Foreign Office: Civil order must be preserved post-Gaddafi

Alistair Burt, a Foreign Office minister, stresses the importance of preserving civil order in Libya once Gaddafi regime is gone to the Today programme:

"The first and most important thing is to make sure civil order is preserved, that there's food and power, all the things that people need to make sure their daily lives go on.

"The evidence of what's happening in other cities would suggest that when the National Transitional Council has been in charge instead of the Gaddafi regime, things have worked perfectly well, perfectly smoothly – no major reprisals against those who previously had been supporting the regime.

"For those of us who live with freedom every day, I think it's difficult for us to understand how it must feel for people who have not felt that for more than a generation and now feel in control of their own country."