Libya signs arms deal with France
Pastor Dale Morgan
Libya signs arms deal with France*
Roxanne Escobales and agencies
Friday August 3, 2007
Guardian Unlimited
Libya has signed contracts to buy £200m worth of anti-tank missiles and
radio systems from Europe, Libyan and French officials confirmed today.
The announcement comes just days after a visit to Tripoli by the French
president, Nicolas Sarkozy, and a little over a week after Mr Sarkozy's
wife, Cecilia, helped secure the release of Bulgarian medics jailed in
Libya for eight years.
But France repeated its denials that the sale was in exchange for the
release of the foreign medics, who had been sentenced to death for
allegedly infecting more than 400 Libyan children with HIV at a Benghazi
hospital.
The European defence and aerospace group, EADS, said it had finalised
the agreement through its joint venture company with Britain's BAE
Systems and Italy's Finmeccanica, called MBDA.
The agreement to sell Milan anti-tank missiles to the north African
country, was finalised after 18 months of negotiations. EADS said they
were also in advanced talks on supplying radios to Libya.
"This (missile) contract is awaiting the signature of the Libyan client,
and EADS is happy that the negotiations could be concluded," the company
said in a statement.
It made no comment on the value of the deals, but a Libyan source said
they were worth a total of €296m (£200m).
The French opposition party, the Socialists, questioned the nature of
the sale of arms to the Libyan leader, Muammar Gaddafi, and called for a
parliamentary commission of inquiry to establish whether the deal was
related to the release of the medics.
"There's a further question, which doesn't have to do with a commission
of inquiry, which is, should we have arms deals with a country like
Libya, ruled by Gaddafi?" the Socialist party leader, Francois Hollande,
told France Inter radio.
Mr Sarkozy's spokesman, David Martinon, denied any deal had been offered
as an exchange for the Bulgarian nurses and the Palestinian doctor. At
the time of their release last week, French and European Union officials
announced a $460m (£225m) deal to provide compensation for the victims'
families and opportunities for Libya to normalise relations with the west.
But Mr Martinon said the president's own visit, which came just hours
later, had improved the climate between the two countries and may have
helped the deal with EADS.
"It's true that President Sarkozy's state visit to Tripoli was very
successful because the negotiations for freeing the nurses had gone
through just before, and it seems that greatly accelerated things, to
the benefit of French companies," Mr Martinon told France Info radio.
The French defence minister, Herve Morin, also rejected Socialist
criticism of the deals. He said they were discussed for months and had
been cleared in principle by a special French ministerial commission on
arms sales in February 2007, before Sarkozy's victory in the
presidential elections.
Mr Morin also noted that other European countries - including Britain -
had been pressing for arms deals with Tripoli.
The recent visit by the French leader comes just months after the former
British prime minister, Tony Blair, made a similar trip to Libya.
After meeting with Mr Gaddafi in a traditional Bedouin tent, Mr Blair
announced that relations between the two countries were "completely
transformed".
"We now have very strong cooperation on counter-terrorism and defence,"
Mr Blair said at the end of May.
A significant development to come out of the renewed relations between
the UK and Libya, was a deal worth almost $1m that allowed BP to set up
gas exploration projects in the energy-rich region of north Africa.
Libya's emergence as a friend to the west, after decades of
international isolation, began in 2003. Libya agreed to halt a weapons
programme, prohibited by the UN, and pay compensation for the 1998
Lockerbie bombing, in which 270 people were killed when an American
airliner exploded over Scotland.
The European Union lifted an arms embargo on Libya in October 2004, but
Gaddafi's son, Saif al-Islam, had said the ban had effectively remained
in place because Germany was putting the brakes on deals.