Price of Peace
Here are two conflicting views about the case for intervening actively in the terrible events that continue to plague so many different parts of the world.
Matthew Parris writing in The Times is applied as anyone else at the atrocities occurring in Libya and elsewhere, but he remains convinced that intervening in the ghastly conflicts only serves to make things worse in the long-run.
I can see his point, but Matthew fails to consider other examples where 'liberal intervention' has a more successful track record, as it did in the former countries of Yugoslavia, for example, where the successor states adopted new, power sharing, democratic constitutions as the price to be paid in return for peace.
The West must face the evil that has revealed itself in the Iraq genocide
By Michael Nazir-Ali - The Telegraph
Displaced Iraqis from the Yazidi community settle at the camp of Bajid Kandala at Feeshkhabour town near the Syria-Iraq border. (Photo: AP)
A beautiful mosaic of ancient religions, cultures and languages in the Middle East is being systematically destroyed. Until now, the world has watched mutely. When Muslims were threatened with genocide in Bosnia, the international community acted in concert to prevent the campaign against them developing into a full-scale pogrom. I went there myself, as part of an effort to bring relief supplies to all those who were affected. I was also present when millions of Afghan refugees poured into Pakistan after the Soviet invasion of that country. Once again, Western countries, Christian, Islamic and secular organisations were at the forefront of bringing relief to these people.
For years now the Christian, Mandaean, Yazidi and other ancient communities of Iraq, have been harried, bombed, exiled and massacred without anyone batting so much as an eyelid. Churches have been bombed, clergy kidnapped and murdered, shops and homes attacked and destroyed. This persecution has now been elevated to genocide by the advent of Isis. People are being beheaded, crucified, shot in cold blood and exiled to a waterless desert simply because of their religious beliefs.
What began in Iraq, continued in Syria. Here the West’s ill-advised backing of an Islamist uprising (largely funded by Saudi Arabia and Qatar) against the Assad regime has turned into a nightmare which has given birth to ultra-extremist organisations like Isis. Once again, religious and ethnic minorities, whether Christian, Alawite or Druze, have been the victims, alongside ordinary people of all kinds. Isis, now armed to the teeth with weaponry originally intended by the suppliers for "moderate" Islamist groups, has arrived in Iraq with a vengeance beyond anything that unfortunate country has so far experienced.
Next door in Iran, the Baha’i have been reduced to being a non-people: their marriages are not recognised, their children cannot be educated, their leaders have been executed or are in prison and even their graveyards have been desecrated. Christians, similarly, are not allowed to worship in Farsi, or to hold meetings in their homes. Churches have either been closed or can open only under tightly-controlled conditions. Any violation of these orders brings arrest, interrogation and imprisonment. Zoroastrians, belonging to the indigenous religion of Iran, are now so reduced in numbers that there are more of them outside Iran than remain in the country. Jews, likewise, are in daily danger of being associated with Zionism and having their property confiscated as "enemy property", even if they have never set foot in Israel.
In Pakistan, Christians are being cowed by the draconian blasphemy laws, systematic discrimination and terrorist attacks on churches, schools and social organisations. The Ahmadiyya (a heterodox group), also, suffer legal discrimination, restrictions on the practice of their religion and recurrent mob violence. Only in Egypt can we say that the large Coptic minority has a breathing space as they await the emergence, perhaps, of a new order.
So will the world just stand by and watch this unprecedented onslaught on freedom or will we do something beyond airdropping food and medicines and protecting our own personnel who may be caught up in the conflict?
Along with many others, I have been saying for sometime now that Iraqi minorities need internationally protected "safe havens". Until recently, the obvious place for Christian safe havens were the plains of Nineveh. For years, the West operated no-fly zones over Saddam’s Iraq to protect Kurds in the North and the Marsh Arabs in the South. What can be done to protect those under threat now?
I recognise that American or British "boots on the ground" is asking for the moon, but a UN-authorised international force, drawn from a variety of countries, is desperately needed to prevent multiple genocide. This can go hand in hand with whatever air action is deemed practical in consultation with the Kurds and with Baghdad. If the UN cannot prevent this genocide, hard questions will have to be asked about its utility at all.
In Syria, the international community must encourage a negotiated end to the Civil War (without preconditions, such as the departure of Bashar Al-Assad). Everything must be done to prevent the acquisition of weaponry by extremists, whether directly or indirectly. As with Iraq, once relative security returns to the land, there will have to be a massive programme of rebuilding historic cities like Aleppo, returning refugees and internationally-displaced persons to their homes and the rehabilitation of the injured. It is clear that Syria will not be able to achieve this on its own. A very significant international effort will be needed. I am sure the large Syrian diaspora will assist in such an effort.
The paradox is, of course, that the West supported the uprising in Syria partly to check Iran’s influence over the Assad regime. Now that same Iran is needed to check the advance of Isis in Iraq. But can Iran be trusted in this matter or, indeed, on what is of much greater concern to the West, the nuclear issue? How can we trust a regime to keep its word internationally when it oppresses its own people, denying them basic freedoms of movement, belief and worship? Surely, any re-engagement with Iran must be will have to be all-round? It must take into account not only what is perceived as a threat to the West or Israel but also the future of Iran’s role in the region, as well as its treatment of women, religious and ethnic minorities.
On a wider front, bilateral relations, particularly aid, will have to be agreed with the human rights situation fully in view. Article 18 of the UN Declaration on Universal Human Rights can be a template for such discussions. Is educational aid, for instance, simply fuelling the teaching of hatred in school text books or is it being used to remove such teaching? Is aid reaching marginalised minorities, women and the very poor? There has been a welcome concern in the United Kingdom to help in the development of the rule of law and of legal systems. Such an approach can be used, on a case-by-case basis, to encourage ‘a Bill of Rights’ in Egypt, for example, or a review of the blasphemy laws in Pakistan. At another level, assistance with legal discourse on punishment which moves away from an Islamist insistence on deterrence to more consideration of reform and rehabilitation, will lead to the development of more humane legal systems and greater respect for fundamental freedoms.
We cannot go on as before. The evil, with which we have been living for so long, has once again revealed its full face in Iraq. It is not a pretty sight and the international community must ensure that it has no place in the coming world order.
Road to hell is paved with liberal intervention
By Matthew Parris - The Times
The great and good assured us that Libya would be a beacon of hope in the Arab world. How wrong could they be?
It can only be weeks before we quit our embassy in Tripoli. Britain will be almost the last. This week’s “I’m still here” tweet from our intrepid ambassador, Michael Aron, had a plaintive ring.
Almost all the others have gone. The Americans evacuated their diplomatic mission: their ambassador and three of his staff were murdered two years ago; French diplomats quit on Wednesday taking some British nationals with them and departing on a warship. The Italians stay, to run an evacuees’ air-bridge back to Italy. Other diplomatic staff have made their escape by road to Tunisia.
Many thousands of ordinary Libyans flee that way daily, too. Those who remain live amid ferocious fighting between warring factions, continuing now for two months; some are the militants that toppled Gaddafi. Now they are at war with each other. In Tripoli, factions from Misrata and Zintan battle it out. Hospitals are overflowing with the wounded, low on supplies and running out of staff as they, too, flee. Government has all but collapsed. Libya, said our leading article on Tuesday, “is hurtling towards civil war”.
New militias have formed and entered the fray, mostly Islamist in character. Fighters are joining from other Arab nations. What we once billed as a battle to establish liberal democratic values may become a battle to exterminate them.
To non-experts like me the picture appears so hopelessly fractured as to defy any analysis at all; but experts speak of a fiercely intricate tangle of tribe, clan, city-loyalty, patronage and plunder. Factions battle for control of airports, roads, ports and infrastructure. Libya (notes that Times leader) is “atomising”.
On this page in March 2011, on the eve (as it turned out) of the Franco-British military incursion to remove Gaddafi, I asked: “What is it we would be trying to do? To impose a government? To organise the institution by the rebels of a government? Which rebels? Who, anyway, are ‘the rebels’? Do we really know? Are they a unified force with a leader whom we could deal with? Would they remain so?”
Some of these questions have been answered. After the failure of a hands-on intervention in Iraq we opted for a hands-off intervention in Libya. The operation to remove Colonel Gaddafi from the air went well. We then settled on a longer-term objective: to create a safe space for the forces who had opposed Gaddafi to institute a new government. We offered advice and training but allowed the new governance of Libya to take its own shape. Realising the administration would need a security arm to maintain civil order, the US, Britain, Turkey and Italy undertook to train Libyan soldiers at overseas bases, intending to create a national force of some 20,000.
“Hands-off” has failed utterly. No viable government emerged in the safe space we created; the effort to train up a security force produced a pitiful platoon of sub-standard trainees who return to find no effective national institution they can join. Civil order has disintegrated.
And the cry goes up (I quote Frederic Wehrey, writing last Monday for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace): “There is not one faction strong enough to coerce or compel the others.”
Such a faction did once exist in Libya, of course. It was called Muammar Gaddafi.
And so the circle turns. I offer no solution. This column has a different purpose: to inoculate you against the optimism of military adventurists.
The inoculation will be by exposure to yellowing Hansard and old newsprint. Scratch your arm, as the smallpox vaccination used to do, with the once-infectious optimism of liberal interventionism. In the spring of 2011 the great majority radiated it. The great majority were wrong.
“To those who say it is nothing to do with us,” David Cameron told the Commons on March 11, “I would simply respond: do we want a situation where a failed pariah state festers on Europe’s southern border?” Britain, he concluded “will remain at the forefront of Europe in leading the response to this crisis”.
Ed Miliband, quoting his own maiden speech, was passionate: all the key United Nations tests, he said, “right intention, last resort, proportional means and reasonable prospects” were satisfied. Lord Owen, the former foreign secretary, called on the UN to “up the ante in every possible way”. William Hague, then the foreign secretary, told MPs that the case for intervention was so overwhelming that the UK and France could impose a no-fly zone even without UN authority.
Another former foreign secretary, Sir Malcolm Rifkind, was so enthusiastic he made a special video. “This is not like Iraq,” he said. “What has to be . . . agreed urgently, is . . . to enable the Libyan people to liberate themselves. That is a worthy cause, a sensible one and a cause consistent with both our ideals and our interests.”
Columnists cheered from the sidelines. Matthew d’Ancona in theTelegraph, deriding Barack Obama’s “paralysis”, declared: “The whole world is watching, yet again, to see whether the West is weak or strong. Cameron, to his credit, has . . . decided the path he wants to take.”
In The Times, a column by my friend David Aaronovitch was summarised in the headline “The price of inaction in Libya is far too high” and synopsis: “If we don’t bomb Gaddafi’s tanks, Europe is likely to face a wave of refugees and a new generation of jihadis.” InThe Observer, Andrew Rawnsley was headlined: “Instead of fearing another Iraq, the West must do right by Libya.” Ken Macdonald, then with this newspaper, called it simply “the right thing to do”.
Our editorial line was clear. “We stand on the side of the freedom of the Libyan people.” Even The Guardian seemed to approve.
Doubt was drowned by noise: by the Daily Mail, for example, laying into Mr Obama, “paralysed by indecision” and becoming known as “the Great Vacillator”.
In September that year, Mr Cameron, in Tripoli with Nicolas Sarkozy, the military battle won, felt able to look forward. “This is a moment,” he told the Libyan people, “when the Arab spring could become an Arab summer . . . I believe you have the opportunity to give an example to others about what taking back your country can mean.”
Well, he did ask for an example. He got it.
The great and good assured us that Libya would be a beacon of hope in the Arab world. How wrong could they be?
It can only be weeks before we quit our embassy in Tripoli. Britain will be almost the last. This week’s “I’m still here” tweet from our intrepid ambassador, Michael Aron, had a plaintive ring.
Almost all the others have gone. The Americans evacuated their diplomatic mission: their ambassador and three of his staff were murdered two years ago; French diplomats quit on Wednesday taking some British nationals with them and departing on a warship. The Italians stay, to run an evacuees’ air-bridge back to Italy. Other diplomatic staff have made their escape by road to Tunisia.
Many thousands of ordinary Libyans flee that way daily, too. Those who remain live amid ferocious fighting between warring factions, continuing now for two months; some are the militants that toppled Gaddafi. Now they are at war with each other. In Tripoli, factions from Misrata and Zintan battle it out. Hospitals are overflowing with the wounded, low on supplies and running out of staff as they, too, flee. Government has all but collapsed. Libya, said our leading article on Tuesday, “is hurtling towards civil war”.
New militias have formed and entered the fray, mostly Islamist in character. Fighters are joining from other Arab nations. What we once billed as a battle to establish liberal democratic values may become a battle to exterminate them.
To non-experts like me the picture appears so hopelessly fractured as to defy any analysis at all; but experts speak of a fiercely intricate tangle of tribe, clan, city-loyalty, patronage and plunder. Factions battle for control of airports, roads, ports and infrastructure. Libya (notes that Times leader) is “atomising”.
On this page in March 2011, on the eve (as it turned out) of the Franco-British military incursion to remove Gaddafi, I asked: “What is it we would be trying to do? To impose a government? To organise the institution by the rebels of a government? Which rebels? Who, anyway, are ‘the rebels’? Do we really know? Are they a unified force with a leader whom we could deal with? Would they remain so?”
Some of these questions have been answered. After the failure of a hands-on intervention in Iraq we opted for a hands-off intervention in Libya. The operation to remove Colonel Gaddafi from the air went well. We then settled on a longer-term objective: to create a safe space for the forces who had opposed Gaddafi to institute a new government. We offered advice and training but allowed the new governance of Libya to take its own shape. Realising the administration would need a security arm to maintain civil order, the US, Britain, Turkey and Italy undertook to train Libyan soldiers at overseas bases, intending to create a national force of some 20,000.
“Hands-off” has failed utterly. No viable government emerged in the safe space we created; the effort to train up a security force produced a pitiful platoon of sub-standard trainees who return to find no effective national institution they can join. Civil order has disintegrated.
And the cry goes up (I quote Frederic Wehrey, writing last Monday for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace): “There is not one faction strong enough to coerce or compel the others.”
Such a faction did once exist in Libya, of course. It was called Muammar Gaddafi.
And so the circle turns. I offer no solution. This column has a different purpose: to inoculate you against the optimism of military adventurists.
The inoculation will be by exposure to yellowing Hansard and old newsprint. Scratch your arm, as the smallpox vaccination used to do, with the once-infectious optimism of liberal interventionism. In the spring of 2011 the great majority radiated it. The great majority were wrong.
“To those who say it is nothing to do with us,” David Cameron told the Commons on March 11, “I would simply respond: do we want a situation where a failed pariah state festers on Europe’s southern border?” Britain, he concluded “will remain at the forefront of Europe in leading the response to this crisis”.
Ed Miliband, quoting his own maiden speech, was passionate: all the key United Nations tests, he said, “right intention, last resort, proportional means and reasonable prospects” were satisfied. Lord Owen, the former foreign secretary, called on the UN to “up the ante in every possible way”. William Hague, then the foreign secretary, told MPs that the case for intervention was so overwhelming that the UK and France could impose a no-fly zone even without UN authority.
Another former foreign secretary, Sir Malcolm Rifkind, was so enthusiastic he made a special video. “This is not like Iraq,” he said. “What has to be . . . agreed urgently, is . . . to enable the Libyan people to liberate themselves. That is a worthy cause, a sensible one and a cause consistent with both our ideals and our interests.”
Columnists cheered from the sidelines. Matthew d’Ancona in theTelegraph, deriding Barack Obama’s “paralysis”, declared: “The whole world is watching, yet again, to see whether the West is weak or strong. Cameron, to his credit, has . . . decided the path he wants to take.”
In The Times, a column by my friend David Aaronovitch was summarised in the headline “The price of inaction in Libya is far too high” and synopsis: “If we don’t bomb Gaddafi’s tanks, Europe is likely to face a wave of refugees and a new generation of jihadis.” InThe Observer, Andrew Rawnsley was headlined: “Instead of fearing another Iraq, the West must do right by Libya.” Ken Macdonald, then with this newspaper, called it simply “the right thing to do”.
Our editorial line was clear. “We stand on the side of the freedom of the Libyan people.” Even The Guardian seemed to approve.
Doubt was drowned by noise: by the Daily Mail, for example, laying into Mr Obama, “paralysed by indecision” and becoming known as “the Great Vacillator”.
In September that year, Mr Cameron, in Tripoli with Nicolas Sarkozy, the military battle won, felt able to look forward. “This is a moment,” he told the Libyan people, “when the Arab spring could become an Arab summer . . . I believe you have the opportunity to give an example to others about what taking back your country can mean.”
Well, he did ask for an example. He got it.
