Kadafi

WASHINGTON -- A month before a U.S. deadline for Libya to hand over two suspects in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 in 1988, administration officials say they are planning to seek tougher economic sanctions against the country. After months of diplomatic maneuvering, Col. Muammar el Kadafi has given no sign he will accept a compromise from the United States and Britain on trial arrangements in the case.President Clinton announced in December that the United States would push for tougher U.N. sanctions if Libya failed to hand over two intelligence agents for trial in the Netherlands by the end of February.

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa -- President Nelson Mandela, a key player in the handover of the two Lockerbie bombing suspects by Libyan leader Muammar el Kadafi, said yesterday that the transfer justified what some here have called his "pariah" foreign policy.Mandela has taken widespread criticism for the close relations he has maintained during his five years in power with Third World dictators who supported the struggle by his African National Congress party during the apartheid era.Among the "pariah" leaders he has kept close contact with are Kadafi, Cuban President Fidel Castro and Iraq's Saddam Hussein.

SANCTIONS, placed on a rogue regime by the world community for an attainable goal, can work.The delivery of Libyan intelligence officers Abdel Basset al-Megrahi and Al-Amin Khalifa Fahima to United Nations custody testifies to that.The U.N. sanctions placed on Libya starting in 1992 in all likelihood will end formally in three months. Whatever the role of dictator Muammar el Kadafi in the bombing of a Berlin nightclub favored by U.S. soldiers in 1986, the bombing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, that killed 270 in 1988 and the bombing of a French airliner over Niger the next year, Libya's pariah status largely ended when the two suspects were handed over.

COL. MUAMMAR El Kadafi's emissary, Youssef Debri, met me in Cairo last year. He was in Egypt exploring the ramifications of Libya's surrendering two of its citizens to stand trial for the 1988 bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland.In formal talks in New York, a U.N. official had managed to narrow the gap between Libya's concerns and the British-American proposal for a trial in the Netherlands, but important differences remained.Now Debri was in Cairo informally, to clarify Washington's terms with a well-connected, retired American diplomat, in the hope of ending Kadafi's equivocation.

WASHINGTON -- George Williams has seen signs of cooperation before from Libyan leader Muammar el Kadafi, only to be disappointed. This time he's not buying it.Williams and his wife Judy, who live in Joppa, lost their 24-year-old son, Geordie, in the explosion and crash of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988.As president of an organization representing the majority of families of the 189 American victims, Williams closely follows the diplomatic efforts to bring two Libyan intelligence agents to trial in the attack.

NEW YORK -- U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said yesterday that "important progress" has been made toward persuading Libya to turn over two suspects wanted in the 1988 bombing of a Pan American flight over Lockerbie, Scotland, that killed 270 people.Annan's office issued the cautiously optimistic statement after Saudi Arabia and South Africa said in separate announcements that what South Africa called a "common understanding" had been reached by their envoys with Libyan leader Col. Muammar el Kadafi.

Inner Harbor East is no place for huge hotelThe Sun's arguments against the Wyndham Inner Harbor East hotel make perfect sense.Michael Beatty of H&S Properties misleads when he talks of how many jobs and dollars the Wyndham will bring to Baltimore (letter, Nov. 1). That benefit is also true of the Westin proposal at the News American site and the Grand Hyatt proposal near Camden Yards.The mayor and Baltimore Development Corporation have forced the decision-making into a poor process that does not allow the decision-makers, now the City Council, to look at the entire picture.

Washington -- Rumors have circulated that Vladimir Zhirinovsky was funded by the KGB, by Saddam Hussein, Muammar el Kadafi -- all of which may or may not have been true.Mr. Zhirinovsky gave all three reason enough to bankroll his candidacy. His frankly authoritarian goals are manifestly attractive to the same KGB faction that has supported previous conspiracies against Russian democracy. His advocacy of closer relations with Iraq and Libya give these progressively more isolated regimes a rationale for supporting his election.

At first glance, dispatching 400 Army Rangers to Somalia does not make a lot of sense.Rangers are an elite commando force. These are the guys who slide down ropes from helicopters and train in counterterrorism and unconventional warfare.These were the dreaded "lurps" -- Long-Range Reconnaissance Patrols -- of Vietnam, who smeared their faces and hands with camouflage paint, crept into the jungle at night and killed in utter silence.So what are they doing in Somalia where our mission is to feed people?

UNITED NATIONS -- A Libyan envoy is expected here next week to tell United Nations Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali whether the government of Col. Muammar el Kadafi is ready to deliver for trial in Scotland two Libyans accused of complicity in the bombing of a Pan American World Airways plane over Lockerbie, Scotland, in December 1988 that killed 270 people.If Libya again refuses to turn over the men -- Abdel Basset Ali Megrahi and Lamen Khalifa Fhimah -- the United States, Britain and France will ask the U.N. Security Council to impose new restrictions on Tripoli beyond those laid down in April 1992, which cut Libya's air links with the rest of the world and banned arms sales to Tripoli.

In my graduate class on Arab politics, we would often puzzle over decisions autocratic leaders have made that did not seem to make sense, either in moral or strategic terms. It was often tempting to take the intellectually lazy route and think they were simply crazy or stupid. In order to make the discussion more productive, the professor would suggest that we assume the leaders are at least as smart as ourselves. In recent weeks, the only person convicted in the 1988 Lockerbie bombing was released to Libyan soil, where he received a jubilant welcome organized by Libyan leader Col. Muammar el Kadafi.

WASHINGTON -- The restoration of diplomatic relations with Libya ends more than three decades of hostility. It sends a strong signal to Iran and other countries that abandoning terrorism and weapons of mass destruction can lead to similar benefits. In Afghanistan and Iraq, the United States has shown how we would respond to governments we perceived as uncooperative in the war on terrorism. Absent a clear example of how a country with a bad past could change course and stand with the United States, some governments might have concluded that the best strategy was to follow the North Korean example of covertly developing a weapon to gain concessions at the negotiating table.

How would you feel if the man who murdered your child was forgiven - and embraced - by your government? That's what happened to me Monday when the State Department announced that Col. Muammar el Kadafi's Libya was being taken off the list of state sponsors of terrorism and that the United States would establish full and friendly relations with the regime. Libya, you may recall, was the country that blew up Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, on Dec. 21, 1988. The blast killed 270 people, 189 of them Americans.

WASHINGTON - In the corridors of the State Department, diplomats joust for the honor of being Washington's first ambassador to Libya in more than 30 years. It has been nearly a year since President Bush ended sanctions on Libya and announced his intention to open a diplomatic office in Tripoli. That speech followed a year of heady diplomacy, culminating March 12, 2003, with Mr. Bush's comment that "Libya is beginning to change her attitude about a lot of things." As evidence of Libyan strongman Muammar el Kadafi's good will, he cited the case of Libya's most famous dissident.

TRIPOLI, Libya - Libya will not execute five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor who were sentenced to death earlier this year for infecting more than 400 children with HIV in 1998, according to the son of the Libyan leader, Col Muammar el Kadafi. "No one is going to execute anyone," the Libyan leaders' son, Seif al-Islam Kadafi, said yesterday. This month or next, he said, the country will pass new laws that will limit capital punishment to a small number of crimes. "Capital punishment is going to be finished," he said.

WASHINGTON - President Bush eased economic sanctions on Libya yesterday, rewarding Col. Muammar el Kadafi for renouncing weapons of mass destruction and opening opportunities for American companies to do business in his nation. The action, announced by the White House while Bush was in Florida, had been anticipated for many weeks. But it was nonetheless drastic, since it softened a hard-line policy that has been in place for years against a leader who was once an enemy of the United States.

LONDON - With a handshake that was beamed round the world, Prime Minister Tony Blair officially ended Libya's three decades of isolation by greeting Col. Muammar el Kadafi yesterday in a tent near the capital, Tripoli, where they exchanged promises to fight the terrorism that Kadafi once enthusiastically supported. Some relatives of those who died in 1988 in the bombing of a Pan Am jet over Lockerbie, Scotland, criticized Blair's journey. Libyan intelligence was blamed for that act, and Libya admitted responsibility in September.

WHILE nobody was paying attention, Rep. C.A. Dutch Ruppersberger slipped into Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya. In a desert tent, he met with Col. Muammar el Kadafi and talked about Libya's abandonment of nuclear weapons. In Afghanistan, he met with President Hamid Karzai and talked about the search for Osama bin Laden. In Iraq, he met with soldiers from Maryland who wondered what awaits them when they return home. Ruppersberger was part of a small congressional delegation -- members of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence -- that went to the Middle East last month to assess U.S. intelligence there, and to receive briefings from military commanders and diplomats.

A U.S. congressional delegation told Col. Muammar el Kadafi that he must acknowledge responsibility for the attack on Pan Am 103 in order for U.S.-Libyan relations to improve, a member of the delegation said yesterday. Rep. John E. Sweeney, a New York Republican, was part of a six-member delegation that met with Kadafi for two hours in the Libyan desert Friday in a tent compound outside the dictator's hometown of Sirte. Sweeney, in a telephone interview, said Kadafi criticized militants in general, expressed "sympathy" for American losses in the Sept.

PARIS - Libya agreed yesterday to pay $170 million to the families of victims killed in the terrorist bombing of a French airliner over Africa in 1989, clearing one of the last hurdles in its campaign to rehabilitate its image in the West. In addition to the agreement, Libya declared last month that it would dismantle its nuclear weapons program, which it had pursued clandestinely, and invite international weapons inspectors to verify the process. The deal, providing $1 million for each of the 170 people killed in the attack, brings to a close two years of contentious negotiations that at one point threatened to derail a U.S.-led bid to lift economic sanctions against the North African country.