Don't let Libya off the hook for Lockerbie bombing

May 30, 1999

UNITED NATIONS - Libya's mercurial Colonel Gadaffi may yet have the last laugh if the United States, Britain and France finally agree to lift sanctions imposed on Tripoli in wake of the Pan Am #103 bombing over Lockerbie Scotland. Though Libya has now seemingly complied in turning over two "small fry" suspects over to the United Nations for a long awaited trial before a Scottish judge presiding in the Netherlands, justice may still not be served according to informed sources.

Both Britain and the U.S. want to turn the page and get to the bottom line through better business relations with oil-rich Libya. France and Italy are already doing so. Yet, the haunting specter of Pan Am flight #103 being blasted out of the sky over Scotland in 1988 and a similar attack on a UTA French airliner nine months later, made governments cringe, but now only pause before "doing the deal" with Colonel Gadaffi. With 270 deaths on the ill-fated Pan Am flight and another 170 on UTA, many surviving family members have demanded justice and won't simply turn the other cheek.

While the United Nations imposed crippling sanctions on Libya in 1992, the Security Council is now likely to lift the trade and transportation embargo in early July given that Gadaffi has "complied" with the UN.

According to Francoise Rudetzki, President and founder of the French group SOS Attentats a "victims lobby" of those who have personally suffered the scourge of terrorism, the move to drop sanctions is ill advised. Herself a victim of a Paris bombing, Rudetzki has had wide support from the French political class including President Jacques Chirac who has extolled her work.

Madame Rudetzki stresses to this correspondent that, "until the trial of the two suspects, the Libyan sanctions should be suspended not lifted." She concedes that while she wants Gadaffi to publicly renounce terrorism, this may be wishing thinking.

According to Rudetzki " SOS holds those accountable for committing, masterminding, or financing acts of terrorism and fights to bring them to justice." She adds, "We focus on the rule of law, we pressure states who in the name of national interests (raison d'etat") fail in their duties to implement national and international laws to bring justice to those responsible for terrorist acts."

This is precisely the problem. London's Sunday Times reveals that the British government has irrefutable evidence that the Libyan leader personally ordered the 1988 bombing of Pan Am flight #103 in revenge for an American air raid on Tripoli two years earlier. The paper under severe pressure from the Labor government not to publish the story said, "Robin Cook, the Foreign Secretary is planning to rehabilitate Gadaffi after the decision to hand over for trial two men accused of putting the bomb on Pan Am 103."

While the British government slapped the Sunday Times with a gag order from printing details, the paper published an account stating "the security services have concluded that Libya was solely responsible and that Gadaffi ordered the bombing after the raid on Tripoli."

The Sunday Times added, "British companies are already in discussions with potential customers in Libya--the government has given the go ahead of the unfreezing of Libyan assets in Britain."

While Washington remains uniquely uncomfortable with lifting the lid off Colonel Gadaffi's sanctions cage, there's little chance the U.S. will use its Security Council veto to stall lifting the sanctions. It's likely that a practical European Union will lift the veil of Lockerbie from Libya, and allow a Third Way compromise in doing business with Tripoli.

Now that the International Criminal Tribunal in the Hague has indicted Serb President Slobodan Milosevic for state sponsored ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, does Colonel Gadaffy's state sponsored terrorism committed a decade ago remain no less a heinous crime?

John J. Metzler is a U.N. correspondent covering diplomatic and defense issues who writes weekly for World Tribune.com.