Libya heads for rehabilitation

Despite last-minute French objections, Libya is on the road to international rehabilitation this week with the final lifting of UN sanctions after the settlement of the Lockerbie aircraft bombing.

Sources involved in the negotiations said Tripoli and the United States had agreed to enter a process of discreet bilateral talks once the UN Security Council votes to remove the sanctions imposed to force Colonel Muammar Gaddafi to accept responsibility for two mid-air bombings in the late 1980s.

London-based lawyer Saad Djebbar said Libya will deposit $2.7 billion in an escrow account at the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland, on Monday to compensate relatives of 270 people killed when a Pan Am airliner crashed on the Scottish town of Lockerbie in 1988.

Djebbar said that Britain would table a resolution on the same day in the Security Council to lift the sanctions, suspended after Tripoli handed over two citizens for trial over the Lockerbie bombing.

One of the men, Abdel Basset al-Megrahi, was found guilty of planting a suitcase bomb aboard the transatlantic jumbo jet.

The Libyan government last week formally accepted responsibility for his actions.

France has said it might block the lifting of sanctions to demand that Libya increase the much smaller compensation it paid in 1999 over the mid-air bombing of a French UTA airliner in 1989 in which 170 people died, 65 of them French.

But lawyers and diplomats said Paris did not have a legal leg to stand on since the $36 million it received in damages had been set by a French court and accepted at the time by the French government as an irrevocable and final settlement.

Diplomats doubted that Paris would risk a fresh crisis with the United States and Britain at the United Nations by using its veto on such shaky legal ground, especially since it would also prevent the Lockerbie families from receiving their money.

France said yesterday it was still in talks to obtain more compensation even though Libya has ruled out a fresh settlement.

"We had an agreement with the French and it is completely settled. Any kind of extortion or blackmailing, we're not going to accept that," Libyan Foreign Minister Mohamed Abderrahmane Chalgam said on Saturday.

Chalgam said that restoring ties with Washington and attracting US investment were now top of Tripoli's agenda.

But the White House said in a harshly worded statement on Friday that US sanctions on Libya would remain in "full force" until concerns about its human rights record and alleged pursuit of weapons of mass destruction were addressed.

In a sign Libya was intent on coming in from the diplomatic cold, the German magazine Der Spiegel said on Saturday Tripoli was set to compensate non-American victims of a 1986 bombing of a Berlin disco used by US soldiers.

Djebbar, who has advised the Libyan government in the Lockerbie case and helped craft the statement of responsibility, said the next Libyan initiative could be to sign all international arms control treaties and accept rigorous inspection of its facilities to show it was clean of weapons of mass destruction.

"The Libyans know that WMD is top of the Americans' agenda. They could take the initiative by signing all the relevant agreements and allowing verification before anyone forces anything on them from outside," he said.

Djebbar said senior Libyan officials who negotiated the Lockerbie deal had built a relationship of trust with US Assistant Secretary of State William Burns and were advising Gaddafi on further steps to gradually rebuild ties with the US.

They faced suspicion from entrenched hardliners who feared rapprochement with the West would undermine the Libyan system and harm their vested economic interests. But with Gaddafi's backing the Lockerbie deal seemed certain to pass in the supreme General People's Council yesterday.

Also supportive in the background is Gaddafi's son, Seif al-Islam, who Djebbar said had advised the maverick leader to build bridges with the Americans rather than risk the same fate as deposed Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

In another sign of Libya' desire to improve ties with the US, it has asked Arab heavyweight Saudi Arabia to represent its interests in Washington instead of the United Arab Emirates.

Libya will also this week withdraw a lawsuit it filed against the United States and Britain at the International Court of Justice in the Hague in retaliation for the Lockerbie case, Djebbar said.