Editorial»
Gaddafi’s U-turn on WMDs
JAN 07 - Recently, Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi provided the world with a surprise New Year’s gift when Tripoli announced that it would abandon its Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) programme. Welcomed at home and abroad, it possibly heralds a change in the global geopolitical landscape.
Timed just days after the dramatic capture of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein the decision was described by British Prime Minister Tony Blair as a “historic one and a courageous one,” while American President George W. Bush said it entitled Libya to “rejoin the international community.”
BACKDROP
Before further ado, it may be noted that the dramatic decision of a leader widely regarded in the non-Arab world as unpredictable and reckless came after nine-months of secret diplomatic negotiations between Washington, London and Tripoli.
Indeed, according to Western sources, those talks began in London’s Travelers Club, a traditional haunt of the intelligence community in the British capital, between MI6 officers and senior Foreign Office officials with Gaddafi’s closest advisers. That included Musa Kousa, head of Libya’s intelligence service and former chief of Libya’s mission to Britain, expelled in 1980 for threatening to murder opponents of Gaddafi’s regime.
As such reports have it, British intelligence and security agencies had been aware that since the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States that Al Qaeda presented a threat to Col. Gaddafi. A key constituent in that regard was the essentially secular nature of the Gaddafi regime.
Thus, while the Libyan leader saw the opportunity of benefiting from much-needed Western investment to develop its natural resources, Europe, and Whitehall in particular, had viewed Gaddafi as a potential ally in the battle against Islamic fundamentalism, and, in particular, Al Qaeda-inspired terrorism.
As if to support such a contention, it has been reported that Libya has recently provided intelligence on hundreds of Al Qaeda and other Islamic militants.
What may also be usefully recalled is that Libya last September formally claimed responsibility for the 1988 bombing of a Pan Am jetliner over Lockerbie, Scotland in which 270 people were killed. Moreover, Libya agreed to pay US $ 2.7 billion to the victims’ families. That led to the lifting by the United Nations Security Council of sanctions, in response.
(US sanctions, at that point, remained intact. Washington has now clarified that she will only discuss relations with Tripoli only after Libya has eliminated its WMD programmes and renounced terrorism. )
UN sanctions, imposed in 1992, had crippled oil-rich Libya’s and dampened Gaddafi’s well-known revolutionary spirit and had taken the bite out of his anti-Western, anti-capitalist rhetoric.
REVOLUTIONARY TURNED PRAGMATIST?
One key factor behind Gaddafi’s transformation from a revolutionary to a pragmatist is said to be his desire to revive Libya’s economy and to place Libya in a respectable niche in the comity of nations obliterating its unenviable reputation as an outcast state.
The Colonel, known in Libya as the Leader of the Great Revolution, has long denied charges that he has bankrolled hijacks, assassinations and revolutions, while insisting on his right to support national liberation movements. Self-styled “defender of Islam and the Arab nation”, Gaddafi was, for years, derided by the United States and some of her allies as an evil force backing the scourge of international terrorism.
Many believe that Saddam Hussein’s fate was another important determinant instrumental in Gaddafi’s dramatic turn-around. Indeed, as British Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon told UK’s Sky Television: “We showed after Saddam Hussein failed to cooperate with the United Nations that we meant business and Libya, and I hope other countries, will draw that lesson.”
Harsh economic compulsions and a reminder of the dire end-result of Saddam Hussein’s defiance of countless UN WMD resolutions, which ultimately led to the US-led invasion of Iraq last March and his capture eight months later, are not however the only motivating elements behind Gaddafi’s decision to abandon secret WMD efforts.
In fact, the most crucial of all contributing components may have been the seizure last October of a consignment of uranium enriched components headed for Tripoli on a German freighter. US officials have now confirmed that the freighter, while not boarded on the high seas, had its consignment of thousands of centrifuge parts seized, after it was diverted to an Italian port where it was searched by local authorities.
That action, explained State Department spokesman Adam Ereli, had been undertaken under the US-led Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI). The PSI was launched by President Bush last year to prevent the spread of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. Sixteen countries have presently signed on to the programme which envisions seizing WMDs, their components and delivery systems while in transit on the high seas, in international airspace or overland.
SWORDS INTO PLOUGHSHARES
Whatever the contributing causes for Gaddafi’s reversal of policy on WMDs, it is noteworthy that Libyan Prime Minister Shokri Ghanem told the BBC: “We are turning our swords into ploughshares and this step should be followed by all other countries.”
Predictably, the US urged North Korea, Syria and Iran to “get smart and follow Libya’s example in pledging to abandon its weapons of mass destruction and join the rest of the world in productive cooperation.” As US Secretary of State Colin Powell put it in a television talk show: “We hope that the North Koreans are watching all of this and realising that others are getting smart, and it is time for them to get smart too.”
He pointed out that the same thing applied to Iran, adding that Syria needed “to get out of the hole that you have been in for all these years.” Meaningfully, Gaddafi, too, issued a similar appeal to the three concerned nations.
Yet, after a mini-summit between Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad at Sharm El-Sheikh, the two Arab leaders called for a Middle East free of weapons of mass destruction, referring explicitly only to Israel’s undeclared nuclear arsenal, without mentioning the chemical and germ warfare programme that Syria accuses the United States of maintaining.
Although it remains to be seen whether Assad chooses to follow in Saddam Hussein’s or Gaddafi’s footsteps, it is notable that Iran, too, has lately come a long way as far as providing for a greater role for UN inspections of its nuclear programme.
Significantly, Libya has allowed visits by the UN nuclear chief to four once-secret nuclear sites. As news reports have it, they have proved that Libya had been in the early stages of a weapons programme before it dismantled its efforts.
Although the worldly-wise do not expect any pressure on Israel on the WMD front from America and her allies, at least not yet, it is moot whether, or if, the implications of the Libyan – and Iraqi – lessons in post-9/11 realpolitik can be easily brushed aside by India and Pakistan.
Indeed, one wonders if such a powerful new impulse in international affairs explains tentative moves towards amity between the two just manifested at Islamabad’s SAARC fest. While neither India nor Pakistan will, naturally, publicly confess to such a possibility, only the purblind can ignore the far-reaching ramifications of the US-led Iraq war; the increasing anti-proliferation pressures on Pyongyang, Teheran or Damascus; or now even of Gaddafi’s U-turn on WMDs. Posted on: 2004-01-07 02:13
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