A Libyan rebel celebrates in front of a tank belonging to loyalist forces bombed at the start of Western-led air strikes in March 2011.
Libya was supposed to be different. The lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan had been learned, David Cameron and Nicolas Sarkozy insisted last year. This would be a real humanitarian intervention.
Unlike Iraq, there would be no boots on the ground. Unlike in Afghanistan, Nato air power would be used to support a fight for freedom and prevent a massacre. Unlike the Kosovo campaign, there would be no indiscriminate cluster bombs, only precision weapons. It would be a war to save civilian lives.
Seven months on from Muammar Gaddafi’s butchering in the ruins of Sirte, the fruits of liberal intervention in Libya are now cruelly clear and documented by the United Nations and human rights groups: 8000 prisoners held without trial, rampant torture and routine deaths in detention, the ethnic cleansing of Tawerga, a town of 30000 mainly black Libyans (already in the frame as a crime against humanity) and the continuing violent persecution of sub-Saharan Africans across the country. A year after the Western powers tried to make up for lost ground in the Arab uprisings by tipping the balance of the Benghazi-led revolt, Libya is in the lawless grip of rival warlords and armed conflict between militias as the West-installed National Transitional Council passes Gaddafi-style laws clamping down on freedom of speech, gives legal immunity to former rebels and disqualifies election candidates critical of the new order.
These are the political forces Nato played a role in bringing to power.
Now the evidence is starting to build up of what Nato’s laser-guided bombing campaign actually meant on the ground. The New York-based Human Rights Watch this week released a report on the deaths of at least 72 Libyan civilians, a third of them children, killed in eight separate bombing raids (seven on civilian targets) and denounced Nato for still refusing to investigate or even acknowledge civilian deaths that were always denied at the time.
Comparative trifles
Given the tens of thousands of civilians killed by United States, British and other Nato forces both from the air and on the ground in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen over the past decade, perhaps Nato commanders prefer not to detain themselves with such comparative trifles. And Human Rights Watch believes that, whatever the real number of civilians directly killed by Nato bombing, it was relatively low given the 10000-odd sorties flown.
But whereas Nato’s mission was to protect civilians, the alliance in practice turned that on its head. Throwing its weight behind one side in a civil war to oust Gaddafi’s regime, it became the air force for rebel militias. So, whereas the death toll was perhaps between 1000 and 2000 when Nato intervened in March, by October it was estimated by the National Transitional Council to be 30000, including thousands of civilians. We cannot, of course, know what would have happened without Nato’s bombing campaign, even if there is no evidence that Gaddafi had either the intention or capability to carry out a massacre in Benghazi. But we do know that Nato provided decisive air cover for the rebels as they matched Gaddafi’s forces war crime for war crime, carried out massacres of their own and indiscriminately shelled civilian areas with devastating results, such as reducing much of Sirte to rubble last October.
There were also Nato and Qatari boots on the ground co-ordinating rebel operations. So, Nato certainly shared responsibility for the deaths of many more civilians than its missiles directly incinerated.
Aiding and abetting
It is the kind of indirect culpability that led to the conviction last month of Charles Taylor, the former president of Liberia, in the UN-backed Special Court for Sierra Leone in The Hague. Taylor, now awaiting his sentence, was found guilty of “aiding and abetting” war crimes and crimes against humanity during Sierra Leone’s civil war in the 1990s. But he was cleared of directly ordering atrocities carried out by Sierra Leonean rebels, which pretty well describes the role played by Nato in Libya last year.
International lawyers say legal culpability would depend on the degree of assistance and knowledge of war crimes for which Nato provided cover, even if the political and moral responsibility could not be clearer. But there is, of course, no question of Nato leaders being held to legal account for the Libyan carnage, any more than they have been for more direct crimes carried out in Iraq and Afghanistan. The only Briton convicted of a war crime over the bloodbath of Iraq has been Corporal Donald Payne, for abuse of prisoners in Basra in 2003, whereas George Bush has boasted of authorising the crime of torture and has faced not so much as a caution.
It only underlines that what is called international law simply does not apply to the big powers or their political leaders. In the 10 years of its existence, the International Criminal Court has indicted 28 people from seven countries for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Every one of them is African. As long as international law is used only against small or weak states in the developing world, it will not be a system of international justice but an instrument of power politics.
Similarly, the urgent lesson of Libya for the rest of the Arab world and beyond is that, however it is dressed up, foreign military intervention is not a short cut to freedom. – © Guardian News & Media 2012