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Andrew Murray (Conflict of self-interest, 22 March) calls for "assertive mediation" as an alternative solution to the Libyan crisis. So all we have to do is speak very firmly to Gaddafi and he will come quietly to the conference table. Might we have just the shadow of a whisper as to the possible terms of a mediated compromise? Partition, perhaps? And how would he ensure that the notoriously duplicitous Gaddafi would honour any deal? With a peacekeeping force? Or perhaps a "no-fly zone"? Mr Murray has been driven to this fanciful formula to try and paper over the fact that he has nothing to offer the Libyan people. It is in fact an approach that would be more likely than the current intervention to result in the outcomes he fears.
Brian Slocock
Chester
• Shane Lynch (Letters, 19 March) might do better to imagine how he would feel if, after 40-plus years of unrelenting dictatorship, and the routine incarceration of dissenters, an initially unarmed, impassioned quest for democratic representation were greeted with heavily armed represssion by the state, quickly reducing St Albans, for instance, to rubble. Obviously, this is much harder for people in Britain to imagine, but I think we should all try, before deploring UN-based action, albeit horribly imperfect, on behalf of the dissenters.
Jane Frances
Little Downham, Cambridgeshire
• Although I am convinced that violence nearly always breeds violence, I could see that it might be necessary in Libya to stop even greater abuses of human life and human rights. But I was not expecting the scale of the violence that has followed the UN resolution. Cruise missiles and sophisticated bombs may be very reliable, but they are not 100% accurate. And has the tribal nature of Libyan society been adequately taken into account? It will either lead to internal strife as it has done in Iraq or unite all Arab countries against the west.
Robert Hinde
Cambridge
• When it is finally decided who is in charge of the operation (US losing patience as Europeans fail to agree on handover, 22 March), will the allies work as strenuously to protect those civilians who support Gaddafi, or do all civilians just happen to live in rebel-held areas?
Bob Adamson
Skipton, North Yorkshire
• Clearly the UN statement means our forces should step in if the rebel forces attack Libyan citizens. What frightens me is not that this indicates we should not support one side against the other but the simplistic idiocy of our leaders and our media in not being able to comprehend complex situations. Which explains why we choose to protect innocent civilians by killing innocent civilians. Barmy.
Ken George
London
• You report Obama as saying grandly that when a leader lost legitimacy and turned his army on civilians, the international community could not respond with "empty words" (Is Gaddafi a target? Cameron and military split over war aims, 22 March). You also report the government in Bahrain saying it has been trying to restore law and order and suppress a foreign-backed coup led by Iran, and the al-Qana newspaper in Qatar as complaining that Gaddafi has turned to waging war against the people, complete with the participation of mercenaries ('It is the right of people to protest against tyrants', 22 March).
What exactly is the difference between Libya's attacks on its own people and its use of mercenaries, and Bahrain's paying foreigners to join its army and police and inviting in the Saudi army to suppress the majority population by vicious force? And what else can one say of Clinton's pathetic appeal for restraint on both sides in Bahrain than that they are empty words? Oh, I forgot: Bahrain and Qatar are on "our" side but Libya isn't.
Richard Carter
London
• The government acts to protect civilians in Libya from attack by their own government, but takes no action when the Sri Lankan government kills tens of thousands of its own citizens in 2009. There are, of course, many examples of similar inaction, most recently in Bahrain. Is it unreasonable to have clear criteria drawn up that can guide such actions?
Dr Vip Thiagarasah
Chairman, Helping East Lanka Progress
• While sectarianism is a factor in Bahrain (The Saudi intervention in Bahrain will fuel sectarianism, not stifle it, 21 March), the real problems lie in the regime's failure to respect its citizens' rights and its harsh treatment of those who call for reform. Whether Bahrain's protesters are Shia or Sunni, their central demand is for political freedom and democracy.
It is important that a consistency runs through our foreign policy. We are right to confront a tyrant in Libya, but we should also be prepared to strongly voice our criticism of Bahrain's government. For the sake of our long-term relations with the Arab world, we must make it clear that we believe political reform in Bahrain is long overdue and that, in responding to protesters with violence, its rulers have made a serious error of judgment.
Ann Clwyd MP
Chair, all-party parliamentary group on human rights
• I have been waiting for years for an accredited scholar to expose the lie about Kosovo. Before the bombing of Serbia I wrote to Robin Cook pointing out that it would not save the Kosovans because the Serbs would take revenge on them. As Professor Gibbs shows (A template for disaster, 22 March), that assessment was accurate. The bombing exponentially increased ethnic cleansing and atrocities.
Malcolm Pittock
Bolton
• Visiting villages in Kosovo a few years ago I was struck how in cemeteries the Muslim gravestones had scores of different birth dates but all bore the same day of death – when Milosevic's militia came to kill and assert the Serb nationalism expressed in his notorious "We will beat you speech" made near Pristina in 1987. So while Professor David Gibbs from Arizona University is right to say that the Libyan intervention is not the same as Kosovo (the UN never approved the Kosovo intervention), Europe simply could not have allowed Milosevic to maintain his killing fields policy in Kosovo.
Certainly, the years of violent oppression against Kosovan identity created a force field of hate that led to Kosovans also being brutal, cruel and linked to crime in the manner of the IRA until politics replaced terrorism. But in 1999, Europe and the US could not have just stood idly by while Europeans were being massacred in the name of Serb nationalism.
Today, the UN, with help from American and other European military forces, has stopped an exterminationist bloodbath in Benghazi. Cheers, fears, jeers and tears are the four stages of military intervention. In 1999 the fears and tears of a small nation at last came to an end. Today Kosovo is not happy but at least Kosovan Europeans are still alive.
Denis MacShane MP
Rotherham
• Here's another Kosovo myth to add to those comprehensively demolished by Professor David Gibbs. Nato's aerial bombardment of Yugoslavia in 1999, ostensibly to force the Serbs to submit to a Nato ultimatum and withdraw from Kosovo, completely failed to achieve that objective: if anything it stiffened Serbian resistance to Nato's demands and Serbian support for Milosevic.
The Serbs were only forced out of Kosovo when President Clinton, conscious that the bombing was getting nowhere and that demands for a land invasion of Kosovo were, as the Serbs well knew, manifestly unrealistic, abandoned the attempt to freeze the Russians out of the picture and sent his own envoy, Strobe Talbott, then US deputy secretary of state, and Viktor Chernomyrdin, former Russian prime minister and President Yeltsin's nominee, with the then president of Finland, Martti Ahtisaari, later awarded the Nobel peace prize, to Belgrade with radically revised terms for Serbian withdrawal.
Rejection of these new terms, now that they had Russian and therefore UN backing, would have left the Serbs completely isolated for the first time, and they caved in more or less at once. If the Nato powers had been prepared to accept Russian participation from the beginning, a settlement on the lines of that eventually adopted could probably have been achieved months earlier without a single bomb being dropped. Diplomacy succeeded where force had failed. The Nato attack on Yugoslavia was not only illegal: it was totally unsuccessful and unnecessary as well. Yet another reason for not citing Kosovo as a useful precedent for the current action in Libya.
Whether international intervention on the side of the KLA, earlier regarded as a terrorist organisation, and the detachment of part of Serbia as a largely unrecognised potentially failed state, did more good than harm is of course another question. It seemed a good idea at the time.
Brian Barder
London