The Forgotten Flight: Terrorism, Diplomacy and the Pursuit of Justice by Stuart H. Newberger

Author:Stuart H. Newberger [Newberger, Stuart H.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Terrorism, Political Science, History, Law, General
ISBN: 9781786070937
Google: Qh69DwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 48673906
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2017-05-25T00:00:00+00:00

PRESIDENT CHIRAC ALSO read about the Lockerbie settlement with great interest. From his perspective, it only proved his point that eventually the United States and Britain would come around and do business with Qaddafi. The world was a practical place, he always said, and the expensive Lockerbie settlement was the “American way” of dealing with dictators such as Qaddafi. His way, the French way, was just as effective, since his deal with Qaddafi a few years earlier had paved the way for French firms to get into Tripoli in advance of other companies and obtain lucrative contracts worth many billions of dollars. In comparison to the Lockerbie families settlement, the Chirac deal was actually a business proposition for French companies, who would be able to create jobs and bring cash back to France.

Or so it seemed.

Chirac had not counted on one thing. The huge amounts of the Lockerbie settlement—the $10 million per family—were an insult to the French victims. Apparently, an American or British victim of Libyan terrorism was worth a lot more than a French one. His advisers were hearing rumors from their contacts in the French press that SOS Attentats and the French UTA 772 victims were very upset. There were rumblings that Chirac had sold out the French victims and that he did not value a French victim’s life.

This was especially ironic since under French law and procedure it was unheard of for a victim of any wrongful death case to receive multi-million-dollar settlements or court judgments. The French legal system, like most European civil law systems, typically would award very low damages for “pain and suffering” or even “economic losses” from a death. French legal scholars had, for years, derided the American tort system as more of an unpredictable casino than a thoughtful legal adjudication device.

The biggest, and most recent, legal settlement in France was itself unprecedented, and yet grossly smaller than the Lockerbie settlement. In July 2000, an Air France Concorde supersonic flight taking off from Charles de Gaulle Airport on a flight to JFK in New York caught fire and crashed, killing all 109 persons on board, plus 4 people on the ground. Investigators learned that debris from an earlier flight had hit the Concorde’s wing, quickly causing a rupture in the fuel tanks and a catastrophic failure of the aircraft’s engines and navigation systems. The disaster was the death knell of the once-proud supersonic aircraft, which was taken out of service by Air France shortly before the Lockerbie settlement was announced.

Each of the 109 families who lost a loved one on the Concorde had received a single 1 million Euros payment—far greater than anything ever paid in the past—in full satisfaction of any claims for negligence. The settlement was the largest ever made under French law and was widely considered necessary because of the prestige Concorde—a symbol of French engineering and travel—had brought Air France.

Even with the Concorde settlements, Lockerbie overwhelmed the French psyche. Qaddafi was paying American and British victims almost ten times more than had ever been paid to a French victim of a notorious air disaster.

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