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Gaddafi and High Hedges Legislation

Posted by Sammy Wilson, MP for East Antrim, at 10:04, Wed 2 March 2011:

I had to smile as I talked to a friend this week. He was talking about the turmoil in the Middle East and North Africa and he was describing how he was scrolling through the news on Tuesday evening. The headlines were about the trouble on the streets of Bahrain, the changes forced on the government of Egypt and the massacre of civilians by a demented Gaddafi in Libya while in N.I. the Assembly had passed the High Hedges Bill. It put a different perspective on everything. I know that the High Hedges Bill is important and has been something which people, councils and public bodies have long been asking for in N.I. It shows the necessary work which a local administration can do, but meanwhile there are events happening around us which we have no control over and which can and will change our lives beyond recognition.

Most Unionists in N.I. will be glad to see the terrorist-sponsoring madman who rules Lybia getting his comeuppance and hopefully by the time this article is published he and his sons will have received his just rewards at the hands of the citizens of his country whom he has oppressed, robbed, tortured and murdered for forty years. Of course the misery which he heaped on his own people he also exported to N.I. in the form of weapons and explosives for the IRA. The ultimate irony in the whole Libyan situation is that Sinn Fein who were happy to receive weapons of terror from their vicious sponsor are now condemning him and his “absolutist” rule. Another U turn for republicans or another example of the two faced hypocrisy which they are notorious for.

Of course they are not alone in their about turn. The British government who cosied up to Gaddafi in return for oil contracts is now having to renounce him for his brutality towards his own countrymen. Let us not forget that it was not so long ago that our government was refusing to back N.I. Unionists in their call for compensation for IRA victims from Gaddafi because it might upset their trade aspirations. It was the same government which was involved in a dirty deal to return the Lockerbie bomber so that Gaddafi could engage in a defiant act of triumphalism to bolster his flagging support at home. It was our government which engaged in arms sales to this lunatic, some of those arms may even have been used in the massacre of those killed on the streets of Tripoli and to its disgrace it was this government, and some in the hierarchy of the PSNI, who sent police officers to Lybia to train Gaddafi’s counter terrorism forces – a disgraceful betrayal of the RUC men and women who were murdered with Gaddafi’s IRA supplied weapons.

Hopefully the world will soon be rid of this despot. However the turmoil in Arab countries should be a concern for us all. Whilst the protests and uprisings have been about establishing more democratic regimes, history shows that very often the result is very different. In the last century the Revolution by the people to replace the Tsar in Russia, resulted in the tyranny of communism, the murder of tens of millions of Russian citizens and decades of repression and poverty. In Germany the replacement of the corrupt Weimar Republic brought to power Adolf Hitler and the murderous Nazi regime which left the proud German nation and Europe in ruins. In China the peasants’ revolt gave that country the monstrous regime of Mao Zedong and his bloodthirsty communist dictatorship. And, of course, in Iran the replacement of the Shah by popular uprising has resulted in the brutal fundamentalist Islamic government which sponsors terrorism, oppresses women, imprisons Christians and threatens the peace of the whole region.

The fear is that the upheaval in all these Muslim countries of the Middle East and North Africa will not bring into being democratic governments sympathetic to the West, but fanatical Muslim fundamentalist governments whose oppression will make the present regimes look like liberal democracies and will use their power to hurt the West.

They can do this in two ways. First of all they can sponsor Islamic terrorists providing them with training grounds, money and weapons and, as Libya did, bases in Western countries. Even more potently through their control of the oil upon which our economies depend, they can hold us to ransom and do more damage than the mad suicide bombers which they may send into our countries ever could. Look what is already happening to the price of oil because of the political uncertainty which has developed in Libya which only supplies 2% of the world’s oil think of the effect, if countries like Saudi Arabia also get caught up in this political turmoil.

We are going to live in dangerous times and the amazing and momentous events which we are witnessing on our television screens could make the problems which so dominate our political discussions such as balancing budgets, financing the Health Service, what to do about water charges, the way forward on student fees, potholes in the roads etc seem quite mundane. Despite the talk of our Prime Minister, the President of the United States, the UN and all of the others who have pontificated on the events unfolding, the truth is that we can only sit back and wait to see the outcome of the government changes in countries over which we have no influence and whose internal political and religious dynamics we often do not even understand.

Maybe it would be better to have nothing more than high hedges legislation to be concerned about.