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You. Good evening, everyone, and welcome.

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My name is Michael Willis. I'm one of the fellows here at the Middle East Centre since these college.

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And I'm very pleased to welcome you to our event this evening.

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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.

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Both of you came this time last week.

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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.

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And this evening, I am pleased to say we are very privileged to have another very prominent speaker address us about his latest book.

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Ian Martin is a distinguished human rights activist and international diplomat who has held some of the most important roles in both fields.

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From 1986 to 1992, he served as secretary general of Amnesty International.

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He went on to work for the United Nations, serving a large number of senior roles in missions in Haiti,

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Rwanda, East Timor and Nepal, to name just a few of them.

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However, he's probably best known to those of us who worked on and familiar with the Middle East and North Africa.

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With his work in Libya in April 2011, in the wake of a popular uprising against the regime of Moammar Gadhafi,

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he was named special advisor to the Secretary General of the United Nations on post-conflict planning for Libya.

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He then went directly on to serve as Special Representative of the Secretary-General and Head of the UN Support Mission in Libya.

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From the 11th of September 2011 until a 17th of October 2012.

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He was therefore very much at the heart of efforts to fashion a response from the outside world,

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the international community, whether we can call it the international community.

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I wondered over what was the best phrase response to the uprising in Libya and its aftermath?

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And now the role played by outside actors in events in Libya during this period attracted significant

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debate both at the time and also since then over issues of whether too much was done or not enough,

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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.

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The prolonged civil conflict that Libya has found itself in and experienced over much of the past decade has often been

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attributed to the events that took place and decisions that were made in the first year or so after the uprisings began in 2011.

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Not all of this debate has been as informed or as rooted in in what actually happened as it could have been.

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That is why it's so valuable to have someone who was actually there and at the centre of

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what was happening to give his considered view an assessment of this important period.

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Ian Martin has now written and published his reflections and assessment and a new book, All Necessary Measures Note for Question Mark,

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which I think is important for the United Nations and international intervention in Libya.

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We are therefore very pleased and honoured. I'm going to thank you for coming to speak to us tonight here about this book.

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Ian. Thanks very much, Michael.

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In my appreciation to Atlanta, this Middle East centre for inviting me here.

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Most important question about Libya is what on earth to do now about the mess that Libya is in?

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And yesterday I watched the eighth special representative of the Secretary General in 13 years.

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Mr. Abdulai Bartley, briefed the UN Security Council for the first time after taking on picking up the baton in Libya.

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I'm afraid that's not what this book is about and you won't find the answers to that question in it.

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It's about the intervention in 2011 and the immediate aftermath.

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And while I wrote it, apart from in order to keep myself somewhat occupied during the COVID lockdowns,

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because I have become increasingly irritated with references to Libya at that time,

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which I think either distort what happened or at least don't fully reflect the reality.

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And it's not uncommon these days to hear Afghanistan,

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Iraq and Libya mentioned almost in the same breath as examples of disastrous Western intervention.

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Whatever one thinks about each of those interventions that are radically different and in their nature for sure.

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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.

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I also wanted to reflect on, I suppose, my own role because I left Libya after its first post-Gadhafi election,

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its first election for more than 40 years, and in some ways its worst election ever.

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In July 2012, I left shortly after that. What was a moment of relative optimism, which,

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despite by then the death of the US ambassador and the jihadist attack on the US compound in Benghazi, it was still.

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There was still optimism that that election might be the basis for a positive way forward.

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And so I wanted to reflect on what more we could have done,

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what more could have been done in that early period that might perhaps have saved or mitigated the later problems in Libya.

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So although this book really isn't about what to do about Libya now, I think it's not irrelevant to three things.

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I mean, one, I still think that talking about Libya today is better done on the basis of a nuanced and

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accurate understanding of what actually happened at the beginning of the intervention.

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But secondly, I think it's relevant to wider issues of international intervention.

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And following the collapse of the international project in Afghanistan and the and the despair.

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It's one major intervention that bears analysis.

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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.

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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.

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And so the question of whether the all forms of positive and effective intervention is still one that has to be asked.

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The third thing that I think the book has some relevance to is for those of us

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who are interested in the United Nations and how the United Nations does things.

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The Libya case poses some important questions about decision making in the United Nations Security Council and

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accountability back to the UN Security Council and also about the role of United Nations peace operations on the ground,

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which the one I started up in Libya is is one.

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So just to be clear, on on my own role is, as Michael rightly referred to,

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I became involved because after military intervention had been authorised by the Security Council at the first major gathering,

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international gathering of the countries that supported the intervention,

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the London conference, convened by the UK, which became something called the Libya Contact Group,

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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.

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And I was then asked to come to the U.N. Secretariat to begin to think about that.

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I did that despite not being a middle East expert or an Arabic speaker.

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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.

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The mission up in Tripoli fell quicker than anybody expected and to see it through its first year

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and the first election in the reflections from me that you circulated was part of the notice.

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For this seminar. I posed a number of questions and I'm going to discuss them tonight on the Five Main Hates.

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The first is how did the intervention come about? And was it justified?

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What was the case for intervention? Secondly, how were the military operations that were authorised, carried out, and what implications did they have?

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Thirdly, was there ever any alternative to a military outcome, mediated outcome of managed transition?

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Fourthly, what force was given to post-conflict planning to the day after?

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And finally, how did that play out on the ground in the in the first year?

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So I'm going to try to address each of those those five.

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Regarding the arguments around intervention in the first place, the major retrospective controversy is really what's the action going to be?

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A massacre in Benghazi as those who intervened said it was the basis for humanitarian intervention.

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So in the book, I try to examine as closely as possible the early response from the Gadhafi regime to the uprisings across Libya,

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not only in the east, in Benghazi, but also in Tripoli, in Misrata and in other places.

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And the way what were initially peaceful demonstrations were met with lethal, lethal force.

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There's no doubt that there was some exaggerated reporting of what happened, including from Al Jazeera, for example.

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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.

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But it has to be said, was compounded by Gadhafi's own rhetoric,

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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.

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And my own conclusion is that certainly were good reasons to fear killings, including of civilians and other reprisals had Gadhafi's forces gone,

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all them to take Benghazi, the epicentre of the uprising, as they were only hours away from doing when military action actually began.

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And those fears were real, and they were very real to Libyans in Benghazi, the International Committee of the Red Cross,

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which is not an organisation but it frightens, easily withdrew its personnel and expressed fears about the killing of civilians.

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So in my view, they were not a pretext. Policymakers in London, Paris, Washington were indeed scarred by Rwanda and Tripoli.

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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.

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You a story of a man who actually was very much in favour of trying to bring about a non-military outcome.

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But he said, as politicians, we belong to a generation that has the disastrous experience of rendering trade agreements with us.

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So that's the first point I want to make, that fears were real, substantially justified and not, in my view, a pretext.

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But the other thing that I think doesn't come through in a lot of references I read somewhere the other day,

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a reference to what happened in Libya as the US invasion of Libya, which isn't exactly what I remember happening.

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It certainly is largely grouped with other Western interventions,

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but it was actually Arab voices that were loudest and foremost in calling for intervention, including military intervention, including a no fly zone.

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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,

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led by the deputy permanent representative,

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eventually followed by the Permanent Representative who had been close to Gaddafi but had a profound effect on the diplomatic climate in New York.

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But it was Arab multilateral organisations, the Arab League, the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation.

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It was Arab civil society voices.

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And of course, it was a number of Arab states, particularly the Gulf states,

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although there were states, Syria, Algeria, that were reluctant to see international intervention.

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In fact, the majority of the Arab institutions call for it,

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and one can't take the Libyan decision making out of the broader context of what came to be discussed,

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that perhaps we should drop this, the Arab Spring, the context of the Arab other Arab uprisings,

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because there was certainly a degree of sympathy across the Arab world and the

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fear that if Gadhafi succeeded in putting down an uprising of his own people,

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that would have wider consequences in the in the region.

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So that takes me to the way decision making played out in the United Nations Security Council.

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And certainly French President Sarkozy, British Prime Minister Cameron were pretty gung ho in calling for intervention,

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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.

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So in itself would have had little effect in checking what was going on on the ground.

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And it was really President Obama whose decision making, if you look at it up close,

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some there are very close accounts from many of the key participants,

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which was most careful in which he said,

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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.

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Address that. It wasn't a chicken.

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There was a major argument within that administration that intervention was very much opposed by the then secretary of defence Gates,

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also, incidentally, by Vice President Biden. And when Obama finally took the decision to support intervention, according to Gates,

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he told Gates there had been a 5149 call, so it was not an enthusiastic US led intervention.

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The other aspects of dynamics in the Security Council I think are particularly interesting is the way in which

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the three African members of the Security Council were persuaded to support intervention without their votes.

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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,

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who before long was strongly criticising the for the intervention, took but also the abstention of of Russia.

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And that's gone on being an issue of considerable interest in 2011.

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Move, a foreign policy decision maker in Moscow was President Medvedev.

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Putin was stepped back to the role of Prime Minister and it was Medvedev who took the decision that Russia would abstain.

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And it was quite immediately controversial.

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The Russian ambassador to Libya resigned and very soon when the intervention started, Putin was denouncing it as a medieval crusade.

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And Medvedev was defending publicly against Putin its decision to to abstain.

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And there are still divergent views from those who tried to examine it closely as to what was really going on.

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Obama writes in his memoir that he can't believe that Medvedev took the decision without Putin's support and consulting him.

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But it does seem to have been a genuine disagreement.

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And so those African votes, the decisions of Russia and China to abstain rather than to veto it meant that the Security Council.

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Adopted its resolution authorising all necessary measures that have the title of of the book.

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So my answer, that first set of questions is that there was a humanitarian case.

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And I also believe that non-intervention was almost inconceivable in a context which both look back to things in render and in Bosnia,

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but also looked around at what was going on in the Arab world.

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Well, that leads to the question how it was that all necessary measures and these actually implemented.

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And before long it was being implemented by nature of the early military action was outside nature.

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But before long it was brought under the veto chain of command.

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And the first area of controversy around the nature of intervention is didn't need to exceed a mandate, which,

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in the language of the Security Council resolution, was to use all necessary measures to protect civilians.

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And did they exceed that mandate by going on to the objective of regime change?

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It's not an easy line to draw between protecting civilians and regime change in a context

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where a regime is using all its military resources in a way that endangers civilians.

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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,

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I think it's impossible to to argue against the need to action went from defending

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or enabling the defence of towns and cities that Gadhafi's forces had attacked

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after the uprisings there to supporting the attacks by the rebels as they were able

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to go on the offensive towards places still controlled by the Gadhafi regime.

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And then finally, when the NATO operation continued,

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even after the fall of Tripoli and the rebels took the lost Gadhafi strongholds of certain Bani Walid.

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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.

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But that was still a form of military action that was necessary and justified to protect civilians,

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although NATO's spokespeople continued to maintain that.

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But although there's quite a lot written about along those lines about NATO's application of the mandate,

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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.

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Special Forces operations are, by definition, secret.

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If you read what has been written or given in evidence by General Sir David Richards,

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who is the Chief of Defence Staff at the time of the intervention in both his memoir and his evidence,

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he's given to the House of Commons Select Committee.

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Apart from criticising David Cameron's micromanagement and saying that he had determined that having been the combined cadet force,

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that each of them was not a qualification for micromanaging a complex coalition military operation.

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Richards, I think, quite rightly says that whatever was happening,

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what it was being done by nature from the air, it was the ground war that was crucial.

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And although in saying that, he says little about the role of Special Forces and credits the the rebel ground war.

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In fact, it's clear that the deployment of special forces was crucial to the success of the ground, not in huge numbers.

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And although there is although those operations are secret that are not declared to Parliament when select committees inquire later on,

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it's quite interesting to see how David Cameron writes about it in his own memoir.

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He says, With our allies France, Qatar and the UAE, we ended up steering the ramshackle Libyan army from a secret cell in Paris,

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providing weapons, support and intelligence to the rebels, planning an assault on Tripoli.

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This quartette of countries known internally as the Four Amigos.

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Little ironic in retrospect, focus on training, equipping and mentoring effective militias in the West,

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though this was known to major nature in the US, once again, we were operating outside the traditional structures.

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So those special forces effectively trained Ben to accompany and equipped the the rebel brigades arms were supplied to them.

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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.

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But except on one occasion when France directly supplied weapons dropped,

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which it then maintains were to provide weapons for the protection of civilians.

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These were undeclared to the United Nations,

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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.

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They were not notified. And indeed, long after the events, Qatar was denying that it had supplied weapons to the UAE in the documents,

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acknowledged that it had broken the embargo and indeed was continuing to do so as it has done,

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one might say, virtually to this day, despite Security Council sanctions.

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And I think that Special Forces operation, those arms supplies were certainly outside any Security Council authority,

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because the authority of all necessary measures, required measures taken to be.

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Notified to the UN secretary general and by him to the Security Council.

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And I think raise major questions of accountability to the Security Council and indeed may raise major questions of accountability in domestic terms,

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because when there is no knowledge of special forces operations, then there is effectively no no accountability.

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Now, the manner in which that support happened had some important implications for what followed in Libya.

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I think the assistance and the weapons supplies were provided outside of any civilian control, any chain of command.

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The National Transitional Council in Benghazi had no ability to exercise a chain

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of command over the different Revolutionary Brigades as they as they called them.

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And increasingly, Qatar, in the UAE, particular in particular, favoured particular armed groups on the ground.

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So they crudely cut off the fate of the groups that were more Islamist in orientation,

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whereas the UAE favoured those that were less Islamist in orientation.

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And that began tensions that played on through to what followed what might over say to the present day,

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as did the practice, as I said, of of breaking sanctions.

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So my third question is,

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was there ever a possibility of a mediated outcome of managed transition instead of the battle being fought on to a military victory?

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And there were multiple efforts and I tried to bring them together in the in the book,

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in the way they unfolded and either did relate or didn't relate to each other.

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First off, the ground actually was Norway country,

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which tries to play a mediation role and was approached very early on by selected Islam Gadhafi, Gadhafi's son.

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And there was actually a Norwegian negotiating team in Tripoli when the Security Council authorised

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military action and rapidly had to evacuate itself to Tunisia before the bombing began.

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So there was a Norwegian effort, which has been very little written about or analysed, I think, outside outside Norway.

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The United Nations responded, the secretary general, Ban Ki moon, by appointing a special envoy, Mr. al-Khatib, a former foreign minister of Jordan,

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and he began an engagement with the Gadhafi regime in Tripoli and with the National Transitional Council in Benghazi.

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The African Union rapidly called for a ceasefire and set out what it called its roadmap for a negotiated outcome.

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Appointed a high level committee, which the heavyweight was Jacob Zuma.

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They were affronted when they were told by NATO and indeed by continuing on behalf of the intervening countries

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that they couldn't proceed to Tripoli as they were planning to do because bombing was about to begin.

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So it was some time before they got to Tripoli.

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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.

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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

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little indication of how fully they spoke to Gadhafi and the EU were then regarded themselves as marginalised I believe were indeed marginalised.

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The Western narrative was that they were seeking to save Gadhafi,

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who had of course squandered quite a lot of Libya's money on the African Union and African governments.

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But I believe myself and I try to examine the record that that judgement is unfair,

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that the African Union was genuinely trying to negotiate a managed transition,

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the outcome of which would certainly have included Gadhafi stepping down from from power.

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Although the biggest difficulty that everybody found in the negotiations was would Gadhafi step down from what was never very clear,

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since you pointed out he held no official position, would you stay in Libya or would he leave Libya?

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And if so, as for where the intervening countries, on the other hand, were from the beginning seeking regime change.

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David Richards, you have already referred to General Richards interestingly, says that in the plan,

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the UK plan for military action he had built in a pause after Benghazi had been saved, a pause for diplomacy, assuming that.

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But once the assault on Benghazi had been checked, then that would be a moment to to seek to to negotiate.

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That didn't happen. France and indeed UK political leaders were uninterested in this.

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And indeed the. They used the. Relations with the National Transitional Council discourage rather than to encourage engagement in a mediated outcome.

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So whether such an outcome was ever possible, we shall never know.

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My own view is that if there was a possibility, it would have required coordination amongst those trying to bring it about.

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It was the Africans, the African Union and Zuma who had the maximum potential leverage with Gadhafi.

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And it was the intervening countries that have the maximum leverage with the National Transitional Council.

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But that's not what happened. Indeed, in many ways it was the opposite.

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And having quoted once approvingly on a story of Norway, I'll quote his judgement, which I think is a very fair judgement.

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I felt with the mind set in London and Paris didn't have openings for really reflecting on the diplomatic option

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had the been in the international community a willingness to pursue this track with some authority and dedication.

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I believe that could have been an opening to achieve a less dramatic outcome and avoid the collapse of the Libyan state.

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And I'll quote as well a view from inside the African Union Commission.

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A consensus could have been achieved had the West approached the A.U. in a more subtle and respectful way.

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Closer coordination, an honest and respectful conversation between the EU and the West would have made it possible to build sufficient international

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leverage to compel Gadhafi to accept and to exit the scene with the required security guarantees for himself and his close associates.

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We can't be sure, but judgement is is right because it didn't happen.

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What we can, I'm afraid, be sure of that's not what trying Gadhafi was, of course, is obduracy was a huge obstacle.

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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.

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But the marginalisation of African Union left it extremely bitter.

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Zuma denounced the Security Council and said,

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The way you have been deliberately undermined and that has had continuing implications

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in the relationship between the African Union and the United Nations to the state,

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as well as to the EU perspective on Libya,

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which has ended up with it insisting with the support of Russia and China on that being an African Special Representative Secretary General.

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So my fourth question, the day after post-conflict planning, President Obama said that the intervention was justified,

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but not planning for the day after was the worst mistake of his presidency,

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which is a fairly generous assessment since my responsibility coming into this was from post-conflict planning, so that must be my fault.

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So I naturally particularly felt that I should look at the truth or otherwise of that.

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What is absolutely true is that the decision makers who decided to intervene did so without any strategic foresight whatsoever.

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There were those African neighbouring countries, Algeria, Chad, who warned of why the consequences for the region are from the intervention.

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I'm not surprised that one could find in Whitehall any reflection on possible consequences for the Sahel, but I'm a little surprised.

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I don't find any indication that even in Paris there was any consideration of

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implications that France has subsequently found itself closely involved in.

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But I think one also has to again understand the context.

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In Mali had gone so quickly from Tunisia, Mubarak had gone so quickly from Egypt.

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The people making decisions assumed Gadhafi would go in pretty quick to be from from Libya.

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And therefore, in my judgement, it wasn't that they planned from the beginning a long term regime change operation to topple Gadhafi.

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They assumed that that was already in the in the inevitability of the unfolding of the Arab Spring.

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And one also has to bear in mind the pressures on decision makers for multiple crises.

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I talked to one of the key US decision makers whose responsibility spanned the the region

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and he described rushing from meeting to meeting in Washington with the Tunisia file,

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the Egypt five or Libya file the Yemen file the Bahrain file the Syria file.

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I mean the region was and of. All the countries in the region.

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Libya was the one that those decision makers probably understood least because 40 years of isolation had left

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foreign ministries and indeed the academy in many ways with relatively little depth of understanding of Libya.

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That's not an excuse, but I think it's to some extent an explanation.

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That said, there were serious efforts.

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I would say really from three organisations to think about the day after the US set up something called the Post.

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Q. Q For Gadhafi task force, the UK had an effort led by Defence that also involved some other countries.

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And we in the UN did our own assessment and we interacted with each other through 2011 with the National Transitional Council.

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We couldn't yet treat them as a government in waiting because it wasn't clear what the outcome would be.

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They didn't have that legitimacy. But I went through times to Benghazi in that period.

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The Libyans themselves set up a planning cell in the embassy in Abu Dhabi,

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which the three of us referred to, interacted with some very smart Libyan professionals.

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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.

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And here you had the shadow of Baghdad and the chaos that followed the fall of Baghdad weighing heavily.

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And there was huge concern that Gadhafi might deliberately sabotage essential services and supplies the water,

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the oil, the oil pipelines with the fall of Tripoli.

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There was a huge emphasis on worrying about avoiding the chaos that was thought would be likely in Tripoli when Tripoli fell.

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Ironically, the fall of Tripoli happened more swiftly and with relatively little chaos and and indeed not a huge amount of bloodshed.

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And there was much less attention, although I think in the UN we tried to focus more on the medium and longer term issues

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of building a state in what one Libyan scholars referred to as a stateless state,

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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.

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What planning was done had very little purchase later on because in the end the Libyans who

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became the first interim government were not those Libyans who've been involved in the planning.

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And so I could explain how that happened in the in the book.

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But the biggest single issue that I think is argued about in retrospect is should there have been what people want,

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the stabilisation mission, a large peacekeeping mission to maintain security?

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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.

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And that hostility went absolutely across all the factions in Libya.

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Certainly there was nobody in the international community who had the slightest willingness or interest in doing it.

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And it would not have been a matter for the UN because it would have been what we might call

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peace enforcement rather than peacekeeping and would have required willing countries to do it.

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But I must say, I call it in retrospect myself,

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even regret that because I'm not convinced that the record of large military presence is in post-conflict situations is

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such that that would have gone in Libya's favour and especially might have succeeded in turning most of Libya against it.

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And it would probably be still there in a very difficult situation today, like some other large peacekeeping operations.

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Perhaps there are lesser options that might have been looked at.

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But I don't myself believe that that was a mistake.

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So then finally, to turn to the first year and how things played out, the National Transitional Council moved itself from Benghazi to Tripoli.

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After one of the politicking, it appointed a first interim government.

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They were not the people who had represented Libya externally.

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Dr. Mahmud Jibril, who had been and was often referred to as the prime minister, chairman of the National Transitional Council.

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His executive committee did not become the first interim prime minister, but some people, mostly who had been outside Tripoli as opponents of Gadhafi,

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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.

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But there are two major questions, I think, that are important to reflect on regarding the first year.

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The first is, was the the first election, the July 2012 election held too soon.

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And sometimes people say the international community shouldn't have pushed the Libyans into a premature election.

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And some of you will probably know this all literature around when post-conflict elections should or shouldn't take place.

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With what conditions? The first thing to say is, is that it was entirely Libyan decision that was not one that was advised,

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let alone dictated in any way where the international media was taken before the fall of Tripoli.

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Much debated in Benghazi. Dr. Jabril, the so-called chair of the executive committee,

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had proposed a roadmap that would have expanded the National Transitional Council

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in some way draft of the constitution only after the elections have taken place.

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But that was roundly rejected not just by the Muslim Brotherhood,

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who at that point fought themselves perhaps the best organised political potential political force, but across civil society in general,

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with an insistence that there must be early elections and that the authority of the National Transitional Council, which was only very,

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very limited, and they adopted a constitutional declaration that set a very precise timeline for those first elections.

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And not only that, in important places, two of the leading cities in Misrata and Benghazi,

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the Libyans went ahead and held elections without waiting for the international community or anybody else.

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My own view is not a doctrinal one. I don't think one can be prescriptive about when elections should should take place.

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Although my successor as special representative in Libya, Dr. Tarek Mitri, has written.

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But the first election was held too soon and the security should have been restored before the election took place.

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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.

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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.

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The Libyan view was that the authority of the National Transitional Council in its first interim government was simply to get Libya to elections.

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They were highly. Be suspicious of people who might seek to prolong their their period in office.

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And so I believe it was right and necessary. And the Libyans, with some U.N. assistance,

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did a remarkable job of organising those first elections with a very high degree

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of of registration and and participation and initially a very positive reception.

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The second question, though, is what could and should have been done about the fragmented security sector?

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Whose responsibility was it to address a situation in which the hundreds of armed groups across Libya,

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some of them genuinely deserving the name of Revolutionary Brigades because they had fought in the uprising against the Russian forces.

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Some just emerged locally after sitting on the sidelines to take some local security responsibility,

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and some were, frankly, opportunistic gangs that were ready to engage in crime.

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I think that situation was almost unique and unprecedented.

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What the United Nations talks about is DDR, and this is all security sector reform and disarmament.

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Demobilisation, reintegration is not normally particularly effective, even when the job is to integrate one rebel army into an existing state.

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In Libya, you had no existing, no real continuing state army.

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Gadhafi had kept it deliberately weakened. What was there? It dissolved.

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And you had a multiplicity of armed groups.

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But I do believe that those intervening countries that I described as having been the ones who built up the armed groups,

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were the ones who had the major responsibility to seek to help Libya in addressing a very difficult problem.

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And by and large, they didn't do that, including the UK and France.

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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

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the part at least of the genuine revolutionary brigades to disband once an election had taken place.

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It didn't indeed continue after the election and after the interim government had made the perhaps fatal mistake

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of putting just about everybody on the payroll and creating an incentive for numbers of armed persons to remain.

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So those last two issues are perhaps the two major issues still facing Libya today.

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When you hold elections, what kind of elections?

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Under what conditions, within what framework with or without a constitution, which Libya doesn't yet have?

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And that issue is being argued out now between means in Libya.

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But I'm afraid, whereas the 2011 12 context was one in which all the Libyans wanted elections.

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The current context is one in which those who see themselves as having some political power are more interested

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in avoiding elections that might see them have to give up power that is based on no real continuing legitimacy.

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And the other question, again, is what to do about the security sector now that it's morphed in many ways,

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but it is still trying to defy the security sector.

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And those divisions have be made worse in the meantime by a degree of involvement of external actors,

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which is radically beyond anything that was in the case was the case in the period I new Libya up to 2012,

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in which the external actors have effectively made proxies of different armed actors and bear a huge responsibility for Libya's further civil wars.

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At least today, there isn't very little open fighting.

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So those are the two major questions that I think carry forward from issues I look at in

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the book to Libya today and then the issues that carry forward into the broader debate.

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You might have noticed that I haven't even used the phrase responsibility to protect so far.

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And that's partly because I don't actually believe, although some people would disagree,

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that the fact that the United Nations General Assembly had adopted the responsibility to protect was a significant

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factor in giving rise to the intervention response to protect came from the experiences were under on Bosnia.

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But the experiences of Rwanda and Bosnia would have pushed the actors towards intervention even if it hadn't in the meantime, being.

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Some way formulated by the General Assembly.

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But there is a major effect in the likelihood of what people might call the responsibility to protect intervention in future.

388
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And of course, we saw that very quickly in the Syria debate as to what forms of intervention that there might be.

389
00:46:40,850 --> 00:46:46,790
And we see it, of course, in Putin narrative about Western intervention.

390
00:46:47,220 --> 00:46:59,240
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.

391
00:46:59,540 --> 00:47:08,870
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,

392
00:47:09,440 --> 00:47:16,130
they would have to specify in the resolution who this somebody is who is going to use this authorisation,

393
00:47:16,790 --> 00:47:20,510
what the rules of engagement are, and the limits on the use of force.

394
00:47:21,650 --> 00:47:29,180
And that's hard to disagree with as a statement of why it will be extremely difficult to envisage the United

395
00:47:29,180 --> 00:47:36,440
Nations Security Council authorising an intervention of anything like the Libya intervention in future.

396
00:47:37,460 --> 00:47:45,650
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.

397
00:47:46,220 --> 00:47:49,470
You can see that you're you're a diplomat, rather an academic,

398
00:47:49,470 --> 00:47:53,680
with the clarity with which you identify the key questions and what needs that needs to look at.

399
00:47:53,720 --> 00:47:55,910
Don't appear, be I. No, no.

400
00:47:56,120 --> 00:48:03,500
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.

401
00:48:03,950 --> 00:48:10,760
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.

402
00:48:11,180 --> 00:48:15,560
One thing that's always intrigued me is the way that when we talk about Libya,

403
00:48:16,070 --> 00:48:21,860
that the actions of Britain and France always stopped to get Britain and France, UK and France, etc.

404
00:48:21,930 --> 00:48:29,480
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?

405
00:48:29,750 --> 00:48:34,070
I mean, what's happened with Sarkozy has obviously got rather murky and difficult to go to that.

406
00:48:34,370 --> 00:48:39,140
But what was your sense from what you saw the role of France and how it differed from Britain at the time?

407
00:48:40,670 --> 00:48:47,930
I think they were very close to someone, you know, a senior civil servant at the centre of this.

408
00:48:48,530 --> 00:48:56,390
Pointed out that this followed the kind of agreement between France and Britain that they were intending to restore,

409
00:48:56,450 --> 00:49:01,340
you know, post-Iraq cooperation in the foreign policy fields.

410
00:49:02,030 --> 00:49:07,100
So that was already there. There was certainly very strong military cooperation.

411
00:49:07,190 --> 00:49:17,200
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.

412
00:49:17,600 --> 00:49:24,559
But with the British absolutely embedded in there, so said it was close, close cooperation.

413
00:49:24,560 --> 00:49:32,810
There was undoubtedly close cooperation in the Security Council, in the negotiations around the the resolutions.

414
00:49:33,590 --> 00:49:42,080
There was very little visible cooperation on the ground after the fall of Tripoli between the UK and France.

415
00:49:42,800 --> 00:49:47,630
And although I'm critical in many ways of the UK role,

416
00:49:48,770 --> 00:49:54,890
at least one could see some thinking going on in the UK government about a post-conflict responsibility.

417
00:49:55,670 --> 00:50:00,740
I fail to see any signs of that in the French system.

418
00:50:01,250 --> 00:50:04,219
The French were immediately interested, as far as I could see,

419
00:50:04,220 --> 00:50:12,890
in arms sales and contracts and potential economic interests, the same military that was accused of Britain as well.

420
00:50:13,100 --> 00:50:17,000
Was that how failed that? I'm sure that's partly fair.

421
00:50:17,870 --> 00:50:28,259
I kind of rather enjoy quoting the fact that when David Cameron went to Egypt and watched Gadhafi's speech,

422
00:50:28,260 --> 00:50:33,320
his his famous speech on television from a hotel room,

423
00:50:33,740 --> 00:50:42,660
he was actually on an arms sales promotion, the visit which was diverted to Times Square for a photo opportunity in Tahrir Square.

424
00:50:42,680 --> 00:50:47,660
So so I'm sure that that motivation was there as as well.

425
00:50:47,990 --> 00:50:53,540
And in fact, we the UN got thrust into a role that we hadn't planned for.

426
00:50:54,080 --> 00:51:00,770
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.

427
00:51:01,490 --> 00:51:09,649
But the normal assumption is that a country asks whatever bilateral partners it feels comfortable with to be the ones

428
00:51:09,650 --> 00:51:20,750
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.

429
00:51:20,810 --> 00:51:28,190
Frustrated with the competition among bilaterals that he came to the UN and said, Would you please coordinate this?

430
00:51:28,190 --> 00:51:36,710
And he named six countries that he wanted to be involved in that and that coordination because it was bilateral competition

431
00:51:37,880 --> 00:51:45,440
and undoubtedly future arms sales to a country that could afford to buy them would have been part of that motivation.

432
00:51:45,950 --> 00:51:55,069
But the sort of the different side of UK thinking was, was there with no visible equivalence so far as, as France was concerned.

433
00:51:55,070 --> 00:52:01,910
And to be honest, that's not untypical. I mean, France is not a place anyone can contradict me.

434
00:52:01,910 --> 00:52:10,340
It's not a major peacebuilding actor the way that the defeat in the US led, at least as far to be whatever.

435
00:52:10,880 --> 00:52:15,930
There's no Frasier French equivalent. I'm just trying to think I couldn't even name the.

436
00:52:16,400 --> 00:52:21,080
See, that would be what made me feel. Yeah, thank you.

437
00:52:21,620 --> 00:52:27,290
But there are there aren't the equivalent French sources here. I mean, we have Cameron and David Richards and so on.

438
00:52:27,950 --> 00:52:31,639
I used two books. One is by Bernard-Henri Levy, who,

439
00:52:31,640 --> 00:52:38,480
of course sees himself as the person who inspired the entire intervention and did

440
00:52:38,480 --> 00:52:42,950
play a significant role in taking the Libyans to meet Sarkozy and pushing Sarkozy.

441
00:52:42,950 --> 00:52:49,130
And I think his account, although vainglorious, is, I think, probably largely truthful.

442
00:52:49,550 --> 00:52:53,120
And then there's one by a sort of French military writer.

443
00:52:53,120 --> 00:52:58,000
But I await Sarkozy's memoir, right?

444
00:52:58,220 --> 00:53:09,780
Yeah, we all do. Thank you. Thank.