Nicolas Sarkozy did an immoral deal with Muammar Gadafy to release Bulgarian medics . . . and help France's business interests, argues Lara Marlowe
Relief and joy are appropriate reactions to the recent liberation of five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian-born Bulgarian doctor from Muammar Gadafy's prisons.
But the fact that the Libyan dictator was able to hold the six hostage for 8½ years, during which they were raped, tortured and repeatedly sentenced to death by firing squad, is scandalous. The conditions of their liberation, and the rewards heaped upon Gadafy, are nauseating.
"Kidnapping pays" is the message conveyed by Gadafy's latest engagement with the West. No one ever seriously believed that the six medics arrested in Benghazi in 1999 deliberately infected 426 Libyan children with HIV. International experts, including the scientists who discovered the virus, concluded the infections were caused by deplorable hygiene in the hospital.
Even the dictator's eldest son, Saif al-Islam Gadafy, told the French newspaper Le Monde: "Unfortunately they served as scapegoats."
The Libyans demanded that the hostages sign a document renouncing all legal recourse against their torturers, in the presence of European diplomats, before they left Tripoli. And Libya filed a formal diplomatic protest against the Bulgarian president's pardon of the six medics.
Asked whether Libya had blackmailed the Europeans, Saif al-Islam told the US magazine Newsweek:"It is blackmail, but the Europeans also blackmailed us. It's an immoral game, but they set the rules of the game, the Europeans, and now they are paying the price." Gadafy is a repeat offender. Libyan agents, allied with the extremist Abu Nidal group, seized a Franco-Belgian family from their yacht in the Mediterranean in 1985 and held them for up to six years. In 2000, the Libyan-trained Abu Sayyaf group kidnapped 28 hostages in Jolo, the Philippines, then demanded millions of dollars and safe passage to Libya for their release.
Nor is kidnapping the least of Gadafy's evils. Have the US, Britain and France forgotten that they held Libya responsible for the deaths of 446 civilians in the twin bombings of a Pan Am flight over Lockerbie in Scotland in 1988 and a UTA flight over Niger in 1989?
London has denied any connection between the fate of Abdel Basset Ali Al-Megrahi and the liberation of the Bulgarians. Al-Megrahi, a former head of security for Libyan Arab Airlines, was condemned to life in prison in 2001 for the Lockerbie bombing. Could it be mere coincidence that the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission concluded in late June that Al-Megrahi "may have been the victim of a judiciary error"?
Saif al-Islam Gadafy - who has so far proven more truthful than French officials regarding the Bulgarian case - says Al-Megrahi will soon be sent home to Libya. "We will soon have an extradition agreement with the United Kingdom," he claimed. "Our people [Libyan officials] were in London about a month ago [to discuss it]."
Gadafy jnr was almost gleeful at the deal Libya obtained from the French president Nicolas Sarkozy. "I told my father I couldn't believe the French offer," he said. "I told him I didn't believe the other Europeans would accept it."
The Élysée has refused to divulge the exact terms of the agreement.€335 million will be paid to the Libyan children's families, and the Aids victims will be cared for in Europe. Sarkozy is believed to have asked the Gulf emirate of Qatar - a voracious consumer of French weaponry - to advance the funds while the EU rounds up contributions from member states.
Sarkozy has also promised to sell a civil nuclear reactor to Libya, ostensibly to operate a desalination plant. Unlike other north African countries, Libya has a vast water table and does not need a desalination plant. Such a plant could easily be fuelled by Libya's abundant oil and gas resources. The €3 billion EPR type reactor that France wants to sell would produce 10 times as much energy as it would take to provide Libya with desalinated water.
There is another payback for Paris: the French nuclear group Areva "needs" uranium, Sarkozy noted on his July 25th trip to Tripoli; Libya has 1,600 tonnes stocked up, he said.
Civil nuclear co-operation projects have a sorry history. They led to nuclear weapons programmes in India and Pakistan, to crises with North Korea and Iran, and war in Iraq. Yet Sarkozy wants to sell French reactors across north Africa.
"If we dare say that civil nuclear power is reserved for the northern shore of the Mediterranean and that the Arab world isn't responsible enough for civil nuclear programmes, we humiliate them and prepare for a clash of civilisations," Sarkozy said.
Gadafy renounced nuclear weapons in December 2003. Under the additional protocol of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, Libya is subject to particularly intrusive inspections. It's unlikely he'd start up another military nuclear programme; he seems to want a reactor for prestige.
The biggest prize, Saif al-Islam Gadafy said, was the first western arms contract with Libya since its rehabilitation. The European consortium EADS is now concluding the sale of €168 million in Milan anti-tank missiles and €128 million in Tetra radio communications equipment with Tripoli. Gadafy has yearned for Milans since the French decimated his tanks with Milan missiles in Chad in 1987.
The arms deal was in the pipeline long before the Bulgarian medics were freed, Sarkozy says. But the fact that it could not be concluded without their release makes a mockery of his claim that there is no connection between the two. And France is competing with Russia for $4.5 billion in contracts with the Libyan air force, army and navy.
When Tony Blair went to Libya shortly before leaving office in May, BP signed a $900 million contract for gas exploration. Sarkozy boasted that at least he waited until the Bulgarian hostages were freed.
"Am I going to be criticised for finding jobs and markets for French workers?" he said this week. "The Libyans are going to spend hundreds of millions of euros to make French factories work, and I'm supposed to apologise?"
It was high time someone obtained the release of the Bulgarians. But one can't help thinking it could have been achieved with fewer concessions to Gadafy. During his campaign, Sarkozy claimed he would establish "an irreproachable republic". The word "transparency" appears repeatedly in his draft law on institutional reform. Yet Sarkozy bypassed the EU in negotiations and muddled responsibilities in France by using his wife Cecilia as an intermediary, cutting out his foreign minister. The National Assembly will conduct a commission of inquiry in the autumn.
In their rush to embrace the sleazy Gadafy and his oil billions, western leaders seem to have forgotten that as recently as November 2003, Libyan intelligence agents were plotting to assassinate King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. In 38 years as a dictator, Gadafy has held no free elections. Last year, his police fired into a demonstration in Benghazi, killing 11 people. As the Bulgarians noted, his prisons are full of people like them.
Historians dispute whether it was the US secretary of state Cordell Hull or president Franklin D Roosevelt who first said, "he may be a son-of-a-bitch, but he is our son-of-a-bitch," in reference to an anti-communist Latin American dictator. In 2007, it looks like Muammar Gadafy has become "our son-of-a-bitch".