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Libya

 

The critical apartheid

of Britain's coverage

of the war

 

Gordon Lawrie

Like little that has gone before, the events of the past week have forced me to reappraise what it means to be a citizen of the United Kingdom in the 21st century. To the extent that the actions of our government have gone unexamined by the media it must be concluded that a critical apartheid is currently being enforced; one that will not allow us to stray beyond the bounds of a world-view that is suffocatingly reductive in its ignorance and prejudice.
     The ludicrous assertion being promulgated by our government – that a sovereign state cannot take military action to defend itself against insurrection by a heavily armed militia (later rebranded as civilian) – is quite breathtaking in its ramifications. According to this 'Cameron doctrine' we should have withdrawn from the disputed provinces of Northern Ireland in the early-70s and poor old Ted Heath should be huckled off to the ICC to face charges over the events of Bloody Sunday. Meanwhile armed insurrection is to be accorded a privileged status. Under the new revolutionary charter Rusasia will surely be required to withdraw from Chechnya while Israel must of course be prevailed upon to withdraw from the occupied territories.
     But don't go planning a stag weekend to Grozny or the Golan Heights. I have a feeling that this doctrine will only be deployed against militarily weak, non-nuclear states. For we have created a perverse system through which the strong can pummel the weak into submission having first ensured that the underdog has been forbidden from defending himself. It's a curious mix of legalism and brutality. Indeed the idea that we can now take 'any means necessary' seems more appropriate to Malcolm X than the UN while the phrase 'legitimate target' was last used by self-justifying IRA bombers before it issued from the mouth of our defence secretary (a doctor of medicine no less). The worst have indeed been full of passionate intensity while their putative betters lack any conviction: as Mad Dog Cameron slavers for a piece of the Libyan action, Clegg – true to form – is the dog who will not bark.

 

     That is not to say that Cameron has avoided attempts to justify his actions, especially where this foreign fracas can help distract from the domestic crisis. At the Conservative party conference he was correct in his assertion that this debacle is unlike Iraq for in that situation Blair and Bush went to some lengths to secure their legal and moral position before taking action. But they are both lawyers. Cameron is an ex-corporate PR man high on his own propaganda who may not realise that there is a line to cross. Indeed, what Blair did with some agonising – however genuine – Cameron has done with absolute alacrity. Curiously, Cameron states that this is not a moral crusade whereas I thought the basis for intervention was to 'stop the slaughter'? What is he giving voice to if not a moral duty of intervention? It is certainly neither political nor economic.
     The distraction has allowed our more dubious allies to take care of business unmolested by the world's media. In the Yemen, President Saleh (enjoying his 33rd year in power) 'kettled' protesters by blocking their exits with burning tyres and then let his snipers go to work. Cameron has not issued one word of condemnation against this slaughter of civilians despite clear evidence of a massacre. So we can add inconsistency to incoherence and hypocrisy.
     The coalition government is entitled to debase itself but in so doing it has also made a mockery of those institutions which are meant to enshrine our commitment to human rights and the rule of law. The ICC's 'timely' announcement of investigations into Gadaffi's actions – in the absence of any concrete evidence that he has massacred ‘civilians’ – make it appear as a mere instrument of Western foreign policy while the strong-arming of the Security Council makes the UN appear merely contemptible. Even our Crown Office has gone riding into the fray with its announcement that it is 'preparing fresh charges' in relation to the Lockerbie bombing. To what purpose? It seems that Cameron, Berlusconi, Sarkozy and Obama – all of whom are domestically depleted - will artificially resuscitate a Libyan opposition and push for partition of the country, creating a Vichy state.
     But you won't find any discussion of the Cameron doctrine in the mainstream media. So cosy has been their reporting that it might become mandatory for their roving correspondents to travel with a sofa and coffee table. The BBC has been particularly uninformative but perhaps it is obsessed with legacy issues. Of course the media are merely providing the level of critique that we have come to expect. We have been trained to respond to a narrative that would make a Hollywood plot seem convoluted. Our connection to a downed American aircrew is no more or less than to the Libyan tank-crew they have just obliterated yet we are habituated to identifying with the plight of one to the exclusion of the other. It is increasingly difficult to get off the emotive carousel when it is kept turning ever more rapidly by fresh acts of desperation and cruelty.
     This cannot go on. We must accept that by binding ourselves to acting within the rule of low we deliberately fetter our freedom to act pragmatically, whimsically or emotionally. As the situation stands the law is being used to elevate whimsy, greed and opportunism. Of course we can completely ditch the commitment to human rights and the rule of law. If we wish we can live on the dodge, making and breaking alliances as it suits us, acting only as our self-interest dictates, simultaneously fawning over our 'senior partners' and demonising our weaker competitors.
     I have a feeling that our PM would be untroubled by such a course of action. To the extent that Cameron is guided by anything it is a base mercantilism. Let’s not forget that he missed the beginning of the Libya debacle as he was busy tying the outgoing Mubarak government into costly defence contracts with the UK. I have no doubt that he would have been untroubled working for the East India Company during the opium wars. But the man who acts thus internationally can be expected to act no differently domestically. When our forces return to their medals and P45s they would do well to remember this.

 

     Just as I may criticise Cameron I am no apologist for Gadaffi. I do not see him as worthy of praise but neither do I see him as a floating signifier for all that is bad in the world. Curiously, given the way the press have portrayed him, both he and his troops appear to have acted with some small amount of rationality and restraint. Perhaps he remembers what it feels like to be bombed and to lose your daughter to an aggressor who does not discriminate between military and civilian targets. His greatest crime is that he has embarrassed the West by refusing to kowtow to its every petulant demand. In his refusal to capitulate and hand over his country to a puppet democracy he joins a list of morally ambiguous figures from Chiang Kai-shek to William Wallace.
     Sadly we now live out a pale charade of liberty and have grown lazy and complacent in our supposed freedoms having never had to defend them. There is nothing in the history of liberation that would lead us to equate freedom with comfort. But it is a shallow, luxuriant democracy that cannot bind its representatives from doing great harm.
     The greatest tragedy is that a process that began with great hope in the Middle East has been hijacked by the West and is now overshadowed by shabby, murderous opportunism. The sudden rise of Arab democratisation is matched only by our own downward progress. At some point our paths must cross, probably without our knowing it, and we will find our legalistic morality utterly debased. Given that we now occupy a position discernible not by the luminosity of our ideals but by their shadow, that point may already have been reached.
     And what of the future? It is worth looking to the fate of the League of Nations, compromised to such an extent by crises in Abyssinia and Spain and by American exceptionalism that when real trouble arrived it was utterly hollowed out. We do a disservice to its successor in treating it as a rubber-stamping operation for whatever opportunistic adventure might serve our interests. And we had better tread carefully. Just as Gadaffi's defences have been degraded – leaving Libya open to Balkanisation – so we have degraded our own institutions and through them our ability to ward off whatever misfortunes the future may throw in our path.

Gordon Lawrie is a former runner-up in the Scotland Young Thinker of the Year competition with which SR is associated. He is one of a panel of young people now writing regularly for SR.