Libyan lies?

One thing you can depend upon in time of war: that governments will start lying before they start shooting – and probably continue long after.

So it is that the latest batch of Tall Tales from Libya seems to have been exposed by investigations from Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.

Governments, Libyan rebels and Nato have made much of the supposed use of foreign mercenaries and allegations of systemic mass rape to justify the war against Colonel Gaddafi.

The only difficulty was that little by way of evidence was produced to justify the claims.

Now both Amnesty and Human Rights Watch say they’ve found no evidence in Libya to back up allegations used widely by politicians to justify the war.

And yet, earlier this month, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Luis Moreno-Ocampo told a press conference: “We have information that there was a policy to rape in Libya those who were against the government. Apparently he [Colonel Gaddafi] used it to punish people.”

It appears that no actual evidence was offered even then to back up this dramatic assertion. In fact, drama was indeed what it seems to have been. And this from a war crimes prosecutor…

Last week, the US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, claimed she was “deeply concerned” about such reports surfacing of widespread rape in Libya by Gaddafi’s forces.

No doubt Hillary is concerned. But she’s intelligent, surely she’d been shown something? Surely there was testimony? Evidence? Witness statements? Again – nothing was publicly produced.

By contrast, Donatella Rovera, senior crisis response adviser for Amnesty, who spent three months in Libya after the start of the uprising in February, said of systemic mass rape: “We have not found any evidence or a single victim of rape or a doctor who knew about somebody being raped”, although she added that there is also no evidence to suggest mass rapes have not occured.

Despite allegations from Eman al-Obeidi – who claimed she was the victim of a mass rape by Gaddafi supporters – Human Rights Watch agree with Amnesty International that there is little evidence of mass rape being used as a policy of the Gaddafi regime.

Human Rights Watch’s Libya researcher Fred Abraham told me that they have found “no evidence of systemic mass rape coming from orders from the top, but there is also no evidence to suggest the contrary.”

The Amnesty investigation also found no evidence of mercenaries fighting for Gaddafi. Rovera commented: “Those shown to journalists as foreign mercenaries were later quietly released. Most were sub-Saharan migrants working in Libya without documents.”

It’s war, people lie. In Benghazi Libyan rebels will tell beseiged Misrata is running short of food. You go there. The shops are open, reasonably well-stocked. The butchers’ stalls hung with freshly-slaughtered goats.

The Misratan rebels will tell you government forces have been issued with gas masks because they’re preparing to use chemical weapons. Again – lies, propaganda and rumour. No journalist in Misrata bothered to report this junk, even with appropriate attribition and caveats. We could see it for the paranoia it was.

Twas ever thus. Back in 1991 a rather younger A Thomson found himself debunking the propaganda lie that Saddam Hussein’s soldiers had ripped babies from incubators in Kuwait’s hospital.

Eventually it was all exposed as lies cooked up by a US PR firm contracted to the displaced Kuwaiti authorities.

So it goes on down the years. During the British invasion of Iraq the MoD spouted a series of lies about the actions of Iraqi forces in Basra. The Americans were doing much the same of course.

Never take anything on trust from a politician who has a war to justify should be the obvious rule of thumb for any journo – any person – in a time of war.

If NATO claims Libya is a desert country – ask them to show the sand.