Libya: The Rise and Fall of Qaddafi

Author:Alison Pargeter
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780300139327
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2012-06-27T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 7

The Chimera of Reform

Qaddafi was faced with a dilemma. Libya was deep in crisis and the Colonel desperately needed a way out. Everywhere he looked, the pressures were building and he feared the country might slip out of his hands. His cherished Jamahiriyah was on shakier ground than ever before. If his regime was going to live, he was going to have to do something drastic. The exhausted Colonel knew that the key to extricating himself from this mess was to hand over the Lockerbie suspects, thereby securing the lifting of the international embargo that was strangling the country and grinding down the all-important energy sector, which was crying out for US technical expertise.1 Yet the idea of surrendering the two suspects was still anathema to the Brother Leader. How could this proud Bedouin, who had invested a lifetime in spouting anti-imperialist rhetoric, simply bow down to Western demands? Moreover, beyond the issue of personal pride, the Leader had domestic concerns to think about. For all that Libyans may not have liked the Qaddafi regime, most viewed Western demands to give up the suspects as a further example of imperialist bullying. Most important of all, however, the Colonel feared that, if he handed the men over, imperialist powers would use the trial to incriminate the Libyan state – and him personally.

Yet the cornered Qaddafi knew he had to find a way of navigating himself out of the crisis. His chance came in August 1998, when Washington and London put forward a new proposal: the Lockerbie suspects could be tried in a specially convened court in The Hague, under Scottish law and in front of a panel of three Scottish judges.2 This proposal was not, in essence, very different from one that the Libyans had put forward themselves in 1994. Back then, keen to be seen to be making some concessions that would nevertheless not look as though the two men were simply being relinquished to the Americans and the British, Libya had suggested that Al-Megrahi and Fhimah could be tried at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague. Tripoli had also conceded at the time that the men could be tried under Scottish law, before a tribunal of Scottish judges.

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.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.