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North Africa and the Near and Middle East

I agree; I said merely that I hoped ICC lawyers would be able to observe the proceedings. I have received disturbing evidence about the equipment that some of our European partners sold to the Gaddafi regime. I will not go into too many details, but it helped Colonel Gaddafi to eavesdrop on his citizens and on citizens of this country. That is something that will come out in the coming days and weeks, but I should be interested to find out from the Minister everything that was exported to Gaddafi over those 13 years and might have assisted him in oppressing his own people. Mr Blair told us that the great rapprochement and engagement in the tent in the desert were to ensure that that man gave up his weapons of mass destruction, but from recent newspaper articles we see that vast stocks of chemical weapons have been found in Libya, so Colonel Gaddafi was really just playing a game of cat and mouse with the previous Government. I very much hope to see progress on Lockerbie now. We all know that Mr Megrahi is not solely culpable of the worst terrorist atrocity on UK soil since the second world war, so I very much hope that the Minister and the Foreign Office will do everything possible to ensure that the Libyan authorities comply fully in helping us to get to the bottom of that case—and the case of PC Yvonne Fletcher. I turn now to Mauritania. I alluded to the fact that on a recent visit to the country, as well as meeting politicians I spent a little time standing on the coast, watching the fishermen bring in their fish. It was quite extraordinarily difficult for them to drag—literally drag—their small boats on to the sand to get their catch. The European Union and, in particular, Spanish vessels are pillaging the waters off the coast of Mauritania, sucking out all the fish and impoverishing the lives of local fishermen. Many promises that the EU made as a result of the agreement to which I referred earlier have not been fulfilled. One was that a pier or jetty would be built near Nouakchott for the local fishermen, but that has still not been put in place, 10 years on. I raise the issue with the Minister, as I very much hope that he will use his good offices to find out what the European Union's promise of assistance was to the local fishermen, and that he will do everything he possibly can to help them. My trip to Mauritania was the first by a British Member of Parliament since one by the Father of the House in 1960, and the Mauritanians were so amazed by this that they laid out the red carpet. I had more than two hours with the President—[Laughter.] My hon. Friend the Member for Beckenham (Bob Stewart) laughs but this is a serious matter, because the people there feel neglected by the United Kingdom and wish to engage far more with us. The problem is that Governments of various political colours have neglected the whole of Francophone north Africa over the decades, and that has led to a lack of engagement in terms of trade and co-operation. Luckily, I studied French—that was my degree—at university, so I could converse quite happily with the Mauritanians in French and had to translate for the rest of my delegation, but we need more engagement. On my other visit, to Tunisia, I found when I met representatives of its chambers of commerce that only 52 British companies trade there, in contrast with 1,700 French companies—52 to 1,700. There are very similar statistics regarding Morocco. I have met Lord Green, the new Minister for Trade and Investment, who does an excellent job, but I very much hope that somebody who is a fluent French speaker will be appointed to lead a massive export drive to the Francophone countries.