Libyan News

Sunday, 4 March, 2001: Some of the biggest names in Africa came to Libya to applaud Mu'ammar al-Qadhafi and his ideas. But they left without making any concrete progress toward the "United States of Africa" that the Libyan leader says is the only way to rescue the continent from poverty and powerlessness. At the end of two-day Organization of African Unity summit in the coastal Libyan town of Sirte on Friday night, the leaders announced the "establishment" of an African Union but said not enough nations had formally ratified the proposal, first floated by Qadhafi in 1999 and adopted as a goal a year later at a summit in Togo. Two-thirds of the OAU's 53 nations, or 36 states, must ratify the union before it can come into force. The failure at Sirte to institute Qadhafi's latest foreign policy objective is not likely to slow his pursuit of a leading role in Africa and a place in its history. [AP]

Saturday, 3 March, 2001: Nelson Mandela on Thursday urged leaders attending the fifth OAU extraordinary summit in Sirte to take a clear decision calling for the immediate and definitive lifting of UN sanctions against Libya. He regretted that the states dealing with Libya in the affair had not respected their commitments as had initially been agreed by all the parties. "A special tribunal has just condemned one of the two Libyan citizens at the end of the Lockerbie trial. During my mediation, it had been agreed that if Libya fully co-operates, The U.S. and U.K. would do their best to lift the sanctions..." "It was agreed that a Security Council resolution in this direction would be tabled as soon as Libya surrendered the said suspects. I expected the powers involved to call for the lifting of sanctions," Mandela added. Mandela said that he had written the leaders of these two countries and the UN secretary general to remind them of their commitments but up to now Libya has not received any reprieve. [PANA]

Tuesday, 6 March, 2001: "Rogue nations," an expression discouraged by the Clinton administration in June 2000, has crept into the language of the Bush administration. U.S. President Bush has used the expression twice in the past week, sending a signal to his subordinates that they can follow suit if they choose. "The president thinks it's a term that means something to people. It's pretty clear what it means," National Security Council spokeswoman Mary Ellen Countryman said on Monday. It was former Secretary of State Albright who decided to drop the term, in recognition of the fact that countries such as North Korea, Libya and Iran can change their policies. She advocated the alternative expression "states of concern" but that phrase never really caught the imaginations of diplomats, policymakers and journalists. [Reuters]

Wednesday, 7 March, 2001: Jeune Afrique, the Paris-based African magazine, has reported in its current issue that Guinea's President Lansana Conte recently rejected a US $500,000 "gift" from Libyan leader Qadhafi. The money was allegedly taken to Conakry in a suitcase by Libyan envoy, Mr. Ali Treiki. Treiki, who in the 70s announced that, "a bag of cash can take care of any problem in Africa," is believed to center his diplomacy on bribing corrupt African leaders. Jeune Afrique said Qadhafi's special envoy went to pay a friendly visit to Guinea and was received in audience by Lansana Conte. According to witnesses to the meeting, the Libyan Envoy had brought a valise containing cash in the amount of 1/2 of a million dollars, as a gesture from the leader of the Jamahirya. Conte refused the money. According to Jeune Afrique, few days before Treiki's visit, Guinean forces had arrested a rebel at the Guinean border with Liberia who admitted having been trained in Libya and entering in Guinea through Liberia. [The Perspective]

Thursday, 8 March, 2001: The creditors of South Korea's embattled Dong Ah Construction said they would discuss the conversion of the financially troubled builder's debts into equity if Dong Ah is put under court receivership. The nine creditors, including Korea Exchange Bank, submitted a petition Tuesday to have the troubled builder put under court management to the Seoul district court. This is being interpreted as an expression of the creditors' willingness to swallow part of Dong Ah's losses if the court grants court receivership, an official at a creditor bank said. According to the application, the creditor banks will pursue Dong Ah's overseas and civil engineering projects, as they are more profitable than its construction and plant operations. The company's promising projects include a waterway project in Libya and engineering projects for highways, dams, harbors and railroads. [Asia Pulse]

Saturday, 10 March, 2001: The Libya soccer contingent, in Zambia for Saturday's World Cup match in Chingola yesterday lambasted FAZ (The Zambian Football Committee) for what they claimed shoddy accommodation arrangements and later checked themselves out of the Savoy Hotel in Ndola. After the morning work out at Dola Hill stadium, the Libyans took Ndola based FAZ committee member Pivoty Simwanza to task and demanded to be driven to Kitwe where they wanted to be booked at Edinburgh Hotel as earlier arranged. Simwanza explained that Edinburgh Hotel was fully booked and that they should be patient as the association was looking into their accommodation issue. But the Libyan officials, expressing dissatisfaction at Simwanza's statement that Edinburgh was full and ordered all their players out of their rooms and onto the bus to Kitwe. While Simwanza insisted Edinburgh Hotel was fully booked, the Libyans travelled to Kitwe and managed to get accommodated at the hotel without difficulties. [Times of Zambia ]

Saturday, 10 March, 2001: In Korea, the Seoul district court Friday ruled against the creditors of Dong Ah Construction Co., canceling court receivership for the ailing builder and putting it on a course to bankruptcy. But the ruling also said that the ailing company's waterway construction projects in Libya will not be affected, even after the company begins bankruptcy procedures. The ruling effectively raises prospects that the construction firm will be declared bankrupt as the chances are slim that an appeal to the higher court by the company and creditors will be accepted. The court can rule the company bankrupt if it fails to make an appeal within two weeks. The company's bankruptcy, if it takes place, could lead to the bankruptcies of its subcontractors, a drop in the country's overseas credit and a diplomatic row with Libya. [Asia Pulse]

Tuesday, 13 March, 2001: The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries needs to cut crude output by around one million barrels a day when they meet later this week to sustain OPEC's basket price at $25.00 a barrel, a Libyan oil official told Dow Jones Newswires Monday. Speaking by telephone, the official said, "We (Libya) believe around one million b/d is a good figure as during the second quarter oil demand is expected to fall by a daily average of 1.7 million b/d." Friday, OPEC's basket price stood at $24.59/bbl. The official said that all OPEC members recognize that an output cut is now needed so as to protect prices from dipping in the second quarter amid forecasts of lower demand. He said he was confident "a collective decision" would be made at the forthcoming meeting on an output cut figure. [Dow Jones]

Wednesday, 14 March, 2001: France's highest court has ruled that Libyan leader Colonel Mu'ammar al-Qadhafi cannot be prosecuted in connection with the bomb attack on a French DC-10 airliner over Niger in 1989. Ten years after the bombing of UTA Flight 772 which killed 170 people, six Libyans - including Colonel Qadhafi's brother-in-law - were sentenced in absentia to life imprisonment. Last October, a French appeals court ruled that Colonel Qadhafi did not have diplomatic immunity in the case although he is a serving head of state, and could therefore be prosecuted. The court ruled that diplomatic immunity did not apply to acts of terrorism. But on Tuesday the Cour de Cassation overturned the appeals court ruling, effectively ending France's case against the Libyan leader. [BBC]

Thursday, 15 March, 2001: Up to 34 African countries have ratified the Constitutive Act to establish an African Union (AU), Zimbabwean Foreign Affairs Minister Stan Mudenge said on Wednesday. Mudenge told foreign diplomats accredited to Zimbabwe that a total of 36 member countries of the Organization of African Unity (OAU) are needed to ratify the act. "We are confident that within the next year the AU would be a reality," he said. Formation of the AU was mooted by Libyan President Mu'ammar al-Qadhafi and endorsed at an extraordinary summit of the OAU in Sirte, Libya earlier this month. The AU, whose headquarters will be in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa, is to have several institutions under its auspices, including a Pan-African Parliament and an African Court of Justice. [Xinhua]

Friday, 16 March, 2001: Libya's Ambassador in Seoul, Ahmed Mohamed al-Tabuli, expressed Thursday his hopes that Dong Ah Construction Industrial Co. will continue its large-scale Libyan waterway project that has been in jeopardy since Dong Ah was ordered to liquidate last week, Yonhap News Agency reported. The ambassador conveyed the hopes in a meeting with Kang Ghil-boo, South Korea's vice construction and transportation minister, Yonhap said. Last week, Seoul Bankruptcy Court ordered Dong Ah to be placed out of court receivership, a move that will likely liquidate the fifth largest Korean builder. Dong Ah will face formal liquidation unless it, along with creditors or shareholders, appeal the case to a higher court within two weeks. [Dow Jones]

Monday, 19 March, 2001: Libyan leader Mu'ammar al-Qadhafi called on Libyans Sunday to devote their economic strength to the development of Africa, saying Libya's future lies in the continent. "Your future and the future of your children is in Africa. ... You have money, oil and gas; Africa should benefit from them," Qadhafi told the annual session of the General People's Congress, Libya's legislature. Echoing his announcement earlier this month of the creation of a united Africa, Qadhafi said: "We have the chance now with the birth of the African Union. Our riches and our oil must be put at the service of the African economic zone." "Africans should also benefit from Libya's riches and you should not be opposed to it," Qadhafi said, alluding to the deadly riots last year that forced 33,000 black Africans to flee Libya. Qadhafi was addressing the annual one-week session of the General People's Congress, which is due to look at Libyan internal developments and foreign policy and to question officials about their ministries' activities. [AFP]

Sunday, 18 March, 2001: Mohammed Abul-Qasim Al-Zwai will be entertained with other Arab ambassadors at a banquet in Edinburgh, Scotland, on Thursday by leaders of the Scottish parliament. Sir David Steel, a longstanding advocate of closer ties with Libya, will host the event. Al-Zwai is the first Libyan ambassador to Britain in 17 years. His trip to Scotland will be among his first official duties after he presents his credentials to the Queen on Tuesday. Peter Lowenstein, one of the founders of the American group Victims of Pan Am 103, who lost his son Alexander in the bombing, said: "It's the old story that money, greed and oil rule and everything else falls by the wayside. The Scots should have perhaps tried to avoid having the Libyan ambassador to dinner." Opposition members of the Scottish parliament are likely to raise questions about Steel's role. Steel, presiding officer of the Scottish parliament and former Liberal leader, flew to Tripoli several years ago to meet Colonel Mu'ammar al-Qadhafi, the Libyan leader. [The Sunday Times]

Sunday, 18 March, 2001: A Libyan court postponed for the tenth time on Saturday the trial of six Bulgarian health workers charged with deliberately infecting hundreds of Libyan children with the HIV virus, a Bulgarian official said. The medics' trial formally opened on February 7, 2000. "The Libyan People's Court postponed the trial until April 28," a spokeswoman for Bulgarian President Petar Stoyanov told Reuters. The delay was granted at the request of the medics' Libyan lawyer Othman al-Byzanti, the spokeswoman said. She gave no details. Previous delays were also at the request of the defense. Bulgarian state radio on Saturday quoted al-Byzanti as saying that the court had again rejected his request for foreign experts to testify in the case. The six medics are charged with intentionally infecting the children with blood products contaminated with HIV in what the indictment says was a bid to destabilize the Libyan state. Eight Libyans and a Palestinian face similar charges. [Reuters]

Saturday, 17 March, 2001: Emirates airline will launch its inaugural flight to Libya on March 25, Emirates officials said. The Dubai carrier will run three non-direct flights to Tripoli through Malta on Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays and direct return flights to Dubai on the same days, the officials added. Emirates' new service is part of the memorandum of understanding (MoU) signed between Dubai and Libyan civil aviation authorities in March 1999. The MoU allows both to run unlimited flights and grant them open rights for transportation of passengers, cargo and mail courier. Under the MoU, both civil aviation authorities are also allowed to exchange information, expertise in aircraft and aerial control, maintenance and training. It also recommended the signing of an avoidance of dual-taxation pact between the two countries. [Golf News]

Thursday, 22 March, 2001: Four members of the British parliament (MPs) arrived in Libya to persuade Colonel Mu'ammar al-Qadhafi to hand over the murderer of WPc Yvonne Fletcher, the police officer shot outside the Libyan embassy in London in 1984. The group was led by Tam Dalyell, a Labour MP. Before flying to Tripoli, Mr Dalyell said: "... I have been intimately involved in the Yvonne Fletcher case and I will be raising it." WPc Fletcher, 25, was shot in the back from a bullet fired from the Libyan embassy in St James's Square. The gunman and 21 embassy staff were allowed to return to Libya under diplomatic immunity. Scotland Yard believe that they have strong evidence against several suspects, including Abdulgader al-Tuhami, an intelligence officer. Officers also want to interview Moustfa al-Mighirbi, the chief intelligence officer, and Omar al-Sodani, a diplomat. [The Telegraph]

Thursday, 22 March, 2001: The British government agreed to drop napalm bombs - widely used by US forces in the Vietnam war - in military exercises in Scotland and Libya, according to official documents released yesterday. The plan was to drop the bombs in 1970 on firing ranges at Tain, Scotland, and at el-Adem, an RAF base in Libya. In June 1969 - three months before Colonel Qadhafy seized power from King Idris in a coup - the British ambassador to Libya, Roderick Sarell, told the Foreign Office that the RAF was confident that explosions from napalm, called "firebombs", looked like "ignitions of a barrel of oil to the uninitiated" and that "the fragments would not be identifiable". He continued: "In the light of this advice I am quite clear that we can go ahead and certainly say nothing to the Libyans." The papers do not say whether the RAF did go ahead with the training exercises. Denis Healey, the defence secretary, noted that napalm bombs were used to attack the Torrey Canyon, the tanker wrecked off the Isles of Scilly in 1967. That was the first time British possession of napalm had "come to public knowledge", he said. But, he added, that appeared to have been forgotten. [The Guardian]

Monday, 26 March, 2001: Libyan leader Col. Mu'ammar al-Qadhafi arrived Sunday in the Jordanian capital of Amman to take part in Tuesday's Arab summit. Qadhafi was received at the airport by Jordan's King Abdullah II and was the first Arab leader to arrive in the kingdom for the summit. The Libyan leader's participation in the first so-called ordinary Arab summit to be held in more than a decade came after he refused to attend an emergency high-level meeting in Cairo in October that focused on the bloody confrontations between the Palestinians and Israeli forces in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. One of the draft resolutions being drawn up by the ongoing Arab foreign ministers preparatory meeting to be presented to the summit, the Arab leaders call on the U.N. Security Council to immediately lift the economic sanctions against Libya. [UPI]

Sunday, 25 March, 2001: Libya's General People's Congress (GPC) has commended the high court in France for "resisting pressure" from what it described as "Zionist circles and forces at the service of injustice". The Paris Court of Cessation, which is the highest French legal organ, on 13 March, decided to close a case whose sole target was Col. Qadhafi. Opened in 1999, the case had aimed at accusing Qadhafi in connection with a UTA DC-10 plane crash. In a statement issued in Sirte late Thursday at the end of its annual conference, the GPC pointed out that the ruling of the Paris Court was an illustration of "objectivity and refusal to give in to pressure" by the French justice system. The Congress denounced the imprisonment of Libyan national, Abdelbasset Al-Maghrahi, who was given a life sentence in connection with the Lockerbie case. [PANA]

Thursday, 29 March, 2001: Here are the main points of the final communique from the Arab summit in Amman [concerning Libya] : The leaders "demand the Security Council to lift sanctions imposed on Libya immediately and permanently based on Libya's compliance with the demands of the Security Council because there is no longer any justification for their continuation under any guise. "The Arabs consider themselves free from any commitment to the sanctions in the event that they are reimplemented since Libya has fulfilled all its obligations as required by the Security Council." The leaders "demand the immediate release of Libyan citizen Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi (found guilty in January of blowing up a Pan Am jumbo jet over Lockerbie in Scotland in 1988) who was convicted for political reasons." [AFP]

The judges who convicted a former Libyan intelligence agent of bombing Pan Am flight 103 were too quick to accept testimony linking him to the attack, and overlooked witnesses who could have vindicated him, defence counsel argued Thursday. the second day of the appeal hearing for Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, lawyers asked the five appellate judges to review key testimony from the only witness to connect him to the 1988 disaster over Lockerbie, Scotland that killed 270 people, including two Canadians. Al-Megrahi, 49, was convicted last January and sentenced to life imprisonment, with no possibility of parole for 20 years. He has been serving time in a special lockup in the Netherlands under Scottish guard since the verdict, but would likely be transferred to a prison in Scotland if he loses the appeal. A second defendant, Lamen Khalifa Fhimah, was acquitted and returned to Libya.The United States has repeatedly demanded that Tripoli accept responsibility for the attack, in which 189 Americans died, and pay damages to victims' families. Only then would it lift sanctions imposed in 1986 for what Washington viewed as Libya's support for international terrorism.The United Nations ended sanctions against Libya in 1999 after leader Moammar Gadhafi agreed to surrender the two Lockerbie suspects, in a deal that called for the trial to be held by a Scottish court on neutral territory.The appeal hearing focuses on two main defence strategies. One contests a prosecution witness who identified al-Megrahi as the purchaser of clothing that was in the same suitcase that contained the bomb, concealed inside a cassette recorder. Secondly, the defence seeks to call a new witness to testify that the lethal suitcase could have been put on board the plane at London's Heathrow airport, rather than onto a feeder flight in Malta. During the hearings, which are expected to last up to five weeks, the burden of proof lies with the defence. Prosecutors need only reaffirm their support of the verdict, while the defence has to discredit the trial court's conclusions .Scottish legal experts say the defence will have a difficult task persuading the appeals court to overturn a verdict rendered by three professional judges. Defence lawyer William Taylor said the three trial judges misinterpreted information and failed to give enough weight to contradictions in the testimony of Maltese shopkeeper Toni Gauci, whose evidence provided the essential link between al-Megrahi and the explosives-packed suitcase. He said mistakes in the "crucial issue of the date" of a visit to Malta led the judges to the wrong verdict. Gauci testified in July, 2000, that a man resembling al-Megrahi bought men's clothing, baby apparel and an umbrella from the boutique Mary's House in December 1988. His testimony led the judges to conclude that al-Megrahi had bought the clothing on Dec.7 in Gauci's store, later found in the wreckage. Taylor said the trial judges erred in determining his client's whereabouts from Gauci's statements and asked them to reconsider testimony from one of three defence witnesses, Maltese meteorologist Joseph Mifsud.
Mifsud asserted that on the day al-Megrahi was said to have been in the store it hadn't rained but only drizzled briefly, making it unlikely he would have bought an umbrella. Mifsud said it was more likely to have rained on November 23, not on Dec. 7 which was the only day prosecutors said al-Megrahi had been to Malta. Gauci was the only witness out of 229 called during the trial to identify al-Megrahi. Taylor said the wide publication of al-Megrahi's photo in newspapers and the 12 year lapse between the trial and time of the purchase had biased the identification and rendered his testimony unreliable