Former South African President Mbeki Says UN Had No Evidence of War in Libya

Former South African President Thabo Mbeki along with Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe. The two leaders had worked on a power-sharing agreement for Zimbabwe., a photo by Pan-African News Wire File Photos on Flickr.

Libya: UN Had No Evidence of War - Mbeki

17 February 2012

Cape Town — The United Nations gave free reign to the United States, France and the United Kingdom, known as the P3, to intervene in Libya without any evidence of war, former president Thabo Mbeki on Thursday.

"The naked reality is that the relevant organs of the UN --the Security Council and the Office of the Secretary General -- elected to betray their binding obligations in terms of international law, especially as prescribed by the UN Charter," he said in a speech prepared for delivery.

"In this context I would like to state that there is absolutely no evidence that the [Muammar] Gaddafi regime either committed or had any intention to commit any genocide or wage a war against civilians, justifying the evocation by the UN, the P3 and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) of the so-called 'right to protect'."

Mbeki was speaking at the annual Dullah Omar Memorial Lecture at the University of the Western Cape.

He said military actions in Libya were purportedly performed to make peace, bring people out of a dictatorship and protect the people from criminal abuse by the government, especially if war crimes, ethnic cleansing and genocide occurred.

"Together with everything I have said, we must nevertheless accept that various concrete realities in Libya provided the excuse for the Western powers to intervene in the manner they did," he said.

"Through its actions, it had earned the wrath of the major Western powers, partly informed by the conviction that Libya had carried out terrorist actions which had claimed many lives of citizens of these powers."

Libya had not been a democratic country, and it was young military officers, led by Gaddafi that originally overthrew a feudal regime to assert the right of African people.