012, I left shortly after that. What was a moment of relative optimism, which,
despite by then the death of the US ambassador and the jihadist attack on the US compound in Benghazi, it was still.
There was still optimism that that election might be the basis for a positive way forward.
And so I wanted to reflect on what more we could have done,
what more could have been done in that early period that might perhaps have saved or mitigated the later problems in Libya.
So although this book really isn't about what to do about Libya now, I think it's not irrelevant to three things.
I mean, one, I still think that talking about Libya today is better done on the basis of a nuanced and
accurate understanding of what actually happened at the beginning of the intervention.
But secondly, I think it's relevant to wider issues of international intervention.
And following the collapse of the international project in Afghanistan and the and the despair.
It's one major intervention that bears analysis.
I quote in the introduction to the book, the US diplomat who said, We intervened in Iraq and occupied it and it was a disaster.
We intervened in Libya and didn't occupy it and it was a disaster and we haven't intervened in Syria and it's a disaster.
And so the question of whether the all forms of positive and effective intervention is still one that has to be asked.
The third thing that I think the book has some relevance to is for those of us
who are interested in the United Nations and how the United Nations does things.
The Libya case poses some important questions about decision making in the United Nations Security Council and
accountability back to the UN Security Council and also about the role of United Nations peace operations on the ground,
which the one I started up in Libya is is one.
So just to be clear, on on my own role is, as Michael rightly referred to,
I became involved because after military intervention had been authorised by the Security Council at the first major gathering,
international gathering of the countries that supported the intervention,
the London conference, convened by the UK, which became something called the Libya Contact Group,
shifted from General Ban Ki-Moon was was asked and agreed that the UN would in some way take the lead in post-conflict planning.
And I was then asked to come to the U.N. Secretariat to begin to think about that.
I did that despite not being a middle East expert or an Arabic speaker.
I was asked to do it because of some of my other experience in peace operations elsewhere, and I then was in effect required to go consult.
The mission up in Tripoli fell quicker than anybody expected and to see it through its first year
and the first election in the reflections from me that you circulated was part of the notice.
For this seminar. I posed a number of questions and I'm going to discuss them tonight on the Five Main Hates.
The first is how did the intervention come about? And was it justified?
What was the case for intervention? Secondly, how were the military operations that were authorised, carried out, and what implications did they have?
Thirdly, was there ever any alternative to a military outcome, mediated outcome of managed transition?
Fourthly, what force was given to post-conflict planning to the day after?
And finally, how did that play out on the ground in the in the first year?
So I'm going to try to address each of those those five.
Regarding the arguments around intervention in the first place, the major retrospective controversy is really what's the action going to be?
A massacre in Benghazi as those who intervened said it was the basis for humanitarian intervention.
So in the book, I try to examine as closely as possible the early response from the Gadhafi regime to the uprisings across Libya,
not only in the east, in Benghazi, but also in Tripoli, in Misrata and in other places.
And the way what were initially peaceful demonstrations were met with lethal, lethal force.
There's no doubt that there was some exaggerated reporting of what happened, including from Al Jazeera, for example.
There's no doubt that the way in which fears were expressed was exaggerated with talk of genocide, with references to another and another Srebrenica.
But it has to be said, was compounded by Gadhafi's own rhetoric,
his talk of the those involved in the uprising as rats who were going to be expunged street by street by al-Qaida and by having.
And my own conclusion is that certainly were good reasons to fear killings, including of civilians and other reprisals had Gadhafi's forces gone,
all them to take Benghazi, the epicentre of the uprising, as they were only hours away from doing when military action actually began.
And those fears were real, and they were very real to Libyans in Benghazi, the International Committee of the Red Cross,
which is not an organisation but it frightens, easily withdrew its personnel and expressed fears about the killing of civilians.
So in my view, they were not a pretext. Policymakers in London, Paris, Washington were indeed scarred by Rwanda and Tripoli.
So it is perhaps best expressed, as I quote in the book, by the then Norwegian foreign minister, who today is Norway's prime minister.
You a story of a man who actually was very much in favour of trying to bring about a non-military outcome.
But he said, as politicians, we belong to a generation that has the disastrous experience of rendering trade agreements with us.
So that's the first point I want to make, that fears were real, substantially justified and not, in my view, a pretext.
But the other thing that I think doesn't come through in a lot of references I read somewhere the other day,
a reference to what happened in Libya as the US invasion of Libya, which isn't exactly what I remember happening.
It certainly is largely grouped with other Western interventions,
but it was actually Arab voices that were loudest and foremost in calling for intervention, including military intervention, including a no fly zone.
They were Libyan voices, and one of the most dramatic effects on UN decision making was the defection of all Libya's diplomats at the UN,
led by the deputy permanent representative,
eventually followed by the Permanent Representative who had been close to Gaddafi but had a profound effect on the diplomatic climate in New York.
But it was Arab multilateral organisations, the Arab League, the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation.
It was Arab civil society voices.
And of course, it was a number of Arab states, particularly the Gulf states,
although there were states, Syria, Algeria, that were reluctant to see international intervention.
In fact, the majority of the Arab institutions call for it,
and one can't take the Libyan decision making out of the broader context of what came to be discussed,
that perhaps we should drop this, the Arab Spring, the context of the Arab other Arab uprisings,
because there was certainly a degree of sympathy across the Arab world and the
fear that if Gadhafi succeeded in putting down an uprising of his own people,
that would have wider consequences in the in the region.
So that takes me to the way decision making played out in the United Nations Security Council.
And certainly French President Sarkozy, British Prime Minister Cameron were pretty gung ho in calling for intervention,
but calling specifically for a no fly zone, even though it came to be pointed out to them by their military advisers at a local.
So in itself would have had little effect in checking what was going on on the ground.
And it was really President Obama whose decision making, if you look at it up close,
some there are very close accounts from many of the key participants,
which was most careful in which he said,
don't ask me to support a no fly zone in the Security Council and less of what Gadhafi's forces are doing on the ground.
Address that. It wasn't a chicken.
There was a major argument within that administration that intervention was very much opposed by the then secretary of defence Gates,
also, incidentally, by Vice President Biden. And when Obama finally took the decision to support intervention, according to Gates,
he told Gates there had been a 5149 call, so it was not an enthusiastic US led intervention.
The other aspects of dynamics in the Security Council I think are particularly interesting is the way in which
the three African members of the Security Council were persuaded to support intervention without their votes.
That would not have been nine votes in the Security Council and that the key vote was South Africa's and the decision of Jacob Zuma as its president,
who before long was strongly criticising the for the intervention, took but also the abstention of of Russia.
And that's gone on being an issue of considerable interest in 2011.
Move, a foreign policy decision maker in Moscow was President Medvedev.
Putin was stepped back to the role of Prime Minister and it was Medvedev who took the decision that Russia would abstain.
And it was quite immediately controversial.
The Russian ambassador to Libya resigned and very soon when the intervention started, Putin was denouncing it as a medieval crusade.
And Medvedev was defending publicly against Putin its decision to to abstain.
And there are still divergent views from those who tried to examine it closely as to what was really going on.
Obama writes in his memoir that he can't believe that Medvedev took the decision without Putin's support and consulting him.
But it does seem to have been a genuine disagreement.
And so those African votes, the decisions of Russia and China to abstain rather than to veto it meant that the Security Council.
Adopted its resolution authorising all necessary measures that have the title of of the book.
So my answer, that first set of questions is that there was a humanitarian case.
And I also believe that non-intervention was almost inconceivable in a context which both look back to things in render and in Bosnia,
but also looked around at what was going on in the Arab world.
Well, that leads to the question how it was that all necessary measures and these actually implemented.
And before long it was being implemented by nature of the early military action was outside nature.
But before long it was brought under the veto chain of command.
And the first area of controversy around the nature of intervention is didn't need to exceed a mandate, which,
in the language of the Security Council resolution, was to use all necessary measures to protect civilians.
And did they exceed that mandate by going on to the objective of regime change?
It's not an easy line to draw between protecting civilians and regime change in a context
where a regime is using all its military resources in a way that endangers civilians.
But my own conclusion is very clear that although one might be hard put through to see where exactly the line is crossed but the line was crossed,
I think it's impossible to to argue against the need to action went from defending
or enabling the defence of towns and cities that Gadhafi's forces had attacked
after the uprisings there to supporting the attacks by the rebels as they were able
to go on the offensive towards places still controlled by the Gadhafi regime.
And then finally, when the NATO operation continued,
even after the fall of Tripoli and the rebels took the lost Gadhafi strongholds of certain Bani Walid.
And I think it's pretty hard to argue that when NATO's jets fired on Gadhafi's convoy as he fled Sirte, some parents clearly a beaten man.
But that was still a form of military action that was necessary and justified to protect civilians,
although NATO's spokespeople continued to maintain that.
But although there's quite a lot written about along those lines about NATO's application of the mandate,
what is very little discussed and what I tried to bring as much as I could into the book is the role of bilateral special forces.
Special Forces operations are, by definition, secret.
If you read what has been written or given in evidence by General Sir David Richards,
who is the Chief of Defence Staff at the time of the intervention in both his memoir and his evidence,
he's given to the House of Commons Select Committee.
Apart from criticising David Cameron's micromanagement and saying that he had determined that having been the combined cadet force,
that each of them was not a qualification for micromanaging a complex coalition military operation.
Richards, I think, quite rightly says that whatever was happening,
what it was being done by nature from the air, it was the ground war that was crucial.
And although in saying that, he says little about the role of Special Forces and credits the the rebel ground war.
In fact, it's clear that the deployment of special forces was crucial to the success of the ground, not in huge numbers.
And although there is although those operations are secret that are not declared to Parliament when select committees inquire later on,
it's quite interesting to see how David Cameron writes about it in his own memoir.
He says, With our allies France, Qatar and the UAE, we ended up steering the ramshackle Libyan army from a secret cell in Paris,
providing weapons, support and intelligence to the rebels, planning an assault on Tripoli.
This quartette of countries known internally as the Four Amigos.
Little ironic in retrospect, focus on training, equipping and mentoring effective militias in the West,
though this was known to major nature in the US, once again, we were operating outside the traditional structures.
So those special forces effectively trained Ben to accompany and equipped the the rebel brigades arms were supplied to them.
Most of the supplies of arms were were done by Qatar, number one, and the UAE number two, the France, the UK, the US kept the cells away from.
But except on one occasion when France directly supplied weapons dropped,
which it then maintains were to provide weapons for the protection of civilians.
These were undeclared to the United Nations,
although any supplies of arms when there was with an arms embargo in effect were supposed to be subject to authorisation by the sanctions committee.
They were not notified. And indeed, long after the events, Qatar was denying that it had supplied weapons to the UAE in the documents,
acknowledged that it had broken the embargo and indeed was continuing to do so as it has done,
one might say, virtually to this day, despite Security Council sanctions.
And I think that Special Forces operation, those arms supplies were certainly outside any Security Council authority,
because the authority of all necessary measures, required measures taken to be.
Notified to the UN secretary general and by him to the Security Council.
And I think raise major questions of accountability to the Security Council and indeed may raise major questions of accountability in domestic terms,
because when there is no knowledge of special forces operations, then there is effectively no no accountability.
Now, the manner in which that support happened had some important implications for what followed in Libya.
I think the assistance and the weapons supplies were provided outside of any civilian control, any chain of command.
The National Transitional Council in Benghazi had no ability to exercise a chain
of command over the different Revolutionary Brigades as they as they called them.
And increasingly, Qatar, in the UAE, particular in particular, favoured particular armed groups on the ground.
So they crudely cut off the fate of the groups that were more Islamist in orientation,
whereas the UAE favoured those that were less Islamist in orientation.
And that began tensions that played on through to what followed what might over say to the present day,
as did the practice, as I said, of of breaking sanctions.
So my third question is,
was there ever a possibility of a mediated outcome of managed transition instead of the battle being fought on to a military victory?
And there were multiple efforts and I tried to bring them together in the in the book,
in the way they unfolded and either did relate or didn't relate to each other.
First off, the ground actually was Norway country,
which tries to play a mediation role and was approached very early on by selected Islam Gadhafi, Gadhafi's son.
And there was actually a Norwegian negotiating team in Tripoli when the Security Council authorised
military action and rapidly had to evacuate itself to Tunisia before the bombing began.
So there was a Norwegian effort, which has been very little written about or analysed, I think, outside outside Norway.
The United Nations responded, the secretary general, Ban Ki moon, by appointing a special envoy, Mr. al-Khatib, a former foreign minister of Jordan,
and he began an engagement with the Gadhafi regime in Tripoli and with the National Transitional Council in Benghazi.
The African Union rapidly called for a ceasefire and set out what it called its roadmap for a negotiated outcome.
Appointed a high level committee, which the heavyweight was Jacob Zuma.
They were affronted when they were told by NATO and indeed by continuing on behalf of the intervening countries
that they couldn't proceed to Tripoli as they were planning to do because bombing was about to begin.
So it was some time before they got to Tripoli.
They were. However, Zuma was the only person, to my knowledge, who actually dealt directly with Gadhafi and Zuma and that A.U. team on the.
The first is Zuma that on the on the second visit or everybody else dealt with his son and prime minister foreign minister of the entourage with very
little indication of how fully they spoke to Gadhafi and the EU were then regarded themselves as marginalised I believe were indeed marginalised.
The Western narrative was that they were seeking to save Gadhafi,
who had of course squandered quite a lot of Libya's money on the African Union and African governments.
But I believe myself and I try to examine the record that that judgement is unfair,
that the African Union was genuinely trying to negotiate a managed transition,
the outcome of which would certainly have included Gadhafi stepping down from from power.
Although the biggest difficulty that everybody found in the negotiations was would Gadhafi step down from what was never very clear,
since you pointed out he held no official position, would you stay in Libya or would he leave Libya?
And if so, as for where the intervening countries, on the other hand, were from the beginning seeking regime change.
David Richards, you have already referred to General Richards interestingly, says that in the plan,
the UK plan for military action he had built in a pause after Benghazi had been saved, a pause for diplomacy, assuming that.
But once the assault on Benghazi had been checked, then that would be a moment to to seek to to negotiate.
That didn't happen. France and indeed UK political leaders were uninterested in this.
And indeed the. They used the. Relations with the National Transitional Council discourage rather than to encourage engagement in a mediated outcome.
So whether such an outcome was ever possible, we shall never know.
My own view is that if there was a possibility, it would have required coordination amongst those trying to bring it about.
It was the Africans, the African Union and Zuma who had the maximum potential leverage with Gadhafi.
And it was the intervening countries that have the maximum leverage with the National Transitional Council.
But that's not what happened. Indeed, in many ways it was the opposite.
And having quoted once approvingly on a story of Norway, I'll quote his judgement, which I think is a very fair judgement.
I felt with the mind set in London and Paris didn't have openings for really reflecting on the diplomatic option
had the been in the international community a willingness to pursue this track with some authority and dedication.
I believe that could have been an opening to achieve a less dramatic outcome and avoid the collapse of the Libyan state.
And I'll quote as well a view from inside the African Union Commission.
A consensus could have been achieved had the West approached the A.U. in a more subtle and respectful way.
Closer coordination, an honest and respectful conversation between the EU and the West would have made it possible to build sufficient international
leverage to compel Gadhafi to accept and to exit the scene with the required security guarantees for himself and his close associates.
We can't be sure, but judgement is is right because it didn't happen.
What we can, I'm afraid, be sure of that's not what trying Gadhafi was, of course, is obduracy was a huge obstacle.
There was never a moment when his rhetoric changed, when any kind of olive branch was offered to those he saw as his his opponents.
But the marginalisation of African Union left it extremely bitter.
Zuma denounced the Security Council and said,
The way you have been deliberately undermined and that has had continuing implications
in the relationship between the African Union and the United Nations to the state,
as well as to the EU perspective on Libya,
which has ended up with it insisting with the support of Russia and China on that being an African Special Representative Secretary General.
So my fourth question, the day after post-conflict planning, President Obama said that the intervention was justified,
but not planning for the day after was the worst mistake of his presidency,
which is a fairly generous assessment since my responsibility coming into this was from post-conflict planning, so that must be my fault.
So I naturally particularly felt that I should look at the truth or otherwise of that.
What is absolutely true is that the decision makers who decided to intervene did so without any strategic foresight whatsoever.
There were those African neighbouring countries, Algeria, Chad, who warned of why the consequences for the region are from the intervention.
I'm not surprised that one could find in Whitehall any reflection on possible consequences for the Sahel, but I'm a little surprised.
I don't find any indication that even in Paris there was any consideration of
implications that France has subsequently found itself closely involved in.
But I think one also has to again understand the context.
In Mali had gone so quickly from Tunisia, Mubarak had gone so quickly from Egypt.
The people making decisions assumed Gadhafi would go in pretty quick to be from from Libya.
And therefore, in my judgement, it wasn't that they planned from the beginning a long term regime change operation to topple Gadhafi.
They assumed that that was already in the in the inevitability of the unfolding of the Arab Spring.
And one also has to bear in mind the pressures on decision makers for multiple crises.
I talked to one of the key US decision makers whose responsibility spanned the the region
and he described rushing from meeting to meeting in Washington with the Tunisia file,
the Egypt five or Libya file the Yemen file the Bahrain file the Syria file.
I mean the region was and of. All the countries in the region.
Libya was the one that those decision makers probably understood least because 40 years of isolation had left
foreign ministries and indeed the academy in many ways with relatively little depth of understanding of Libya.
That's not an excuse, but I think it's to some extent an explanation.
That said, there were serious efforts.
I would say really from three organisations to think about the day after the US set up something called the Post.
Q. Q For Gadhafi task force, the UK had an effort led by Defence that also involved some other countries.
And we in the UN did our own assessment and we interacted with each other through 2011 with the National Transitional Council.
We couldn't yet treat them as a government in waiting because it wasn't clear what the outcome would be.
They didn't have that legitimacy. But I went through times to Benghazi in that period.
The Libyans themselves set up a planning cell in the embassy in Abu Dhabi,
which the three of us referred to, interacted with some very smart Libyan professionals.
But a central weakness, in my view, in that exercise, particularly on the part of the US and and the Libyans, was a focus only on the first 100 days.
And here you had the shadow of Baghdad and the chaos that followed the fall of Baghdad weighing heavily.
And there was huge concern that Gadhafi might deliberately sabotage essential services and supplies the water,
the oil, the oil pipelines with the fall of Tripoli.
There was a huge emphasis on worrying about avoiding the chaos that was thought would be likely in Tripoli when Tripoli fell.
Ironically, the fall of Tripoli happened more swiftly and with relatively little chaos and and indeed not a huge amount of bloodshed.
And there was much less attention, although I think in the UN we tried to focus more on the medium and longer term issues
of building a state in what one Libyan scholars referred to as a stateless state,
a state in which Gadhafi for 40 years been inimical to develop any of the internal institutions of a modern state, let alone a democracy.
What planning was done had very little purchase later on because in the end the Libyans who
became the first interim government were not those Libyans who've been involved in the planning.
And so I could explain how that happened in the in the book.
But the biggest single issue that I think is argued about in retrospect is should there have been what people want,
the stabilisation mission, a large peacekeeping mission to maintain security?
The first thing to say is that there was unanimous Libyan opposition to any suggestion of events on the ground after that, after the intervention.
And that hostility went absolutely across all the factions in Libya.
Certainly there was nobody in the international community who had the slightest willingness or interest in doing it.
And it would not have been a matter for the UN because it would have been what we might call
peace enforcement rather than peacekeeping and would have required willing countries to do it.
But I must say, I call it in retrospect myself,
even regret that because I'm not convinced that the record of large military presence is in post-conflict situations is
such that that would have gone in Libya's favour and especially might have succeeded in turning most of Libya against it.
And it would probably be still there in a very difficult situation today, like some other large peacekeeping operations.
Perhaps there are lesser options that might have been looked at.
But I don't myself believe that that was a mistake.
So then finally, to turn to the first year and how things played out, the National Transitional Council moved itself from Benghazi to Tripoli.
After one of the politicking, it appointed a first interim government.
They were not the people who had represented Libya externally.
Dr. Mahmud Jibril, who had been and was often referred to as the prime minister, chairman of the National Transitional Council.
His executive committee did not become the first interim prime minister, but some people, mostly who had been outside Tripoli as opponents of Gadhafi,
mostly very well professionally qualified, but with zero experience of governance, let alone in the kind of context that had come to exist in Tripoli.
But there are two major questions, I think, that are important to reflect on regarding the first year.
The first is, was the the first election, the July 2012 election held too soon.
And sometimes people say the international community shouldn't have pushed the Libyans into a premature election.
And some of you will probably know this all literature around when post-conflict elections should or shouldn't take place.
With what conditions? The first thing to say is, is that it was entirely Libyan decision that was not one that was advised,
let alone dictated in any way where the international media was taken before the fall of Tripoli.
Much debated in Benghazi. Dr. Jabril, the so-called chair of the executive committee,
had proposed a roadmap that would have expanded the National Transitional Council
in some way draft of the constitution only after the elections have taken place.
But that was roundly rejected not just by the Muslim Brotherhood,
who at that point fought themselves perhaps the best organised political potential political force, but across civil society in general,
with an insistence that there must be early elections and that the authority of the National Transitional Council, which was only very,
very limited, and they adopted a constitutional declaration that set a very precise timeline for those first elections.
And not only that, in important places, two of the leading cities in Misrata and Benghazi,
the Libyans went ahead and held elections without waiting for the international community or anybody else.
My own view is not a doctrinal one. I don't think one can be prescriptive about when elections should should take place.
Although my successor as special representative in Libya, Dr. Tarek Mitri, has written.
But the first election was held too soon and the security should have been restored before the election took place.
My view is, is you can wait for an election if you have transitional authorities who are sufficiently accepted to get you to an election.
And the degree of acceptance that would have been necessary to achieve ideal security was a very high degree of acceptance that didn't exist.
The Libyan view was that the authority of the National Transitional Council in its first interim government was simply to get Libya to elections.
They were highly. Be suspicious of people who might seek to prolong their their period in office.
And so I believe it was right and necessary. And the Libyans, with some U.N. assistance,
did a remarkable job of organising those first elections with a very high degree
of of registration and and participation and initially a very positive reception.
The second question, though, is what could and should have been done about the fragmented security sector?
Whose responsibility was it to address a situation in which the hundreds of armed groups across Libya,
some of them genuinely deserving the name of Revolutionary Brigades because they had fought in the uprising against the Russian forces.
Some just emerged locally after sitting on the sidelines to take some local security responsibility,
and some were, frankly, opportunistic gangs that were ready to engage in crime.
I think that situation was almost unique and unprecedented.
What the United Nations talks about is DDR, and this is all security sector reform and disarmament.
Demobilisation, reintegration is not normally particularly effective, even when the job is to integrate one rebel army into an existing state.
In Libya, you had no existing, no real continuing state army.
Gadhafi had kept it deliberately weakened. What was there? It dissolved.
And you had a multiplicity of armed groups.
But I do believe that those intervening countries that I described as having been the ones who built up the armed groups,
were the ones who had the major responsibility to seek to help Libya in addressing a very difficult problem.
And by and large, they didn't do that, including the UK and France.
Qatar made a bid to play a strong role, but by then there was backlash against Qatar's role in Libya and the early willingness that was there on
the part at least of the genuine revolutionary brigades to disband once an election had taken place.
It didn't indeed continue after the election and after the interim government had made the perhaps fatal mistake
of putting just about everybody on the payroll and creating an incentive for numbers of armed persons to remain.
So those last two issues are perhaps the two major issues still facing Libya today.
When you hold elections, what kind of elections?
Under what conditions, within what framework with or without a constitution, which Libya doesn't yet have?
And that issue is being argued out now between means in Libya.
But I'm afraid, whereas the 2011 12 context was one in which all the Libyans wanted elections.
The current context is one in which those who see themselves as having some political power are more interested
in avoiding elections that might see them have to give up power that is based on no real continuing legitimacy.
And the other question, again, is what to do about the security sector now that it's morphed in many ways,
but it is still trying to defy the security sector.
And those divisions have be made worse in the meantime by a degree of involvement of external actors,
which is radically beyond anything that was in the case was the case in the period I new Libya up to 2012,
in which the external actors have effectively made proxies of different armed actors and bear a huge responsibility for Libya's further civil wars.
At least today, there isn't very little open fighting.
So those are the two major questions that I think carry forward from issues I look at in
the book to Libya today and then the issues that carry forward into the broader debate.
You might have noticed that I haven't even used the phrase responsibility to protect so far.
And that's partly because I don't actually believe, although some people would disagree,
that the fact that the United Nations General Assembly had adopted the responsibility to protect was a significant
factor in giving rise to the intervention response to protect came from the experiences were under on Bosnia.
But the experiences of Rwanda and Bosnia would have pushed the actors towards intervention even if it hadn't in the meantime, being.
Some way formulated by the General Assembly.
But there is a major effect in the likelihood of what people might call the responsibility to protect intervention in future.
And of course, we saw that very quickly in the Syria debate as to what forms of intervention that there might be.
And we see it, of course, in Putin narrative about Western intervention.
And I'm going to end with a quote of all people from Sergey Lavrov, who is not someone who I quote approvingly very much at the moment.
But he said in June 2011, if somebody would like to get authorisation to use force to achieve a shared goal by all of us,
they would have to specify in the resolution who this somebody is who is going to use this authorisation,
what the rules of engagement are, and the limits on the use of force.
And that's hard to disagree with as a statement of why it will be extremely difficult to envisage the United
Nations Security Council authorising an intervention of anything like the Libya intervention in future.
Thank you very much indeed for giving us such a clear picture of what happened and actually zeroing in on all the key questions that people have.
You can see that you're you're a diplomat, rather an academic,
with the clarity with which you identify the key questions and what needs that needs to look at.
Don't appear, be I. No, no.
You say you went for the academics to evade the clarity that you've got, but really looking at all those questions that get asked.
And thank you very much for doing that. I'm sure we have plenty of questions, but before, before and perhaps I can come with one of my own.
One thing that's always intrigued me is the way that when we talk about Libya,
that the actions of Britain and France always stopped to get Britain and France, UK and France, etc.
I mean, is there anything you can say about how far were they united or were they slightly different things going on, particularly in the French side?
I mean, what's happened with Sarkozy has obviously got rather murky and difficult to go to that.
But what was your sense from what you saw the role of France and how it differed from Britain at the time?
I think they were very close to someone, you know, a senior civil servant at the centre of this.
Pointed out that this followed the kind of agreement between France and Britain that they were intending to restore,
you know, post-Iraq cooperation in the foreign policy fields.
So that was already there. There was certainly very strong military cooperation.
And, you know, I quoted David Cameron's account of the cell in Paris, but that was in fact, that was headed by Sarkozy's military adviser.
But with the British absolutely embedded in there, so said it was close, close cooperation.
There was undoubtedly close cooperation in the Security Council, in the negotiations around the the resolutions.
There was very little visible cooperation on the ground after the fall of Tripoli between the UK and France.
And although I'm critical in many ways of the UK role,
at least one could see some thinking going on in the UK government about a post-conflict responsibility.
I fail to see any signs of that in the French system.
The French were immediately interested, as far as I could see,
in arms sales and contracts and potential economic interests, the same military that was accused of Britain as well.
Was that how failed that? I'm sure that's partly fair.
I kind of rather enjoy quoting the fact that when David Cameron went to Egypt and watched Gadhafi's speech,
his his famous speech on television from a hotel room,
he was actually on an arms sales promotion, the visit which was diverted to Times Square for a photo opportunity in Tahrir Square.
So so I'm sure that that motivation was there as as well.
And in fact, we the UN got thrust into a role that we hadn't planned for.
On the military side, you know, the UN doesn't do armies, you know, and you and try to do police be helpful with building police.
But the normal assumption is that a country asks whatever bilateral partners it feels comfortable with to be the ones
who help it to develop its its military a little way in the first chief of staff of the Libyan chief of staff was so.
Frustrated with the competition among bilaterals that he came to the UN and said, Would you please coordinate this?
And he named six countries that he wanted to be involved in that and that coordination because it was bilateral competition
and undoubtedly future arms sales to a country that could afford to buy them would have been part of that motivation.
But the sort of the different side of UK thinking was, was there with no visible equivalence so far as, as France was concerned.
And to be honest, that's not untypical. I mean, France is not a place anyone can contradict me.
It's not a major peacebuilding actor the way that the defeat in the US led, at least as far to be whatever.
There's no Frasier French equivalent. I'm just trying to think I couldn't even name the.
See, that would be what made me feel. Yeah, thank you.
But there are there aren't the equivalent French sources here. I mean, we have Cameron and David Richards and so on.
I used two books. One is by Bernard-Henri Levy, who,
of course sees himself as the person who inspired the entire intervention and did
play a significant role in taking the Libyans to meet Sarkozy and pushing Sarkozy.
And I think his account, although vainglorious, is, I think, probably largely truthful.
And then there's one by a sort of French military writer.
But I await Sarkozy's memoir, right?
Yeah, we all do. Thank you. Thank.