Oral Evidence: Libya: Examination of Intervention and Collapse and the UK's Future Policy Options, HC 520

Oral evidence: Libya: Examination of intervention and collapse and the UK's future policy options, HC 520 Friday 11 December 2015 Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 14 December 2015 Watch the meeting: http://www.parliamentlive.tv/Event/Index/844fde5d-5cc9-4d0f-8b70- 70838cc07518 Members present: Crispin Blunt (Chair); Mr John Baron; Stephen Gethins; Andrew Rosindell Questions 175-232 Examination of Witness Rt Hon Tony Blair gave evidence. Q175 Chair: Welcome to the fifth public evidence-taking session of our inquiry into Libya. Mr Blair, we are delighted that you have been able to come and give us evidence. It being a non-sitting Friday, this is the stay-behind party to take us through the questions we would like to ask you. I would like to pass on Ann Clwyd’s regards to you. Sadly, she is still recovering from illness and cannot be with us today. I am fairly certain that Mike Gapes would be passing on exactly the same message. I begin by going to the background to the Libyan situation—back to your 2004 deal in the desert and the 2006 economic deal setting up BP’s interests, amongst others, into Libya. I regard the achievement of Libyan disarmament and the huge compensation for the victims of Libyan misbehaviour over previous decades, and then the opening up of Libya’s oil, gas and water sectors, for example, to UK and other overseas investors, as a signal achievement of your premiership. Am I right? Tony Blair: Well, I hope you are. I think it was important, because otherwise we would have had a situation where Libya was continuing to sponsor terrorism, was continuing to develop chemical and nuclear weapons and would have remained isolated in the international community. I think it is important that we brought them in from the cold, as it were. It is important also in today’s context because, particularly if we had still had the residue of that chemical weapons programme in Libya today, given the state of Libya today and given the presence of ISIS there, I think it would have constituted a real risk, even today. Look, it was always one of these decisions that was difficult because of the nature of the regime and the individual we were dealing with but, on the other hand, I think it was worth while because of the protection of our security and because of the broader interests of trying to engage a country like that on a process of change. Oral evidence: Libya policy, HC 520 1 Q176 Chair: We took evidence from Professor Joffé, in which he referred to our rather limited understanding of Libya. I invite you to comment on that, given your role between 2004 and 2006, the reset of the relationship with Libya and the fact that we were then able to establish proper UK diplomatic relations and a UK presence there. Daniel Kawczynski isn’t here—sadly, he is in Poland today on long-standing business—but he wrote a book about Gaddafi and is a member of this Committee. You are reported to have made six visits to Libya after you were Prime Minister, before 2010. Actually, our understanding of Libya was probably pretty reasonable, wasn’t it? Britain probably understood as much as anybody about Libya. Tony Blair: Yes. We obviously had very close links with them, and I continued those links after I left as well, because I think it was important to see if it was possible to get them to do the political and economic reform that followed their switch on the position of security. I am not sure it was very easy to do that, but it was worth trying in my view. Q177 Chair: Just to explore those meetings in your post-premiership period before 2010, I am presuming there may have been a mixture of work being done there. Perhaps you can tell us whether there were any strictly as Middle East envoy, whether they were being done as part of Tony Blair Associates in terms of the political and economic re-engagement of Libya, or whether there were business interests. Perhaps you can just explain. Tony Blair: Sure. First of all, by the way, I never had any business interests in Libya. Secondly, the interaction that I had with them was really as a result of the interaction I had within Government. Obviously, I had already explained to Gaddafi what I was doing in the Middle East, since he had an interest in the Israeli-Palestinian issue. I would talk to him a lot about Africa, actually, which was probably the main topic. And then there was the whole relationship of Libya to the outside world. I was keen to encourage a process of development. As I say, a lot of the conversation afterwards was about whether it was possible for them to open up their economy, to make political change. The tragedy of Libya is that the potential of the country is enormous. It has got some incredible assets. Obviously, the potential in energy is huge, but so it is in tourism. I remember when I was growing up in the ’60s, Tripoli was regarded a bit like Dubai is today; it was regarded as one of the great open cities. They’ve got extraordinary antiquities in the country. It’s tragic for the Libyan people, really—tragic that the country was taken over by the Gaddafi regime and then tragic as to what has happened subsequent to the fall. But those assets remain and the country’s progress remains such that— if they could get stability there, it would be a fantastic country. Q178 Chair: I have had it reported to me by a diplomat who was serving there in the period before our intervention that in a sense the wider British strategy was to—he described it as “betting the shop on Saif”, and that his engagement with the London School of Economics and his obviously frequent visits to the UK—as is perhaps rather traditional with British policy towards the Middle East, there have been a number of sons that we have brought on. What would be your comment on that as the overall British strategy? Would it be one that you would recognise? Tony Blair: Well, I think we—we were obviously interested in Saif because he appeared to be the person most likely to succeed if that regime remained in place, but once the Arab Spring began, it was clear that in the case of none of these regimes they were going Oral evidence: Libya policy, HC 520 2 to stay as they were, because in all of these countries you’ve got young populations who are anxious for change, feel economically and politically deprived. What you’ve really had in the Arab Spring is two groups of people coming together to remove the existing order. On the one hand you’ve got Islamists, and on the other hand you’ve got what I would call the more liberal-minded. And really part of the problem in the whole of the Arab Spring is that those two groups come together in a common objective, which is to remove the regime, but after that, of course, there’s a profound disagreement as to what comes next. Some want to put in place a society that is effectively governed by Islamism, and the others want a society probably more like the one that we have; and those two fundamentally divergent visions are in conflict with each other. So I think post the Arab Spring there was never any way the regime was going to go to the children of the dictator, as it were, but prior to that, obviously we were, as part of the engagement—I think the system did engage with Saif; I think I met him once or maybe twice myself. And who knows what would have happened if the Arab Spring hadn’t erupted? There may have been a more peaceful evolution of the country. We just don’t know. But it’s important to point out that despite all the engagement that we had with Gaddafi—as I say, I’m very happy to justify that, and to explain exactly why we did it and what benefits it brought—I was never under any illusions that in the end that society had to change fundamentally in order to allow its people to govern themselves in a way compatible with the 21st century. Q179 Chair: Would a British diplomat have been right to think that Saif in 2010-11 was absolutely the best if not only prospect of effecting that kind of transition? Tony Blair: Yes; it looked like it at the time, I think. It’s not something I went into in a great deal of detail—there are others better able to comment, probably, than me—but I would think that’s a reasonable assumption. Q180 Chair: Turning to the 2011 military intervention and putting it in the context of your— if I may put it this way—Chicago doctrine, from your 1999 speech, one of the conditions you suggested was that all diplomatic options needed to have been exhausted. Do you think that was done in Libya? Tony Blair: Because of the way events moved and the pace they moved at, I think there was no option in the end but to intervene, but I did try, as this thing got under way, to see if there was a possibility of him going, and going, as it were, voluntarily, and having a different type of transition put in place.

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