Libya - The Rise and Fall of Qaddafi

by Alison Pargeter

  However, back in 1994 the idea was not acceptable in Washington or London, where the Clinton administration and John Major's government were unwilling to give in to what they considered to be yet another example of Qaddafi's political manoeuvring. By 1998, however, the US and Britain had good reason to change their tune. Tripoli's willingness to be flexible had won it some support on the international scene. The Arab League supported its stance, as did the Organization of African Unity (OAU), which, in 1998, threatened that its member countries would stop applying the sanctions unless Britain and the US agreed to trial in a neutral country. To Qaddafi's delight, a number of individual African states had already broken the sanctions. Meanwhile, countries such as Egypt, Morocco and Tunisia – all key US allies – also began to question the legality of the embargo.3 Libya's position was strengthened further when Russia and China waded into the debate and began criticizing British and US intransigence. Indeed, Qaddafi's shrewd willingness to hand the men over for trial in a neutral country gave him a kind of moral authority in the eyes of many in the developing world and beyond, bringing him the international support that his ideological visions had always failed to elicit.

  In the face of this international backing, and with the embargo at risk of being undermined, the US and British governments were forced to think again. The coming to power of the New Labour government in Britain in May 1997 also heralded a new approach on the part of the British. The Blair government was keen to resolve the stand-off with Libya, and proved willing to take a more flexible approach than had its predecessor.4 And so the Blair government invested efforts in lobbying to get the Americans to support the proposal of a trial in The Hague.

  Ever the opportunist, Qaddafi knew a chance when he saw one: Tripoli formally accepted the proposal just one day after it was put forward.5 Predictably enough, however, the handover was not going to be so straightforward. The Libyan leader began flapping about ‘procedural issues’ that needed to be ironed out before he would allow the suspects – who, he reminded the world, were human beings and ‘not tins of fruit’ – to be handed over.6 These procedural issues concerned matters that were highly sensitive in Libya, such as where the men would be held if convicted, and under what conditions. The Colonel's insistence on imposing his own set of conditions was partly related to his desire to challenge the perception that he had simply rolled over in meek submission to the Western powers. However, it was also about prevarication; with his heightened sense of paranoia, the Leader, who still believed the Americans were out to get him, was convinced that the proposal was an elaborate political trap. In spite of the long list of assurances he was given by the British, the most important of which was that they would not seek to implicate anyone in the trial other than the two defendants, Qaddafi was so mired in his own worldview that he was unable to shed his suspicions.7

  It took the intervention of outside intermediaries to finally reassure the Colonel that he could hand the two men over without risking his entire regime. The most important of these intermediaries was South African President Nelson Mandela, who entered the fray after Tony Blair appealed to him for assistance.8 Mandela's involvement was crucial for the Leader in more ways than one. Not only did it provide him with a sense of assurance, but it also gave him some much-needed legitimacy. If the leader of South Africa's anti-apartheid struggle was supporting the handover of the two suspects, then Libya need not fear giving the men up. So keen was the Colonel to get the point across that, in March 1999, he got Mandela to address the General People's Congress and to reassure the delegates that all the necessary guarantees for the trial were in place.

  Having cloaked himself in this all-important international legitimacy, Qaddafi stopped prevaricating. Proving that pragmatism could win out over the ideology that had underpinned his regime for so many years, in April 1999 Libya handed the two men over for trial. On 5 April, Al-Megrahi and Fhimah boarded the specially chartered UN plane, gesturing with victory signs as they entered the aircraft, and were flown to the bleak Valkenburg airbase in the Netherlands. Two days later, decked out in tweed jackets and ties, the men appeared in the makeshift court at Camp Zeist, where they were formally charged with murder and conspiracy to murder. In return, the UN suspended the sanctions that had tied Qaddafi's hands for almost a decade.

  The trial, which began on 4 February 2000, lasted until January 2001, when Fhimah was acquitted and his co-defendant Al-Megrahi was found guilty of murder. Al-Megrahi was given a mandatory life sentence, passed with the recommendation that he spend twenty years in prison. His conviction came as a shock to many, including his defence team, which had chosen not to call any witnesses, in part because it considered that there was insufficient evidence to convict the men. Indeed, there was a growing belief in some quarters that a verdict of ‘not proven’ – possible under Scottish law – would be handed down.9

  The guilty verdict came as a particularly heavy blow to Qaddafi. The conviction confirmed his suspicions that the trial had been politicized and that he had stupidly walked into the political trap he had so feared. The furious Colonel railed against the decision, announcing that he would produce evidence of Al-Megrahi's innocence ‘within days’. He also declared that the judges had three options: to admit the truth, to resign or to commit suicide!10

  The Libyan people were equally outraged: angry demonstrations erupted in Tripoli, with thousands gathering in Green Square and outside the British embassy to protest about the verdict. Some of the protesters marched to the United Nations office, where, in grisly scenes, three young men produced knives and tried to commit suicide by slashing their throats. One of the men succeeded and died at the scene, while others were rushed to hospital with serious injuries. Given the nature of the Jamahiriyah, such public protest can only have occurred with the blessing of the regime, which had bussed in groups of young men from around the country to take part. The regime even mobilized the country's imams to whip up popular sentiment; the imam of Tripoli's Moulay Mohamed Mosque, Ahmed Al-Balaz, proclaimed: ‘The verdict was a political decision taken under the pressure of the big powers, the United States of America and Great Britain.’11 Yet while this outpouring of anger may have been orchestrated by the regime, it also reflected a very real sense inside Libya that Al-Megrahi had been made a scapegoat and that he was the victim of a politically motivated show trial. This was an affront to Libyan nationalism, and it became a matter of national honour to bring Al-Megrahi home. While probably most British and Americans put the affair to the back of their minds after the trial, the Libyans did not. It was for this reason that the Libyan regime continued to lobby the British government so hard to bring its man home.

  Despite the anger at Al-Megrahi's conviction, there was at least some relief in Tripoli that the country could now start to put the whole Lockerbie saga behind it. However, the Libyans soon discovered that their wish to turn a new page was not going to come so easily. They found themselves forced to jump through a seemingly ever-increasing set of hoops in a bid to secure full rehabilitation. These hoops were largely the work of the Americans, who still could not shake their suspicion of Qaddafi. The US also wanted to make the Colonel pay for the Lockerbie bombing, not least because the families of the American victims had become an influential lobby group in the US. Washington imposed another set of conditions on Tripoli: Libya should pay compensation to the victims' families, should renounce terrorism, should reveal all it knew about the Lockerbie affair, and should publicly accept responsibility for its officials.

  Qaddafi was apoplectic. For all his desperation to restore relations with the US, its repeated raising of the bar was too much for the ever-proud Bedouin, who perceived it as another Western attempt to humiliate and subjugate him. However, while the Colonel fumed, some parts of the Libyan regime were more circumspect. Determined not to lose the gains that had been made by the handover of the Lockerbie suspects, a group of high-ranking officials – including the Libyan ambassador to Italy, Abdel Ati Al-Obeidi; chief of external securit
y, Musa Kusa; Foreign Affairs Secretary, Abdelrahman Shalgam; and the ambassador to London, Mohamed Zwai – concluded that Libya had no choice but to comply with the demands. This group, which was to sow the seeds of what later became known as the ‘reformist faction’, knew that the country could not afford another period of isolation, and that working with the US was the only way to rehabilitation. Its members struggled hard to convince the Colonel; according to Shalgam, they went to Qaddafi some fifty times to try to persuade him to agree to pay compensation.12 Each time Qaddafi refused, insisting that an injustice had been done to Libya, and that it should not be forced to pay for a crime it did not commit.

  However, in the face of US obstinacy, the Leader was finally persuaded that cooperation was the only option. He reluctantly gave the go-ahead for the establishment of a special compensation committee, headed by businessman Mohamed Abdel Jawad, that was to negotiate the compensation package. After several rounds of knotty secret negotiations with the US and the UK, a deal was finally thrashed out in August 2003. Libya was to pay US$10 million to each of the victims' families. This was to be paid in three tranches: the first $4 million was to be paid after UN sanctions were removed; a further $4 million was to be paid when US unilateral sanctions were removed; and the final $2 million was to be forthcoming when Libya was removed from the State Department's State Sponsors of Terrorism list.

  The Colonel grudgingly agreed to the deal. He also agreed to provide a letter denouncing terrorism. But accepting responsibility for the bombing was a far thornier issue. Qaddafi feared that accepting any kind of responsibility would mean falling victim to yet another trap aimed at destroying his regime. Straight after the trial, Shalgam had made it clear that Libya would not countenance any acceptance of responsibility for the bombing. Yet the regime was shrewd enough to understand that it had to come up with something to appease the Americans. So it was that Tripoli finally agreed to the wording of a letter in which it admitted responsibility for the actions of its officials, but not for the bombing itself. This letter was not what the US or Britain would have liked. However, with their 2003 invasion of Iraq weighing down heavily on them, they were keener than ever to come to a resolution with Libya, in order to create a success story in the Middle East.

  Libya's fulfilment of these criteria paved the way for the lifting of UN sanctions the following month. Yet that did not stop the Qaddafi regime from continuing to protest its innocence. Tripoli viewed the whole compensation issue as an unpalatable and hugely unjust obstacle that had to be overcome in order for the country to move on. Libyan officials were not shy to declare that they had purchased the lifting of the sanctions; the general secretary of the General People's Committee, Shukri Ghanem, prompted outrage when, in February 2004, he told the BBC: ‘We thought it was easier for us to buy peace.’13

  While Qaddafi believed that he had made major and humiliating concessions over the Lockerbie affair, it was not enough to get Libya out of its crisis: the Americans wanted more. There had long been anxiety in US policy-making circles, and beyond, about Libya's capability to acquire and produce non-conventional weapons, including nuclear ones. Despite his repeated insistence that Libya's nuclear programme was purely peaceful, on several occasions from the 1970s onwards the Leader had mentioned the desirability of acquiring an ‘Arab’ bomb. While much of this talk was bravado, from the early 1980s Libya began to take practical steps to try to acquire the fissile material required for nuclear weapons.14 Although it was repeatedly thwarted in its bid to legitimately acquire sensitive technology and expertise from overseas, Tripoli's efforts set the alarm bells ringing in Western capitals. The late 1990s opened up new opportunities in this respect: Libya made contact with the illicit A.Q. Khan network, headed by Pakistani nuclear scientist, Abdel Qader Khan, and was able to purchase a significant number of centrifuges, as well as nuclear weapon designs. The network also provided overseas training opportunities for Libyan personnel. Although Libya had not got to the point where it could figure out how to put a nuclear weapon together, it certainly had the equipment and the desire to do so.

  As such, it became increasingly important for the Americans that the quixotic colonel should be reined in; they began to link normalization not only to compliance over Lockerbie, but also to cooperation over weapons of mass destruction (WMD). The Clinton administration, which had opened a secret dialogue with Tripoli in 1999, made it clear to Libya then that the US would only normalize relations fully and lift unilateral sanctions if the Qaddafi regime agreed to put a halt to its efforts to acquire WMD. While the Bush administration (which came to power in January 2001) took an equally tough line on the WMD issue as its predecessor, the new president was reluctant to start his own secret talks with Libya, primarily because he feared that the Lockerbie victims' families would react badly if they discovered that Washington was engaging with the Qaddafi regime.15

  However, the 9/11 attacks on the US in 2001 were to bring about a dramatic shift in the way in which Washington dealt with Qaddafi, and also with regimes across the Middle East and North Africa. The US – and the West more widely – were suddenly in desperate need of all the friends they could muster in the Arab world, as they sought to get as much information as they could about potential terrorist suspects. Libya was no exception in this respect. The 9/11 attacks gave a new urgency to resolving relations with the Qaddafi regime.

  Qaddafi was quick to seize on this opportunity to improve his relations with the West. The Libyan leader, who took great pleasure in reminding the world that it was he who had warned them against Osama Bin Ladin as early as 1995, was happy that the West had finally woken up to the problem of Islamist terrorism. Qaddafi had long condemned Western countries for giving political asylum to Libyan Islamists, taking particular umbrage at the British. In a treatise on terrorism posted on his personal website shortly after the 9/11 attacks, Qaddafi commented: ‘If we believe that youths that trained in Peshawar, who entered Afghanistan, accompanied Bin Laden, and who spread across the four corners of the earth are members of the so called Qa'ida organization, then Britain has the lion's share.’16 The attacks of 9/11 were therefore a kind of vindication for Qaddafi and other leaders in the region: they had been right all along to castigate their own Islamist opposition movements as terrorists.

  With typical theatrical aplomb, the Colonel made a very public show of condemning the 9/11 attacks and offering the US his support, organizing a high-profile ‘blood drive’ to help the victims. Even more surprisingly for a man who had thrived on anti-Americanism, he described Washington's invasion of Afghanistan in November 2001 as a justified act of self-defence.17 Yet Qaddafi was determined to capitalize on this chance to further his mission to restore relations with the US and to pull Libya out of crisis. To prove his seriousness, the Leader willingly shared counter-terrorism intelligence with the US and the UK. Just one month after the 9/11 attacks, his security chief, Musa Kusa, who had been expelled from the UK in disgrace in 1980, hurried to London, armed with files containing the details of Libyan Islamists dotted across the globe.

  But if Libya hoped that, by sharing intelligence over terrorist suspects, the US would take a softer line over issues such as WMD, it was sorely mistaken. While this new cooperation helped to build trust between the parties and to put Libya in a slightly better bargaining position, there was no way the US or the British were going to let Tripoli off the hook. President Bush did not mince his words; in 2001, after Qaddafi had instructed Shalgam to enlist the help of Algerian President Abdulaziz Bouteflika in his efforts to normalize relations with Washington, Bouteflika reported back that Bush's message to the Libyans was either that they must give up on WMD or he would destroy the weapons and everything else besides.18 When a concerned Shalgam relayed this message to Qaddafi, the Leader accused his foreign minister of being a coward.

  Yet for all Qaddafi's swagger, the message had been received loud and clear. In response, Libya signed the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) in November 2001, and the foll
owing month Qaddafi informed diplomats in The Hague that Libya was willing to sign the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC).19 Despite these efforts, the US continued to take a hawkish stance. In March 2002, the Pentagon's Nuclear Posture Review listed Libya – along with Iran, Iraq, North Korea and Syria – as a potential adversary, due to its history of hostility toward the West, links to terrorism and non-conventional weapons programmes.20 Yet this did not deter Qaddafi, who displayed a dogged determination to restore his tattered relations with Washington in the bid to give himself the new lease of life he and his regime so desperately needed.

  In August 2002, the UK Foreign Office minister responsible for relations with North Africa, Mike O'Brien, paid a visit to Libya, where he discussed the subject of WMD with Qaddafi and was given ‘positive assurances of co-operation over the weapons issue’.21 Three months later, Libya signed the International Code of Conduct against Ballistic Missile Proliferation. However, it was in 2003 that progress really accelerated. Much of the push came from the Libyan side; in March 2003, the Libyans contacted the British intelligence services to initiate talks aimed specifically at dismantling its WMD programmes. It was also at this juncture that Qaddafi's son, Saif Al-Islam, entered the fray. The young Qaddafi, who contacted MI6 and left a message saying ‘I am Saif Al-Islam, the son of Muammar Qaddafi and I want to talk with you about WMD’,22 had now become an important lynchpin in the regime. His involvement in the issue demonstrated Libya's seriousness in resolving the matter. What followed was a nine-month secret dialogue between British, American and Libyan representatives that resulted in the final agreement of December 2003, by which Tripoli pledged to dismantle its WMD programmes and to open the country to ‘immediate and comprehensive verification inspections’.23

  It is notable that progress on the WMD front occurred at the same time as the US and British invasion of Iraq. This has led certain political figures and analysts to observe that it was America and Britain's tough stance against Saddam Hussein that frightened Qaddafi into giving up his WMD programmes. Former US Secretary of State Colin Powell made a direct link between the invasion of Iraq and the Libyan decision to relinquish WMD, remarking in 2004: