The World Community and the Arab Spring by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783319609850
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

France’s Support for Libya and Syria on Their Paths to Normalization

Until 2011, Realist Gaullo-Mitterrandian was the leading trend. Even if the EU pushed a bit for democracy through the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership, Paris remained close to Arab autocrats. At the time, “both the US and the EU have shifted their focus to maintaining stability through the status quo rather than risk the unpredictable outcomes of political reform” (Powell, 2009), or at least what they thought was stability, as the Arab revolutions demonstrated the inner instability of autocratic, authoritarian regimes. This “stability syndrome” (Powell, 2009) was an ethical fault (paradigm A) and a strategic error (B), and eventually turned out to be quite inefficient (C). Such was the case under President Sarkozy, who took the lead in the rehabilitation of both Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi and Syria’s Bashar al-Assad.

Gaddafi’s comeback was long and slow and did not favor France in the beginning. Secret negotiations occurred first in 2003 with the United States and the United Kingdom regarding Libya’s weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). The material related to its nuclear program and its SCUD ballistic missiles were shipped from Tripoli to the USA (Abou, 2004). After having joined the Chemical Weapons Convention as a State Party in January 2004, Libya also handed over its chemical stockpiles, munitions and production facilities,1 although the Gaddafi regime retained some undisclosed materials.2

Terrorism was another big issue for the George W. Bush administration, but Libya appeared to give it up too, and even to repent of its previous actions. The financial compensation it paid for the bombing of a Pan Am flight over Lockerbie contributed to the return of Gaddafi’s Libya. Even if bilateral relations were not fully normalized, the sanctions imposed by the Iran and Libya Sanctions Act were lifted in 2004, allowing American and some non-American companies to do business in Libya. Libyan assets in the USA were also unfrozen. In 2006, the USA removed its designation of Libya as a state sponsor of terrorism—an important gesture. With this Anglo-American-Libyan progress, Silvio Berlusconi’s Italian activism in Tripoli and the European Union being very cautious of Tripoli’s new respectability, Paris found itself somewhat outside this promising new land of opportunities.

However, France also had assets in Libya, despite its resentment at the country’s sponsorship of terrorism and the Chadian–Libyan conflict. In 2000, an ad hoc cooperative effort brought Paris and Tripoli closer. French hostages held by Abu Sayyaf in the Philippines were released thanks to Saif al-Islam’s Gaddafi Foundation’s intermediation and financial offer to the terrorist group (Haddad & Lagarde, 2000). Libya’s intervention was a clear gesture toward France—as Germany and South Africa—to rehabilitate the country on the international stage. After Dominique de Villepin’s notable visit in 2002, in 2004 compensation was offered for the bombing of UTA DC-10, even if it was ten times less than was paid for the Lockerbie bombing: $1 million per victim for the UTA bombing versus $10 million for the Lockerbie bombing (Marchi, 2004), with respective totals of $170 million (Daoudi, 2004) and $2.

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