By IRNA,
London : It is up to the Libyan people to determine their own future, however difficult it may be, and not a collection of leaders brought together in London, says the general secretary of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), Britain’s oldest peace group.
“It is not for other powers, other countries outside Libya to discuss the future and what kind of Libya they would like to see,” Kate Hudson said about Tuesday’s London conference.
“In my view, it is for the Libyan people to determine what future they foresee for their country,” Hudson told IRNA after joining a protest rally against Western intervention outside the conference in central London, organised by Stop the War Coalition.
She said that peace campaigners were particularly concerned about the way the British government is talking about Libya by switching focus from the humanitarian crisis to regime change and what kind of change it would like to see for the country.
The London conference was attended by ministers and represntatives from over 40 countries and organisations, but by less that half of the members of the UN Security Council and no Libyans.
Hudson said that she did not know why Libyans were excluded from the meeting plotting about the country’s future without Muammar Gaddafi’s regime, but stressed that Western intervention would not solve the complex situation.
“There are more than two sides and the forces in Libya in dispute about the direction of their country should be together discussing and negotiating what kind of future there is for their country,” she said.
“I know that it will be very hard to do that but ultimately that is the way forward because it is not just a situation where there is one bad man oppressing everyone else, there are different sides in Libya and different forces there.”
“If they going to have a united Libya in future and avoid partition then they must be brought together in dialogue. Western military intervention, firing cruise missile at Libya does not seem to me to be the solution to a very very complicated problem,” she said.
The CND general secretary recalled that there was a long history of Western intervention in the region and elsewhere in the world but was not aware of “one situation where that has contributed to those people determining their own political future, controlling their own national resources.”
“That’s not what happens when other countries become involved and we would like to see a situation where the Libyan people are free to choose their own future how they want to live socially, economically and politically,” she told IRNA.