The BBC -- selective champion of 'Human Rights'
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E-mail People's Daily, December 9, 2013
Until 2011, Libya was one of the most stable and prosperous countries in Africa. Led by Colonel Gaddafi, the ruling regime was not any kind of western-style democracy, but it had an efficiently functioning state apparatus and excellent infrastructure, including The Great Man-Made River, the biggest water supply and irrigation project in the history of humanity, a forty-year project to provide a free supply of clean water to the whole of the country. Funded by its oil revenues, Libya provided a generous spread of social and economic benefits for its population, covering areas such as health, housing, and education. In 2010, Libya’s ranking according to the United Nations Human Development Index was the highest in Africa.
In January 2011, unrest spreading from other North African countries as part of the “Arab Spring” broke out in Libya. With almost desperate haste, Britain and France began to campaign for a UN resolution approving military action to support the rebels, and to solicit partners for such action. They were quickly joined by the USA. On 17th March, under Resolution 1973, the UN imposed a no-fly zone over Libya. It also approved the use of “all necessary means to protect civilians and civilian-populated areas from attack”.
From the outset, western aircraft - principally the French and the British - acted as the de facto rebel air force, interpreting their UN mandate “to protect civilians and civilian-populated areas from attack” as widely as was required to allow them to launch air attacks on the Gaddafi regime forces, strongholds, and centres of support. The final result was a foregone conclusion.
Gaddafi held out until 20th October. By the time the end game was played out, his forces barely numbered three figures, holed out in a refuge in the town of Sirte. Even the most brazen cynic could hardly pretend that he still posed any kind of threat to the civilian population, but British and French aircraft continued a bombing campaign that reduced the town to rubble. When Gaddafi finally cut and ran his entourage could be counted in dozens and was housed in a few unarmoured motor vehicles, but a French plane, still acting to “protect civilians and civilian populated areas under threat of attack”, dropped two 500-lb bombs on his convoy and destroyed it, leaving the survivors to be mopped up by pursuing rebels.
Whatever panglossian veneer Britain or France or any other of the states that took part in the military action might try to put on it, Libya is now a failed state. Its infrastructure lies in ruins, and its state apparatus has been destroyed so there is nothing to build it back up again. Armed religious and tribal factions fight each other and vie for power. In September 2012 the US Ambassador was one of four Americans killed in an attack on the Embassy in Benghazi. The central government exercises little authority - in October 2013 the Prime Minister, Ali Zeidan was kidnapped by one faction. Sectarian violence is a daily occurrence – in the latest major incident on 16th November dozens were killed and hundreds injured when a militia group opened fire on a demonstration. Black Libyans from the south of the country have been subject to racist ethnic cleansing.
On 3rd September the Independent newspaper in Britain published a special report revealing that oil production – the mainstay of the Libyan economy – has been literally decimated, falling from 1.4 million barrels a day at the start of 2013 to just 160,000 barrels now. The report concluded: Government authority is disintegrating in all parts of the country, putting in doubt claims by American, British and French politicians that Nato’s military action in Libya in 2011 was an outstanding example of a successful foreign military intervention which should be repeated in Syria.
With the extensive help of British military forces, the Libya that was one of the most stable and prosperous countries in northern Africa has been destroyed. The situation that they have created is treated with callous disregard by the British politicians who engineered it, and apart from occasional articles like the Independent’s, ignored by the media who offered their baying support.
David Cameron’s government was one of the principal players in this campaign of vigilantism that made a mockery of the UN Resolution on which it was supposedly based, and made a mockery of international law. It has left tens of thousands of dead, and a country in ruins. There is no good reason to imagine that the group or the individual who eventually fills the power vacuum it has created, whatever or whoever that might be, will be one whit better than the regime that was deposed – and many good reasons to fear that they will be worse. This is how Britain protects civilians. This is how Britain defends human rights.
In the course of the Libyan campaign, the BBC was happy to act as the British government’s enthusiastic cheerleader. And now these are the people who have the cheek to demand that David Cameron fly half way round the world to deliver a lecture to China on its human rights record.
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