Just around the time that the West began military operations against Libya, there were ex post facto attempts to describe the assault as the culmination of long-standing hostilities. The model for many, especially Diana Johnstone and Jean Bricmont, was Yugoslavia with Qaddafi serving as a Milosevic type figure. This approach struck me as incoherent in light of the evidence that Libya had been pursuing the same type of neoliberal economic policies as post-Milosevic Serbia for the better part of a decade.
There was also an attempt to equate the Benghazi-based rebellion as Libya’s version of the KLA. This involved attempts to uncover conspiracies by the West to stir up trouble in the eastern regions of Libya and get the “restless natives” to rise up against a benevolent leader who had showered them with wealth for the longest time.
The latest instance of this came to my attention in a post to the Marxism mailing list that linked to an article by Michel Collon that appeared—unfortunately—in Granma Internacional. Collon is a member of the Axis for Peace, a project initiated by the Voltaire Network based in France. Collon described a plot that was hatched by the West well before the February 2011 uprising:
What was the role of secret services? In fact, the Libyan case didn’t start in February in Benghazi, but in Paris October 21st, 2010. According to the revelations of Italian journalist Franco Bechis (Libero, 24th of March) it is that day that the French secret service had prepared the revolt of Benghazi. They then “returned” (or perhaps even before) Nuri Mesmari, Chief of Protocol of Gaddafi, who was almost his right hand against him. He was the only one who enters the residence of the Libyan leader without knocking. Coming to Paris with his family for a surgery, Mesmari didn’t meet any doctor there, but on the other side, he would talk to several officials of the French secret services and Sarkozy’s close aides, according to the latest web Maghreb Confidential. On November 16th, at the Hotel Concorde Lafayette, he prepared a large delegation that would go two days later to Benghazi.
Pretty good stuff, I must say. If I were to turn this into a movie, I’d cast John Turturro as Nuri Mesmari and Tony Shalhoub as Qaddafi. And maybe Steve Martin as a French secret agent.
The Voltaire Network shares the mechanical anti-imperialism outlook of many in the pro-Qaddafi wing of the left, including MRZine, Counterpunch and Michel Chossudovsky’s Global Research. The Voltaire Network was founded by Thierry Meyssan who wrote “9/11: The Big Lie”. Like Hugo Chavez, Meyssan would appear to have a conspiratorial mindset when it comes to 9/11 and the Libyan uprising. It was the CIA whodunit. Since Collon spent 8 years reporting from Yugoslavia, it is not surprising that he sees Libya through the prism of Yugoslavia even though the facts do not support it.
When I first began writing about the war in Kosovo, I made it a point to go through five years worth of Lexis-Nexis articles. In a reply to Solidarity, I made a point of citing Chris Hedges who I can now see in retrospect as one of the NY Times’s more honest reporters on Yugoslavia even though I had problems with his Central America coverage. On March 28, 1999 he reported:
The KLA splits down a bizarre ideological divide, with hints of fascism on one side and whiffs of communism on the other. The former faction is led by the sons and grandsons of rightist Albanian fighters — either the heirs of those who fought in the World War II fascist militias and the Skanderbeg volunteer SS division raised by the Nazis, or the descendants of the rightist Albanian rebels who rose up against the Serbs 80 years ago.
Although never much of a fighting force, the Skanderbeg division took part in the shameful roundup and deportation of the province’s few hundred Jews during the Holocaust. The division’s remnants fought Tito’s Partisans at the end of the war, leaving thousands of ethnic Albanians dead.
The decision by KLA commanders to dress their police in black fatigues and order their fighters to salute with a clenched fist to the forehead led many to worry about these fascist antecedents. Following such criticism, the salute has been changed to the traditional open-palm salute common in the U.S. Army.
I also tried to prove that the hostility toward Milosevic had a class basis. I cited Carol J. Williams article in the December 12, 1990 Los Angeles Times:
The choice of Milosevic and what amounts to hard-line communism isolates Serbia, the largest republic, from four other Yugoslav states that have elected center-right governments and set about repairing the economic damage inflicted by half a century of Marxism. The Socialists have remained popular in Serbia despite an anti-Communist mood in Eastern Europe…
I just spent about an hour doing the same kind of exercise for Libya. Nothing turned up about CIA or French intelligence plotting against Qaddafi, despite Mr. Collon’s best efforts. If anybody thinks that the articles below that are mostly about the economic interests shared by imperialism and Libya augur war, then there’s a bridge in Manhattan that I’d like to sell you cheap.
2006
Christian Science Monitor
January 27, 2006, Friday
Firms beat path to … Libya
By Simon Martelli Contributor to The Christian Science Monitor
DATELINE: TRIPOLI, LIBYA
A Libyan official said this week he expected oil firms to help normalize US ties.
It’s not unusual for the five-star Corinthia Bab Africa Hotel which towers above this city’s waterfront to be completely booked, many of its 299 rooms filled with foreign oil tycoons eager to tap into the country’s untold reserves.
After more than 20 years as a global pariah, Libya is coming out of isolation. Most international sanctions have been lifted since its enigmatic leader, Col. Muammar Qaddafi, abandoned his weapons program, renounced terrorism, and accepted responsibility for the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, compensating the victims’ families.
“With the end of the Lockerbie issue, relations returned to normal and there were many delegations of Congress who visited Libya. I think all efforts are heading towards ending animosity,” Colonel Qaddafi said in an interview with the United States-funded Arabic TV channel Al-Hurra last week.
Now, the companies that helped create Libya’s oil industry in the 1970s are returning as Qaddafi rebuilds bridges to the West that he burned long ago, and this may help to precipitate political, as well as economic, change.
In a major step, ExxonMobil, the world’s largest publicly traded oil company, signed an exploration and production deal with Libya last month. Marathon, Amerada Hess, and ConocoPhilips who together form the Oasis group also negotiated their return at the end of December since being forced out by sanctions in the mid-1980s, while Occidental returned in August last year. The Oasis group was producing 400,000 barrels of oil per day before it pulled out.
* * *
The New York Times
May 16, 2006 Tuesday
U.S. WILL RESTORE DIPLOMATIC LINKS WITH THE LIBYANS
By JOEL BRINKLEY; Matthew L. Wald and Steven R. Weisman contributed reporting for this article.
DATELINE: WASHINGTON, May 15
The Bush administration announced Monday that it would re-establish full diplomatic ties with Libya because Libya had abandoned its nuclear and other unconventional weapons programs and helped in the campaign against terrorism.
The decision ends more than 25 years of hostility while sending a strong signal to Iran and North Korea to follow suit.
Along with the normalization of relations and the announced intention to open a new embassy in Tripoli, the administration removed Libya from the list of nations that are state sponsors of terrorism. The United States had reaffirmed Libya’s place on that list as recently as March.
The announcements were a result of Libya’s surprise decision in 2003 to renounce terrorism. At the time, senior American officials said they believed that Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, the Libyan leader, had taken that step because he was chastened by the American invasion of Iraq. Since then, Libya has also destroyed its chemical weapons stockpiles and dismantled a secret nuclear weapons program.
”Libya is an important model as nations around the world press for changes in behavior by the Iranian and North Korean regimes,” Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said. Hers was just one of several similar statements on Monday from senior officials who worked hard to turn Libya’s change in behavior into a lesson for Iran as a resolution on Iran’s nuclear development program remains stalled in the United Nations Security Council.
So far, however, Iran has ridiculed Libya for its reconciliation with the West. But on Monday, Libya accepted the news enthusiastically and even promised to cooperate with the United States in at least one area in which it is ill equipped to offer help.
”We encourage America on the path of cooperation and we hope we will cooperate together through cultural debate to spread democracy around the world together,” said Mustapha Zaidi, who leads Libya’s Revolutionary Committees — an apparatus of Colonel Qaddafi’s iron-fisted control of the country.
2007
The Washington Post
November 6, 2007 Tuesday
Oil Wealth Fuels Gaddafi’s Drive For Reinvention
By Ellen Knickmeyer; Washington Post Foreign Service
DATELINE: TRIPOLI, Libya
Brother Leader Moammar Gaddafi still exhorts his people to greatness from billboards, banners and murals. But these days a different kind of command is driving Libya’s transformation as the newly opened country taps into oil wealth: “izala,” Arabic for “raze it to the ground.”
Surveyors are spraying the word in red paint up and down Libya’s Mediterranean coast. The orange-vested road crews are tagging for demolition the old Libya — low-rise, stucco Libya, sleepy under decades of Gaddafi’s socialist economy and international sanctions.
To rise in its place, Gaddafi’s officials say: the increasingly capitalist Libya, with new buildings for the country’s new stock exchange. Airports to ferry in and out a dreamed-of annual flow of 30 million oil workers, tourists and other travelers. The world’s second-largest port after Singapore. Railways. Highways. Hospitals. Schools. Luxury beachfront hotels.
Libyans and Westerners here cite a statement attributed to Gaddafi: Libya must destroy in order to rebuild.
“I can’t believe they’re going to do it,” one white-haired shopkeeper said this past weekend at his snack shop on the coast road east of the capital, Tripoli. “Izala” was scrawled across the front of his sandstone shop, marking it for bulldozing to clear the way for a highway.
“It’s going on all over the country,” the shopkeeper said, speaking out of earshot of the government officials who still often trail foreign reporters here. “They’re coming up with all these wild schemes, and no one knows if it’s going to happen.”
* * *
The Independent (London)
March 5, 2007 Monday
THE COLONEL WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD;
Thirty years ago, Muammar Gaddafi’s Green Book branded democracy a ‘problem’. Now, not even pan-Africanism can save Libya’s leader from the forces of change. Peter Popham reports;
Libya opens its doors to the West
By Peter Popham
The Great Leader did not disappoint. We might have asked for more, of course. He might have received us in his legendary tent, the one he brought to Brussels and Belgrade, his flock of camels cropping the grass outside.
He would have done us all a favour if he had ridden into the conference hall on a white stallion, his troop of cruelly beautiful, Uzi-toting female commandos sprinting alongside. But presiding over the 30th anniversary of his little Green Book, he was the man we had come to see, imperious behind his big sunglasses, this modern Ozymandias in a gleaming white dinner jacket with a cape around his shoulders, his jet-black hair teased into the familiar modified Afro, like a member of Mott the Hoople.
He published the Green Book on 2 March 1977, seven years after he seized power, aged 29, in a coup against King Idris, the West’s stooge. Since then, millions of copies have been distributed. It is Gaddafi’s answer to the Little Red Book of Mao, encapsulating what the colonel modestly calls the “Third Universal Theory” – following (and hopefully supplanting) those of capitalism and Marxism. Its subtitle is “The solution to the problem of Democracy”, and the crux of Gaddafi’s insight into that problem is summed up in posters in the desert town of Sebha during the celebration: “No representation without participation.”
Parliamentary representative democracy, according to Gaddafi, is a fraud; what he proposed instead was (as he put it in his speech on Friday) “direct democracy as it was once practised in Athens” through “committees everywhere”. Whether the Green Book revolution has lived up to its billing is a good question. But in one sense it has been a blistering success: it has made it impossible, ideologically and practically, for Gaddafi’s opponents inside Libya to organise themselves into political parties. “Political parties introduce evil in society and society goes corrupt,” Gaddafi declared on Friday. “Any attempt at this needs to be got rid of.”
And so it came to pass. Given the clarity of the word from on high, and saturation levels of plainclothes cops at street level, dissidents of the Islamist or any other variety do not appear to have obtained a toehold in the country. When they have tried to in the past they have been vigorously dealt with.
2008
The Washington Post
January 3, 2008 Thursday
Libya Officially Welcomed Back To the U.S. Fold;
Foreign Minister to Meet Rice Today
By Robin Wright; Washington Post Staff Writer
Abdel-Rahman Shalqam and his wife received a personal tour of the White House, an official escort on Capitol Hill and a luncheon with executives from Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Occidental Petroleum and Raytheon, as well as the U.S. trade representative’s office.
So began the official redemption of Libya yesterday, as the foreign minister of a country once equated with “barbarism” became that nation’s highest ranking official to visit Washington in 35 years.
Shalqam continues meetings today with the secretaries of state, homeland security and energy, as well as the deputy secretary of defense, about ways to deepen ties between Washington and Tripoli, according to both U.S. and Libyan officials. At lunch yesterday, he virtually gushed about the importance of Libyan students getting an American education and U.S. companies doing business in Libya.
“Relations between the United States and Libya are very important to us. . . . We want a new friendship,” he said, trying to reassure Americans that Tripoli does not back the Islamic militancy of other governments and groups now targeting U.S. interests in the Middle East. “Our interpretation of Islamic heritage is completely different from the others who don’t accept the philosophy of coexistence.”
The visit marks a dramatic reversal of decades of U.S. policy.
* * *
The New York Times
September 6, 2008 Saturday
Isolation Over, Qaddafi Meets With Rice
By HELENE COOPER
DATELINE: TRIPOLI, Libya
For the first time in more than half a century, a sitting American secretary of state is in Libya. Condoleezza Rice arrived here on Friday to meet with the man whom Ronald Reagan famously called the ”mad dog of the Middle East.”
But that was then. Ms. Rice, after waiting at the Corinthia Bab Africa Hotel here for an hour as the Ramadan sun set, finally got word that Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi was ready to receive her at his Bab al Azizia residence — the same compound bombed by American airstrikes in 1986 during the height of tensions with Libya.
Amid a swarm of cameras and reporters, she walked into the receiving room where Mr. Qaddafi, clad in a long, flowing white robe, purple and gold sash, and a green Africa brooch, stood waiting to greet her.
He didn’t shake her hand; instead, he put his hand against his heart in a gesture that North African men often use to greet women, then motioned for her to take a seat. It was a very different Libyan leader, in the eyes of Ms. Rice and the Bush administration, from the man who had bedeviled six American presidents over the past four decades.
As far as the Bush administration is concerned, the Libyan leader is rehabilitated, his country removed from the State Department’s terrorism list, his debt to the families of the victims of Pan Am Flight 103 on its way to being paid, Libya’s stockpiles of chemical weapons destroyed and its secret nuclear weapons program dismantled.
His initial chat with Ms. Rice could not have been more pleasant. He politely inquired about her trip; Ms. Rice thanked him for his hospitality. He asked about the hurricanes; she told him America had dodged Gustav but was bracing for Hanna. And that was it for the public chit-chat, as the Libyan authorities quickly shooed the press out of the room while Ms. Rice sat, smiling broadly.
”Quite frankly, I never thought I would be visiting Libya, so it’s quite something,” she had told reporters aboard her flight to Tripoli.
She said she had thought through what she planned to say to Colonel Qaddafi, and, not mentioning him by name, added, ”I look forward to listening to the leader’s worldview.”
2009
Scotland on Sunday
August 23, 2009, Sunday
Energy companies poised to exploit oil riches
By Terry Murden, Business Editor
THOSE who see oil as the motive behind all western dealings with the Middle East will no doubt be feeling vindicated by the deals currently being struck in Libya by British energy companies.
Libya is already Africa’s leading oil producer and also has huge natural gas resources, but it remains largely unexplored because of the effects of repeated sanctions on the country.
The UK government and British companies now joining the queue to invest are well aware that licences to explore depend on the goodwill of the Libyan regime. Lord Trefgarne, the former trade minister who chairs the Libyan-British Business Council, said last week that there would be “benefits” for British firms from the decision to release Megrahi. He said: “In Libya, business matters and political matters are inextricably entwined.”
It was during a visit to Libya two years ago by the then prime minister, Tony Blair, that BP and its joint venture partner, the Libya Investment Corporation, agreed a deal that would see the company return to the country after a 30-year absence. BP withdrew from Libya in 1974 when its oil industry was nationalised.
* * *
The Herald (Glasgow)
September 2, 2009 Wednesday
Commercial relations continue to prosper behind the political scenes;
By MICHAEL SETTLE
“LOCKERBIE is history, ” Saif al Islam, Colonel Gaddafi’s son, told this newspaper last week; not quite.
The political ramifications are still reverberating and are likely to do so for some time yet. However, amid the diplomatic kerfuffle over the Megrahi release, Britain’s commerical relations with Libya are on the up.
The latest correspondence has not disabused many of the idea that the man convicted of the Lockerbie bombing was used as a pawn in the game of easing Libya, a one-time pariah state, back into the bosom of the international community.
Whitehall thought that Tripoli, in ending its bad old ways and returning to the family of nations, would produce gains not only on the security front but on the commercial one, too.
While Prime Minister Gordon Brown refuses to express a view on the Libyan’s release, in the background relations between London and Tripoli prosper.
In the past year or so three ministers have travelled to Libya, which has become something of a magnet for foreign politicians wishing to pave the way for lucrative contracts.
Although Prince Andrew, the UK Government’s business envoy, had to cancel his trip this month to Tripoli to avoid giving credence to suspicions that trade lay behind the al Megrahi release, it will no doubt reappear on the diary once the dust has settled. Meantime, business is bubbling away nicely.
Since Libya came in from the cold, imports and exports between it and Britain have been flourishing.
From 2004 to 2008, imports from Libya rose from GBP196m to GBP961m, almost 400per cent, and exports to Libya, mostly engineering equipment, rose from GBP216m to GBP280m, up almost a third.
2010
The New York Times
March 1, 2010 Monday
Unknotting Father’s Reins In Hope of ‘Reinventing’ Libya
By LANDON THOMAS Jr.
TRIPOLI, Libya — Prying open a closed economy is no easy job, especially if the country in question is Libya — a nation that has spent more than two decades with its back turned to the world. It becomes all the more challenging when doing so means taking on the legacy of your father and fighting an entrenched bureaucracy with little interest in serious change.
Yet that is the goal of Seif al-Islam el-Qaddafi, the son and possible successor to Libya’s leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, as he sets out to dismantle a legacy of Socialism and authoritarianism introduced by his father 40 years ago.
”It is hard work reinventing a country,” he said in an interview last month, as he slouched on a sofa in his villa in the hills above Tripoli, picking at a tray of fruit including fresh dates brought to him by a black-suited waiter. ”But that is what we are doing. We will have a new constitution, new laws, a commercial and business code and now a flat tax of 15 percent.”
* * *
The Washington Post
May 26, 2010 Wednesday
A Gaddafi for change with a chance to lead;
Charismatic son tests patience of his father and hard-liners in Libya
by Sudarsan Raghavan
Saif al-Islam al-Gaddafi relaxed in an opulent suite in a swank new hotel where, just two hours earlier, he had defied Libyan hard-liners by announcing the release of 214 Islamist militants in an effort at national reconciliation.
The broad-shouldered 37-year-old has no official position in government. His power comes from one source: his father, Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi. Like so many of the younger Gaddafi’s initiatives in this North African nation, the releases brought into question just how much change his father and his influential clique will tolerate. After all, those freed included the leaders of a group that tried on three occasions to kill the Libyan leader.
Saif Gaddafi, the leader’s second-eldest son, is widely considered a possible successor to his 68-year-old father, who has ruled Libya for more than 40 years. He is competing with two brothers for the leadership, but many Libyans say he is the favorite, not least because of his commitment to political freedoms and free-market reforms.
* * *
The Christian Science Monitor
July 12, 2010 Monday
Libya’s path from desert to modern country – complete with ice rink;
Libya, a one-time global pariah whose leader’s son is sponsoring an aid boat to Gaza this week, has seen dramatic economic progress since the lifting of sanctions for funding terrorism, nuclear proliferation. Is this a model for Iran and North Korea?
by Sarah A. Topol Correspondent
Libya is on the rise.
From shiny new Hyundais cruising the capital’s wide palm-lined boulevards to cranes dotting the Mediterranean skyline, the long-time pariah is getting a modern face.
Seven years after the international community formally lifted the stringent sanctions it had imposed for state-sponsored terrorism, Libya has not only found its feet but is attracting international investment as well.
“There was huge interest by British and European countries in getting back, but the rewards in terms of contracts were quite slow in coming,” says Sir Richard Dalton, who was serving as British ambassador to Libya in 1999 when the sanctions were initially suspended. “[There's] now on the economic side a pretty unstoppable momentum…. It’s the place to be,” says Dalton, now an analyst at Chatham House in London.
Libya’s nominal gross domestic product (GDP) rose from 16.7 billion dinars ($12.8 billion) in 1999 to 114 billion in 2008, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The year after the US lifted sanctions, the country’s economy surged 10.3 percent in 2005. Foreign direct investment increased more than 50 percent from $1.5 billion in 2000 to $2.3 billion in 2007, according to the World Bank.
Although economic growth rates have lessened amid the global financial turmoil, Libya continues to expand. The IMF projects the Libyan economy will grow 5.2 percent in 2010.
Ice rink and a 22-lane bowling alley
With oil money filling government coffers, the state is undertaking massive infrastructure projects, doling out international contracts for ambitious housing developments, constructing a national railway network, and slowly opening the country to private foreign investment.
Is the stuff you wrote about the KLA/Kosovo online anywhere?
Comment by Binh — June 2, 2011 @ 5:49 pm
You can search this blog for Kosovo. You can also do a search on Kosovo here:
http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mypage.htm
This one was pretty well researched:
http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/fascism_and_war/Kosovo.htm
Comment by louisproyect — June 2, 2011 @ 5:54 pm
Thanks. I was looking under “the national question” this whole time.
Comment by Binh — June 2, 2011 @ 7:50 pm
Recent developments you missed: http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2011/06/11/libya/index.html
Comment by Stuart Newman — June 11, 2011 @ 2:51 pm
I didn’t miss it. It is just another attempt to have predicted intervention on an ex post facto basis. Nobody was predicting a conflict with Qaddafi in 2010, especially government officials.
Comment by louisproyect — June 11, 2011 @ 5:53 pm
I don’t think the issue is whether anyone was predicitng intervention. It’s whether significant fissures were developing between Libya and U.S.-European interests that predisposed NATO to intervene when the opportunity presented itself. In any case, the intervention doesn’t seem to be going that well for anyone, least of all the civilians that the U.N. was so concerned about.
Comment by Stuart Newman — June 12, 2011 @ 1:00 am
The USA certainly saw an opportunity after civil war broke out between Qaddafi and the opposition but in terms of the “hate quotient” of Libya before February 2011, it was not in the same solar system as North Korea, Iran, Venezuela or Zimbabwe. Arguably, Putin was seen as more of an enemy than Qaddafi I think it is possible to shoehorn post-2002 Libya into a “rebellious oil state” paradigm but only by doing violence to the facts.
The Observer
December 21, 2003
Deal with Gadaffi: The meeting that brought Libya in from the cold: Only weeks after 11 September, the first tentative overtures came from Tripoli; two years later, seven men sat down in a Pall Mall club to sign a historic deal
BYLINE: Peter Beaumont, Kamal Ahmed and Martin Bright
SECTION: Observer News Pages, Pg. 6
LENGTH: 2086 words
THE GRAND BUILDINGS of Pall Mall, just off Piccadilly in the heart of London, are the stuff of Victorian history. The Reform Club, the Royal Automobile Association and the Travellers’ Club have all been home to the great and the good of the British establishment whether writers, poets, politicians or spies.
Last Tuesday morning one of the gentlemen’s meeting places was to be witness to the making of a piece of world history. At a quiet table nestled among the pillared grandeur of the Travellers’ Club, seven men sat down to talk.
From Libya were three men. Musa Kousa, head of external intelligence for Colonel Muammar Gadaffi, Abdul Ati al-Obeidi, Libya’s ambassador to Rome, and Mohammed Azwai, ambassador to Britain.
From Britain were William Ehrman, director general for defence and intelligence at the Foreign Office, and his colleague, David Landsman, head of counter proliferation.
Also attending were two senior officials from the Secret Intelligence Services, MI6.
The meeting lasted for six hours. The men were there to discuss a text that would be presented by the Libyan Foreign Minister later that week making it clear that Gadaffi was no longer interested in developing weapons of mass destruction.
There were disagreements, over the use of the word ‘programme’ and over what, exactly, Gadaffi was agreeing to.
The British officials made it clear that this historic move would only work if there was clarity in the statement.
As the different wordings were thrown back and forth, all present knew they had a long working relationship to fall back on. This was the ‘trust factor’ that made the deal possible.
The three men in the Libyan team had also negotiated the complex deal between America, Britain and Libya over Lockerbie. That had been resolved to all sides’ satisfaction.
All believed that this would be as well.
When the meeting split up, the final texts were sent to Tony Blair and Foreign Secretary Jack Straw. Sir Nigel Sheinwald, Blair’s chief foreign policy negotiator, also discussed the wording with US National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice in a series of lengthy telephone calls.
Last Thursday morning, Sheinwald called a meeting at Number 10 with Ehrman and the two MI6 officials. They agreed that a telephone call, the first, between Blair and Gadaffi could speed up the process.
At midday, the call was put through. It lasted for 30 minutes, with Blair giving reassurances that if Gadaffi supported the statement there would be an immediate and positive response from Lon don and Washington. But it had to be absolutely clear what Gadaffi was saying. No more WMD.
There were negotiations about the wording to be hammered down, but then late on Friday afternoon the fruits of two years of negotiations finally emerged in a televised statement from Libya’s Foreign Minister in Tripoli say ing that his country would immediately conform to the Chemical Weapons Convention and to protocols put together by the International Atomic Energy Agency.
In short, it would end its clandestine nuclear, chemical and biological programmes and agree to ‘verification inspections’ by international adjudicators.
IT WAS THE culmination of two years of talking, horse trading and negotiations – a process that began a few weeks after the destruction of the World Trade Centre on 11 September 2001. In October that year a group of Libyan diplomats slipped unnoticed into Britain, led by Libya’s ambassador to Rome.
Within the delegation was a man with an unenviable reputation in the UK – Kousa; the same man who would be welcomed at the Travellers’ Club.
Kousa was an unlikely visitor to the UK. An expelled diplomat and an intelligence official, he was suspected by both MI5 and the French government of co-ordinating terrorism. But he was about to become the key negotiator in efforts to bring Libya back from being a pariah state.
Kousa first came to notoriety in 1979 when he became head of the Libyan mission and de facto Libyan ambassador to Britain, delivering an astonishing interview to Times journalist Michael Horsnall in 1980 that amounted to an announcement of intent to commit murder.
Speaking in his capacity as the secretary of the Libyan People’s Bureau, he openly pledged his support for the IRA and declared that Libya would carry out the assassinations of two Gadaffi opponents on British soil.
‘The revolutionary committees decided last night to kill two more people in the United Kingdom,’ Kousa told the shocked journalist. ‘I approve of this. They are resident in Britain. I do not know how it will be done or if it will be soon.’
He said the two men were former government employees who had misappropriated funds, but who now represented themselves as opposition figures. ‘We don’t like breaking the law here but we are fighting these people because they worked against our revolution,’ said Kousa.
They were comments that led Kousa to be declared persona non grata by then Tory Deputy Foreign Secretary Sir Ian Gilmour; an announcement that was greeted by cheers in parliament.
Kousa was subsequently expelled, but while he had talked up the possibility of killing dissidents, intelligence officials were aware other colleagues wereactually carrying out assasinations, in a spate of killings of Libyan dissidents across Europe.
Two opponents of the regime were found dead in London and several more in other European cities, among them BBC World Service journalist Mohammed Ramadan, who was shot on 11 April 1980 as he left Regent’s Park mosque in central London.
But if Britain was delighted to see the back of Kousa it was clear even in the mid-Nineties that he was still a continuing source of worry to the UK’s intelligence services for running agents in Britain.
In a confidential profile of Kousa, prepared by MI5 in December 1995, he was described in unflinching terms as the head of the ‘principal intelligence institution in Libya, which has been responsible for supporting terrorist organisations and for perpetrating state sponsored acts of terrorism’.
The document went on to describe him as the ‘head of Al Mathaba, the Libyan centre for anti-imperialist propaganda which has funded third world guerrilla groups’.
MI5 noted that Kousa was also wanted in France for his involvement in the blowing up of a French airliner, UTA 772, in 1989 over Niger with the loss of 170 lives.
WHAT WAS even more surprising, as Kousa stepped off the plane at Heathrow in October 2001, was the identity of the officials he was going to meet. They included the Italian Deputy Foreign Minister, the chairman of the North Africa department at the US state department, and the US ambassador in London, as well as officers in the CIA and MI6.
Ostensibly the meeting the delegation of diplomats would attend would cover the on-going negotiations over reparations for the Lockerbie bombing. This would culminate in last week’s meeting in the Travellers’ Club and the historic deal.
Moreover Kousa’s arrival in the UK in October 2001 would signal a seismic shift in relations between Libya and the outside world; not least in the effective ‘recruitment’ of Libyan intelligence for the war on terror. A dangerous enemy had come on side, and with him, as a pledge of the sought-after alliance, he was carrying a pile of documents, detailing the names of Islamist terrorists in Africa, Europe and the Middle East and details of the ‘cells’ into which they were organising.
It was the beginning, say sources, of Libya’s discreet enrolment in President George Bush’s war on terror: a role in which, say sources, Libya would provide ‘exceptional help’ and ultimately would culminate in Friday’s deal to pave the way for lifting the sanctions against the country.
As the meeting wore on, Kousa’s delegation would thrash out the preconditions for the lifting of crippling unilateral sanctions against his country – a carefully stepped series of quid pro quos – that would bring Libya back in from the cold.
On the American side the demands were straightforward. Washington presented Kousa and his colleagues with a list of more than 40 Libyan intelligence agents it accused of co-ordinating terrorist attacks. Among the agents it wanted ‘retired’ was Lt Col Abdallah Senusi, deputy head of Libyan intelligence, also wanted in connection to the bombing of the French airliner.
As the meeting wore on the Libyans were told there was one final pre-condition for the end of the crippling sanctions imposed against Tripoli without which no US Congress would vote to proceed. Libya must finally revoke all ambitions for programmes of weapons of mass destruction.
THEY ARE PROGRAMMES, in any case, that Libya could ill afford. According to experts, including John Pike at Globalsecurity.org, despite a 25-year effort to develop a nuclear weapon, Libya’s programme still remains in the embryonic stage. It has succeeded only in providing some training to a number of students and technicians, and the establishment of a nuclear research reactor, which operates under International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) safeguards at Tajura, southeast of Tripoli.
Libya’s biological weapons programme too has suffered from similar mismanagement and lack of funds, say sources; at best succeeding in producing munitions boobytrapped with human faeces that can be fatal if it enters the blood stream. Instead, real concern has focused on Tripoli’s retention of chemical weapons – believed to be about 100 tonnes of mustard gas at the last audit, and an intermittent programme to acquire a long-range missile capability.
Few analysts believe that Libya’s chemical capability is a threat to any but its own citizens on whom it has been used, while its missile capability is also feeble.
When Jane’s magazine assessed Libya’s missiles capability in the mid-1990s it estimated that the country had around 50 Scud A missiles. 450 Scud Bs and 20 longer range Scud Cs, in addition to about 80 battlefield missiles, none of them were WMD.
What was crucial about last week’s deal was not neutralising a threat, but persuading Libya to symbolically renounce it.
For the real issue of Libya’s WMD is as much about US politics as it is about a genuine threat. Crucially for Libya, which has been campaigning for a lifting of US unilateral sanctions, to follow the formal lifting of UN sanc tions last month – no US Congress would approve the ending of American sanctions, until Libya had renounced its WMD and accepted a regime of intrusive inspections. To earn its reward for its active assistance in the war on terror, Libya had a final hurdle to leap. Early this year Gadaffi offered to renounce WMD in an exchange for an end to US sanctions.
It was a remarkable offer. Bush and Blair discussed it during their summit at Camp David in March. Even with the distractions of war in Iraq, which was due to start in days, the two men realised that a great diplomatic shift was taking place in another part of the Middle East.
As the Iraq war and its aftermath rumbled on, the contacts intensified including Gadaffi’s son Saif, who travelled to Britain for talks under the auspices of an oil energy conference sponsored by the Foreign & Commonwealth Office. Blair and Bush discussed the issue again in June, while Straw and Blair discussed the endgame of the announcement at the European summit in Brussels last weekend.
ON FRIDAY LIBYA cleared that final hurdle in its televised announcement that it had given up its WMD. At 10pm, Tony Blair announced the deal to television crews from the BBC and Sky who had been called to a house in the grounds of Durham Cathedral but not told why. When Gadaffi called the announcement from Tripoli ‘wise’, and one that would go towards ‘building a world free of weapons of mass destruction’, Blair knew enough had been done.
Speaking live Blair called Gadaffi courageous and said that the process of investigating what programmes Libya had would be ‘transparent and verifiable’.
A few minutes later, President George Bush, also in a live television address, said that the move was of ‘great importance’.
The US is now expected to drop its economic sanctions against Libya; a move that will bring millions of dollars of development and trade money flooding into Gadaffi’s country.
‘Libya had to be shown that a move like this will get results,’ said one Downing Street official. ‘We have to show that diplomacy can work.’
Comment by louisproyect — June 12, 2011 @ 1:21 am