Government lies about
Libya
Nearly
five years ago in May 1999, long before the invasion of Iraq, Libya offered to
abandon its “weapons of mass destruction” programmes, at the start of secret
negotiations with the US. It also
agreed to actively co-operate with the US in combating al-Qaeda.
That
was revealed in an article entitled The Iraq War did
not Force Gadaffi's Hand
published in the Financial Times on 9 March.
Its author was Martin Indyk, who was in the US State Department from
1997 to 2000 as Assistant
Secretary of State for Near East Affairs, and was US ambassador to Israel from
1995 to 1997 and again from 2000 to 2001.
He is now the Director of the Saban
Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institute in Washington.
The
trigger for these negotiations was that Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi and Al
Amin Khalifa Fhima, the two Libyans indicted for the Lockerbie bombing by the
Scottish prosecuting authorities, surrendered themselves for trial in a
Scottish court in the Netherlands. That
occurred on 5 April 1999.
At
the first meeting between Libyan and American representatives in Geneva in May
1999, Libya also agreed to pay compensation to the families of Lockerbie
victims and to support the Oslo process in Palestine and end all support for
Palestinian "rejectionist" groups.
Strange
as it may seem, the US didn’t take up the Libyan offer about “weapons of mass
destruction” in May 1999, and it was almost five years before the weapons
programmes were dismantled, programmes which Blair described as “significant
and substantial” when he was in Tripoli on 25 March 2004.
Why
did the US not take up the offer?
According to Indyk, because resolving the Lockerbie issue was the number
one US priority. The Libyans were told
that once that was done UN sanctions would be lifted, but US sanctions would
remain until “weapons of mass destruction” issues were resolved.
But
wasn’t it grossly irresponsible for the US to allow Libya to hang on to these
“significant and substantial” weapons programmes for, as it turned out, nearly
five years? Well no. According to Indyk, “Libya's chemical weapons
programme was not considered an imminent threat and its nuclear programme
barely existed”, and it had no biological weapons programme. In
short, Libya’s weapons programmes were insignificant and insubstantial, so
there was no harm in letting Libya hang on to them indefinitely.
Blair announced in Tripoli that BAe Systems would
shortly sign a major arms deal with the Libya.
Ironically,
once the BAe salesmen have done their work, Libya will be much stronger
militarily than before it abandoned its “weapons of mass destruction”
programmes.
Government story
That
is the actual story of how Libya came to abandon its nuclear and chemical
weapons programmes, such as they were.
It bears little similarity to the Government’s story, which began with
the Prime Minister’s dramatic announcement on 19
December last year:
“This evening Colonel Gadaffi has confirmed that
Libya has in the past sought to develop WMD capabilities, as well as longer
range missiles. Libya came to us in March following successful
negotiations on Lockerbie to see if it could resolve its WMD issue in a
similarly co-operative manner. Nine months of work followed with experts
from the US and UK, during which the Libyans discussed their programmes with
us.”
The
Prime Minister took the unprecedented step of making this announcement from his
own constituency late on a Friday evening, so red hot was the news, we were
meant to believe. We know now that the
news was actually four and a half years old: Colonel Gadaffi confirmed in May 1999
that Libya had “weapons of mass destruction” programmes of sorts – by offering
to give them up.
The Prime
Minister went on to applaud Colonel Gadaffi for his courageous decision “to
dismantle its weapons of mass destruction completely” – which was an impossible
task since Libya didn’t have any weapons to dismantle.
Circumspect
Jack
Jack Straw
was more circumspect when he made a statement
to the House of Commons after the Christmas recess on 5 January 2004; he talked
about weapons “programmes”, not weapons.
Of Libya’s nuclear programme, he
said:
“Libya acknowledged to us that it was developing a
nuclear fuel cycle intended to support nuclear weapons development. … Those
projects included uranium enrichment. Libya had not yet developed a nuclear
weapon, but it was on the way to doing so.”
He didn’t
say that Libya never managed to produce any enriched uranium, and that, in the
words of Martin Indyk, Libya’s nuclear programme “barely existed”.
Of Libya’s
chemical weapons programmes, Straw told the Commons:
“Libya provided to us evidence of
activity in the chemical weapons field, including significant quantities of
chemical agent and bombs designed to be filled with chemical agent.”
That
carefully avoids saying that Libya had usable bombs filled with chemical
warfare agent – which could reasonably be described as chemical weapons. It must be assumed that if Libya possessed
actual chemical weapons, Straw would have said so. In the press, it was suggested that the agent in question was
World War I mustard gas. Small wonder,
then, that the US didn’t consider Libya’s chemical weapons programmes an
imminent threat.
At his press conference in
Tripoli on 25 March 2004, the Prime Minister repeated the lie that Libya had
made the decision “to abandon voluntarily programmes to develop nuclear and
chemical weapons” three months ago. And
he said that on inspection Libya’s programmes had been found to be “significant
and substantial, both in the nuclear and chemical field” – without providing
any details to enable others to judge their significance.
(Time and
time again, most recently in his Sedgefield speech on
5 March, the Prime Minister has told us that the greatest danger in the world
today is the coming together of rogue states with “weapons of mass destruction”
and international terrorists. A major part of the Prime Minister’s case for taking
military action against Iraq was that there was a “real and present danger” of
that happening. Yet all
the time that Blair was conspiring with the US to allow Libya to keep these
“significant and substantial” programmes, Libya was on the US State
Department’s list of states that sponsor terrorism. It’s a funny old world.)
Self-serving
bollocks
The
Government’s Libyan story is a load of self-serving bollocks. The truth is that the US/UK allowed Libya to
hold on to its programmes for nearly five years, because they knew the
programmes were insignificant and insubstantial, and no danger to anybody.
It was
always planned to deal with them once the Lockerbie issue was settled. But, it was very convenient for Bush and
Blair that the issue be resolved in the autumn of 2003. With no “weapons of mass destruction” found
in Iraq and unforeseen problems on the ground there, they were desperate for a
foreign policy success. Even better, one that could be presented as a beneficial side
effect of the invasion of Iraq: we were meant to believe that, although Saddam
had no “weapons of mass destruction”, the decisive action taken by the US/UK to
force Saddam to cough them up, had forced Gadaffi to cough up his.
The Government didn’t openly make that connection, though
Blair went close in his Sedgefield speech on 5 March, when he poured scorn on those who believe in mere
diplomacy:
“When they talk, as they do now,
of diplomacy coming back into fashion in respect of Iran or North Korea or
Libya, do they seriously think that diplomacy alone has brought about this
change? Since the war in Iraq, Libya has taken the courageous step of
owning up not just to a nuclear weapons programme but to having chemical
weapons, which are now being destroyed. Iran is back in the reach of the
IAEA. North Korea in talks with China over its WMD.”
The Government success story is credible only if Libya did
not volunteer to give up its weapons programmes until after the invasion of
Iraq and only if those programmes were “significant and substantial”. But the truth is that Libya first
volunteered to give up its weapons programmes in May 1999, long before the invasion
of Iraq, and the programmes were so insignificant and insubstantial that the
US/UK allowed it to hang on to them for nearly another five years. Then, for the purposes of claiming a great
success, their importance was exaggerated and they were dismantled with a great
fanfare.
New ally against al-Qaeda
As an additional bonus, we are meant to believe that we now
have in Libya a new ally in the war against al-Qaeda. But that’s not true either – Libya has been an ally in practice
for years.
The press have been telling us, no doubt prompted by Downing
Street, that Gadaffi has come over to our side, because he fears that his
regime is under threat from al-Qaeda and like groups. What the press don’t tell us is that Britain supported an
assassination attempt on Gadaffi in February 1996 by an Islamic group, which
promised to hand over the Lockerbie suspects if they took power. Britain, not Gadaffi, has changed sides.
Lockerbie lies
As this magazine has said before, the Government has also continuously lied and
dissembled about the Libyan connection to Lockerbie. While Blair was en route to Libya on 25 March, Jack Straw told a
barefaced lie on the Today programme: he said that Libya has accepted
responsibility for the Lockerbie bombing.
For Libya to accept
responsibility, it would have to say clearly that Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed
al-Megrahi, the Libyan convicted of the bombing of PanAm 103, is guilty, and that he was acting on behalf of the Libyan
state when he carried it out. Libya has
said neither.
When the
compensation arrangements were agreed between Libya and the US/UK last autumn,
Libya made a formal statement about Lockerbie in a letter to the President of
the Security Council on 15 August 2003.
(The
text of the letter is appended to a press statement
issued by Foreign Office Minister, Denis MacShane, on the same date). The letter said
that Libya “has facilitated the bringing to justice of the two suspects charged
with the bombing of Pan Am 103 and accepts responsibility for the actions of
its officials”.
No doubt,
those words were agreed in advance with the US/UK. They do not say that al-Megrahi is guilty, nor that he was a
Libyan “official”. But they are the
sole basis for the Government’s claim that Libya has accepted responsibility
for the bombing. It has not.
Following
this formal statement by Libya, the Security Council passed resolution 1506, which
lifted UN sanctions permanently. That
resolution does not say that as a pre-condition Libya had accepted
responsibility for Lockerbie (as it was supposed to do). It merely welcomes Libya’s “acceptance
of responsibility for the actions of Libyan officials”. Speaking after the vote on resolution 1506,
the US representative said
that Libya “has formally stated that it accepts responsibility for the actions
of its officials”; again, he didn’t say that Libya had accepted responsibility
for the bombing – he just repeated the agreed formula.
In the House
of Commons, Jack Straw has always been more circumspect than on Today. For example, when he made a statement to the
House on 5 January on Libya’s abandonment of “weapons of mass destruction”, he
did not say that Libya had accepted responsibility for Lockerbie. He used the agreed formula several times,
saying, for example, that discussions over several years had led “to Libya
agreeing to pay compensation to the families of those killed at Lockerbie, and
to the Libyans accepting full responsibility for the actions of their
officials”. Lying to the House of
Commons may have serious consequences, which is presumably the reason for his
circumspection.
At his press conference in
Tripoli on 25 March, Tony Blair also stuck to the agreed formula. He said:
“In
respect of Lockerbie, Libya has accepted UN resolutions on this, accepted
responsibility for the actions of its agents and has agreed compensation in
respect of the victims”.
Had he
claimed that Libya accepted responsibility for Lockerbie, as his Foreign
Secretary did earlier in the day, his hosts might have ruined the carefully
choreographed occasion by blurting out the truth, as the Libyan Prime Minister
did on Today on 24 February (transcript here),
when he said that Libya had never accepted responsibility for Lockerbie but had
paid compensation to the families of Lockerbie victims merely in order to buy
peace.
Relative
welcome
There was
a general welcome from the relatives of the British Lockerbie victims for Blair’s
visit to Libya (and Michael Howard got egg all over his face by suggesting that
it would be otherwise). On the face of
it, this seems strange since Blair was going to be shaking the hand of the man
who ordered the murder of their relatives.
Ministers
have been pointing to this general welcome from relatives to bolster the case
for the visit. But, what Ministers don’t say is that many of these relatives are
sceptical about al-Megrahi’s guilt and doubt that Libya was responsible for the
bombing.
For example, one relatives’ spokesman, Jim Swire, stated
categorically on Sky News on 24 March that the bomb was put on PanAm 103 at
Heathrow – whereas the case against al-Megrahi was that he had put the bomb on
a plane in Malta (by means unknown) and after transfers at Frankfurt and
Heathrow the bomb got on to PanAm 103.
WPC Fletcher
On
the killing of WPC Yvonne Fletcher, Blair announced in Tripoli that Libya had
“agreed to a further visit on 3 April of the Metropolitan Police Service in
respect of the murder”, and this has duly taken place. But what’s the point? If, as the British government maintains, WPC
Fletcher was killed by a shot fired from the Libyan People’s Bureau in April
1984, then the Libyan state must know who did it and, in principle, legal
proceedings can be taken against them.
Sending policemen to Libyan is just for show.
It
is noticeable that, whereas the British Government keeps on lying that the
Libyan Government has accepted responsibility for Lockerbie, it doesn’t say
that Libya has accepted responsibility for the killing of WPC Fletcher.
Democratic crusade?
The
Bush administration is on a crusade to bring democracy and freedom to the world
in general and to the Middle East in particular. Or so it tells us. Listen
to this from the president himself when he was in London last November:
“We must shake off decades of failed policy in the Middle
East. Your nation and mine, in the past, have been willing to make a bargain,
to tolerate oppression for the sake of stability. Longstanding ties often led
us to overlook the faults of local elites. Yet this bargain did not bring
stability or make us safe. It merely bought time, while problems festered and
ideologies of violence took hold.
“As recent history has shown, we cannot turn a blind eye to
oppression just because the oppression is not in our own backyard. No longer
should we think tyranny is benign because it is temporarily convenient. Tyranny
is never benign to its victims, and our great democracies should oppose tyranny
wherever it is found. (Applause.)
“Now we're pursuing a different
course, a forward strategy of freedom in the Middle East. We will consistently
challenge the enemies of reform and confront the allies of terror. We will
expect a higher standard from our friends in the region, and we will meet our responsibilities
in Afghanistan and in Iraq by finishing the work of democracy we have begun. “
(see here)
How does
Libya fit in with this “forward strategy of freedom in the Middle East”?
Every
year, the US State Department publishes detailed reports on human rights
violations around the world. They are
readily available on the State Department website. The report for 2003, published on 25 February 2004, says of Libya:
“The Government's human rights
record remained poor, and it continued to commit numerous, serious abuses.
Citizens did not have the right to change their government. Gadaffi used
summary judicial proceedings to suppress domestic opposition.
“Security forces tortured
prisoners during interrogations and as punishment. Prison conditions were poor.
Security forces arbitrarily arrested and detained persons, and many prisoners
were held incommunicado. Many political detainees were held for years without
charge or trial. The Government controlled the judiciary, and citizens did not
have the right to a fair public trial or to be represented by legal counsel.
“The Government infringed on
citizens' privacy rights, and citizens did not have the right to be secure in
their homes or to own private property. The Government restricted freedom of
speech, press, assembly, association, and religion. The Government imposed some
limits on freedom of movement. The Government prohibited the establishment of
independent human rights organizations and of free trade unions.”
Labour & Trade Union Review
April 2004