Big Mistake by the UN.

The United Nations Security Council (UNSC) have today (27/2) concluded their emergency session into the situation in LIbya. It appears that they have been largely fooled by events of Saturday (26/2) where Britain made a big show of sending in special forces to remove 150 of the 450 oil workers that Britain has in the country.

This gave the UNSC the confidence to unanimously impose a resolution against Libya. The first part of this resolution is to refer the events in Libya to the International Criminal Court (ICC). In Britain this is wrongly being reported as Qaddafi being reported to the ICC. This is not the case. What the ICC will do is investigate the atrocities that appear to have been committed in the east of the country to determine who committed them before pursuing criminal charges where appropriate. From what I've seen of the situation this is more likely to send shivers down the spines of the rebels because the loyalty of the army in the east of Libya was in doubt long before they formally came out against Qaddafi.

The second part of the resolution is more troubling. It freezes the international assets of Qaddafi and members of his inner circle and imposes travel bans that prevent them from leaving Libya. This is a serious problem because it removes the option for this to end with Qaddafi leaving Libya for a third country and leaves him with no option other then to fight to the death. At the moment the numbers of government and rebel forces in Libya are pretty evenly matched with the better trained and better equipped government forces seemingly holding a slight advantage. Now that they've been told that surrender is not an option they're going to have to fight back even harder increasing the chances of a prolonged and bloody conflict in Libya.

The third part of the resolution - an arms embargo on Libya - is designed to limit this conflict by stopping the supply of arms to both sides. Sadly experience of African arms embargoes teaches us that this will not work. All it will achieve is making sure that the people who will continue to supply arms to both sides will be the sort of people who have no ethical problem breaking a UN arms embargo. Also these embargoes normally do nothing to stop private security companies bringing in weapons to supply their staff. This increases the chances that the coming war in Libya will be a brutal war fought with small arms rather then a surgical war fought with strategic weapons.

The only positive, and why many in the UN felt comfortable voting for this resolution, is that Qaddafi and Libya have been subject to so many of these UNSC resolutions in the past that this stinker is likely to be ignored.