Fighters in Libya fire at Islamic State military positions. Photo: Manu Brabo / AP/Press Association Images. All rights reservedFor the second time this year, a parliamentary inquiry has examined a British military intervention that resulted in the collapse of a dictatorship, and found a disastrous lack of planning for the aftermath. After Iraq in 2003, came Libya in 2011. But the history of failures in long-term planning following British intervention in conflicts stretches back to long before Iraq; I experienced similar problems when working in Kosovo and Bosnia. Why does this keep happening? One reason is a failure to take basic rights and the rule of law seriously in the critical months after fighting has ended.
In the summer of 2011, Human Rights Watch documented serious human rights abuses by the Gaddafi government, but also the failure to protect basic rights in the growing amount of territory under opposition control. Our information on Gaddafi’s crimes was welcomed in NATO capitals; our concerns about opposition abuses much less so. Western countries displayed a profound lack of interest in addressing abuses by the armed groups they supported - and this became even more apparent when those forces took power.
The UN Human Rights Council had set up a Commission of Inquiry on Libya as unrest began in February 2011. It reported on serious rights violations in the country in the year that followed, including by anti-Gaddafi forces. But the Council - with the strong support of Britain - shut down this Commission in early 2012, a few months after Gaddafi was toppled. UK officials told Human Rights Watch that such monitoring was no longer needed, and that the new Libyan government objected to being monitored. And although a UN mission was set up in Libya with a substantial human rights component, it decided to focus on elections rather than rights abuses. The result was that, at this critical time, there was little public scrutiny of what was going wrong.
