But before that, the skills of politicians and the press would be put to the test as a totally unexpected upheaval swept across part of our world.
21
Libya and the Arab Spring
I didn’t see it coming – I don’t think anyone did. Of course, there were signs. The National Security Council papers I received told of mass unemployment and the inflation of food prices in north Africa. The diplomatic telegrams from ambassadors talked about the spread of social media and a rapidly expanding young population in the Middle East. But no one predicted that those things were kindling for revolts in fourteen countries across the region – or that our military would soon end up deeply involved in one of them.
The conventional wisdom is that the Arab Spring has been an embarrassing failure. Only one country caught up in the revolutions, Tunisia, has kept its new democracy. The legacy elsewhere is civil war, extremism, violence and worse.
As for Britain’s enthusiasm for the uprisings, the theory goes that this was a mistake that should never be repeated, and that our intervention in Libya was misguided.
I don’t agree. We made mistakes – and I will certainly admit to having made some of them. But I stand by my decisions. What we did was right.
It is simply too soon to tell the true outcome of the Arab Spring. Our own journey from autocracy to democracy took centuries and included bloodshed, extremism, civil war, and many false starts. Why should we expect modern transitions from dictatorship to democracy to be instant and painless?
There isn’t room here to document every twist and turn of the Arab Spring in every country. But I will try to cover each of the phases of Britain’s involvement, explaining why I took such a strong stance on the upheaval and why I decided to put British lives on the line by intervening.
Back in late 2010, a fruit-seller had set fire to himself in a Tunisian village, in protest at the heavy-handed authorities persecuting small traders.
Word of his death spread online, and rallies against the oppressive regime broke out. President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, who for twenty-three years had rigged elections, censored the press, tortured opponents, imprisoned people without trial and plundered his country, was gone after just twenty-eight days. It was astonishing.
I received a detailed note from John Casson, my foreign affairs private secretary, in early January 2011 saying that these events were indicative of a wider problem across the region. It was in our long-term national interest that these countries moved towards the rule of law, not just ‘the dead-end choice between dictatorship and extremism’.
John would later become our ambassador to Egypt. And it was Egypt where the spark of revolution would next catch light. The people there, inspired by what they saw in Tunisia – and they predominantly saw it online – took to the streets to call for ‘bread, freedom and social justice’ from their dictator of thirty years, Hosni Mubarak.
Much of the official advice was cautious, as Mubarak had been an ally in the fight against extremism and terror, and British companies had important economic interests in Egypt and the region. A note from the FCO on 27 January said that the situation in Egypt was ‘4 out of 10’, with 10 being the collapse of the regime.
I thought it was right to align Britain decisively with those who wanted to see the spread of democracy, rights and freedom. If we, one of the oldest democracies in the world, couldn’t support those with aspirations for the freedoms we enjoyed, who would?
I was, after all, influenced by earlier revolutions. When I was in my mid-twenties the Berlin Wall came down, and countries freed themselves from the shackles of communism. I had seen the ‘before’ and ‘after’ of a whole part of a continent, once repressed and now liberated. I had felt the surge of energy and hope. I understood; and I never took these things for granted myself.
What’s more, I never bought the argument that some people cannot handle democracy. Yes, there are different challenges in different countries. But the desire for freedom burns inside us all, whether we’re in Berlin or Benghazi.
More to the point, open and inclusive politics are necessary because of the damage the alternatives do in the long run. Tunisia, Egypt, Syria – all were in relative decline before 2011. They are even worse off now, not because of the attempts to change the model, but because those attempts failed. The ‘strongman’ leaders who so comforted Cold War Washington, Moscow and London left their countries corrupt, embittered and impoverished.
I felt, once the uprisings had started, that the status quo wasn’t going to be tenable. It simply wouldn’t be possible, or desirable, to prop up these regimes against their people. The damage to their countries and to our long-term interests would have been great.
But of course I thought it worthwhile to try to stabilise the situation, and to show these dictators a better way if we possibly could. I called Mubarak on 29 January, begging him to show some flexibility if he wanted to keep his job, and pleading with him not to carry out violent repression. He could have survived if he had offered presidential elections. Instead, he cut off the internet and sent thugs onto the streets to attack protesters. Almost a thousand people were killed.
On 2 February I stood outside 10 Downing Street alongside the UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon, who was in London for a bilateral meeting. I made a statement supporting the Egyptian people’s aspirations for a more democratic future and greater rights, and condemning the despicable violence meted out by their own government.
Meanwhile, William Hague was touring Jordan, Yemen, the UAE and Bahrain. He was the first politician to visit Tunisia after Ben Ali was toppled – and, it would turn out, the last Western foreign minister to visit President Bashar al-Assad in Syria.
Britain was firmly on the front foot, in contrast to other Western countries. France had already stumbled down the wrong path, as Sarkozy initially backed Ben Ali. Germany had stepped back, with Merkel largely absent from the debate. And America had a false start too. When I spoke to Obama on the phone about the situation in Egypt, he told me that he did want Mubarak to go. I had my iPad on my knee, and was reading the latest BBC report from the region. ‘But the special envoy you’ve sent there has just said that Mubarak must be part of Egypt’s future,’ I said. I rarely encountered Angry Obama. But when I did, it was because he had been blindsided. He went quiet, spoke even slower than normal, and was clearly fuming.
By 11 February, Mubarak was gone. I declared it a ‘precious moment of opportunity’, as inspired demonstrators took to the streets of Jordan, Syria, Yemen, Bahrain and, crucially, Libya, which was home to the tyrannical dictator of forty-two years, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi.
I was about to head off to the region myself, on a pre-planned visit to the Gulf which many in my team were now advising against. The situation was volatile. Questions would be raised about our relationships with the autocratic monarchs of the Gulf States – and about arms sales too. My view was simple: you can’t influence events unless you are prepared to get stuck in. I was going.
I started the trip with a visit to Egypt on 21 February. I visited Tahrir Square, the epicentre of the revolution, the first foreign leader to do so. I spoke to some of the protesters, including an excited young boy with the Egyptian flag painted on his face. It really felt as if the place was on the cusp of change.
Our ambassador, Dominic Asquith, had arranged a series of meetings with pro-democracy activists and bloggers. We had agreed beforehand that these shouldn’t include representatives of the Muslim Brotherhood or related Islamist organisations. Far from instigating the uprisings, the Islamists had been surprised by them, and were now trying to turn them to their advantage. We shouldn’t assist them.
Indeed, when extremists tried to hijack the demonstrations they had been shouted down. The Egyptian people were rejecting both corrupt authoritarianism and extremism. The young, inspiring people I met there said as much. They knew we would be advised that the alternative
to the strongman leader was extremism and chaos, but they believed that this time it could be different.
They told me they wanted jobs, a voice and the chance to choose their own future, free from corruption. That last word – corruption – was perhaps the most vital. The Mubarak regime was corrupt on an epic scale. Not simply taking some money for personal enrichment, but on a level that was holding the whole country back. Some of it was stashed in London, in properties and bank accounts, and I immediately set up a Whitehall taskforce and sent a Crown Prosecution Service prosecutor and team to the Cairo embassy for two years, freezing over £80 million of assets of the Mubarak family and their cronies.
The following day I was in Kuwait with John Major, marking twenty years since British forces had helped expel Saddam Hussein’s invaders and restore the sovereignty of this small country. I was to address the Kuwaiti National Assembly, where I would set out my stall on the current crisis.
I accept that I was optimistic about what the uprisings could lead to, but in my speech I made arguments about how we should encourage democracy and how we should fight extremism – and the consequences of these things for our foreign policy. I am certain this remains the right approach today.
The choice leaders like me were told we faced – between the supposed stability of highly controlling, undemocratic regimes and the supposed uncertainty of freedom and democracy – was, I argued, a false one. Indeed, I calculated that supporting political change in some cases offered a lower risk of serious conflict and extremism. I was right. Look at what happened later in Syria: political change failed; the classic Middle Eastern strongman Assad ravaged cities like Homs; radicalisation and conflict proliferated.
There was criticism that my visit was hypocritical. How could I be standing there, in these oil-rich absolute monarchies with often terrible human rights records, while simultaneously condemning their secular autocratic neighbours?
We made pragmatic judgements about how best to promote our interests and values, and these differed depending on the domestic position of the leadership, the progress of democratic forces and the centrality of the relationship. If you want to promote British interests you can’t only talk to democracies. If you did, you’d be having most of your conversations in western Europe. In meeting these governments you are neither giving up your principles nor endorsing their systems. And in foreign policy there is not just the promotion of democracy but a myriad of interests that includes security, prosperity, and the need to work with others in order to encourage them to change and to tackle common challenges, that must be taken into account.
The relationship between Britain and Saudi Arabia is a case in point. The fact that the regime in Riyadh uses cruel punishments, torture and excessive use of the death penalty is undeniable, and it horrifies me. Its journey towards equality, human rights and democracy is proceeding at a snail’s pace.
I would argue strongly, however, that we are right not just to engage with Saudi Arabia, but to be its partner and ally. As the home to two of Islam’s most holy places – Mecca and Medina – the country plays a special role in the Islamic world. As the only Arab member of the G20, it is the region’s economic superpower. And, crucially, the Saudis are key allies when it comes to intelligence and security. Throughout my time as prime minister they held at bay a branch of al-Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula, meaning that the UK, the US and allies could focus on areas where we didn’t have capable partners.
Most notably, in October 2010 our security services informed me that Saudi Arabia had foiled the latest terror plot: two bombs smuggled in printer cartridges on flights from Yemen to the US. One had arrived at East Midlands Airport in Leicestershire, and could have blown up mid-flight. It was the Saudis who alerted us to the threat, and gave us details of the packages in which the explosives were hidden. When the planning, preparation and execution of an attack can take place in different countries, such security cooperation between governments is vital.
Excessive ideology in foreign policy is not helpful. Michael Gove had one outburst at cabinet about how the FCO had hugged dictators too close, and the Arab Spring was our moment to take the side of freedom. While I shared his view of freedom, I felt that William Hague got it right when he gave a dignified reply about it being slightly more complicated than that. The conversation made it into the papers the next day, something that often seemed to happen when Michael was involved … In any case, the response to the Arab Spring by the Arab monarchies was more effective – combining reform, cooperation with their neighbours, and repression, rather than just drawing the sword like the secular dictators.
At the same time as these theoretical debates, there was the urgent and practical matter of evacuating our citizens in those countries. We had already got people out of Tunisia on commercial flights, and had chartered planes to rescue expats in Egypt. But in Libya, the FCO was not quick enough to act. Here I learned an important lesson: government departments rarely react fast enough, and rarely work together, unless forced to do so by the centre. That meant me personally convening COBR, getting the key people into the same room, and metaphorically banging the table to make things happen.
The Ministry of Defence has extraordinary capabilities thanks to our armed forces and state-of-the-art equipment, but it can be the worst offender when it comes to working with others. There is a tendency to hang back and wait for things to go wrong before it steps in. There are also the financial constraints: the MoD and the FCO won’t act until the Treasury and DFID have committed to pay – another of the many lessons I would learn.
France, Germany and most other concerned countries had started to evacuate their civilians from Libya on 22 February. But here we were, on 24 February, being told there were still hundreds of Brits in Libya, some deep in the desert working in oilfields, and potentially in great danger.
I was at a grand dinner hosted by the Sultan of Oman, with the orchestra straining away, when palace staff brought in a note from Liz explaining the situation. Immediately I walked out and got on a conference call with William and Liam Fox. ‘Just send the RAF in and do it now,’ I shouted into my BlackBerry.
The military wanted an indemnity – in the form of a written instruction from No. 10 – before C130 Hercules transport planes left the runway. It was a nail-biting time. Thankfully, the Hercules and their passengers returned safely.
Initially, Libya was following a similar pattern to Egypt. But Libya wasn’t Egypt. There was no American-backed national army with a special place in the nation’s affections to step in and keep the peace. Libya hadn’t functioned properly as a country for fifty years; it had been kept afloat by vast oil reserves.
Moreover, Libya’s opposition wasn’t Egypt’s opposition. Its rebels, who quickly formed an anti-Gaddafi coalition which began to fight the regime, were organised and effective at political campaigning. It was the most credible opposition of any Arab Spring country. It had a presence in each of the key cities spanning the coast from west to east: Tripoli, Sirte, Misrata and Benghazi. It brought senior defectors from Gaddafi’s government and long-term secular and Muslim Brotherhood oppositionists into a recognisable political body, the National Transitional Council (NTC). The FCO’s view of its chairman, Mustafa Abdul Jalil, was that he was impressive, effective, had political legitimacy and was inclusive.
Most important of all, Gaddafi certainly wasn’t Mubarak. He had made it clear that he was going to stay – and make his people pay. In his broadcast on 22 February the Colonel screamed in Arabic for a whole hour: ‘We will cleanse Libya inch by inch, house by house, home by home, alley by alley, person by person, until the country is cleansed of dirt and scum.’ He was defiant, deranged – and determined, promising to catch the demonstrators like ‘rats’ and ‘cockroaches’. Watching it from a hotel room in Doha stirred something in Ed Llewellyn and me that bypassed our younger colleagues. To us, raised in the 1980s, he was ‘Mad Dog’ Gaddafi, a horrific figure in mod
ern history who sold Semtex to the IRA, ordered the downing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie in Scotland, and admitted responsibility for the murder of PC Yvonne Fletcher in London. We knew what he was capable of.
To do nothing in these circumstances was not a neutral act. It was to facilitate murder. If Gaddafi had been allowed his way he would have murdered many, many thousands, and then consolidated his regime through repression. And even that wouldn’t have stopped a breakdown, merely delayed it.
I was clear that our first response should be to try to isolate the regime. I joined forces with Sarkozy, speaking to him regularly on the telephone to enforce travel bans, arms embargos, asset freezes and, crucially, referring the perpetrators to the International Criminal Court. Our efforts resulted in UN Security Council Resolution 1970, which deployed our entire sanctions arsenal.
But it had little impact on Gaddafi’s behaviour. On 28 February he intensified his assault against the rebels in Misrata, advancing eastwards, inch by inch, house by house, towards the key rebel-held second city of Benghazi.
At that moment, it was as if someone had turned over a sand timer. It was suddenly clear to me that we were in a race with the regime – them trying to get their hands on the rebel capital, us trying to coordinate an international political and military response. Whoever reached their goal first would either unleash bloodshed or avert it.
Of course, Iraq casts a shadow over all foreign policy – every intervention is seen through the prism of its failures. But it was Bosnia that was at the forefront of my mind as I discussed with Ed how to respond to the crisis in Libya. We knew too well what happens when the West drags its heels as an aggressor decides to ‘cleanse’ a country. Gaddafi had a long record of brutality and violence towards opponents of his regime, and this spoke volumes about his intentions. His army showed every sign of sticking with him – and having no compunction about firing on their own people. I was given information that Libyan soldiers who refused to shoot civilians were themselves shot.
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