Madrid, March 24 (Reuters): Britain’s Tony Blair will make an historic visit to Libya tomorrow, an important step towards bringing Libya in from the diplomatic cold.
Blair will meet Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi in a tent on the outskirts of Tripoli, a senior UK government official told reporters today. He will be the first British Prime Minister to visit Libya since Winston Churchill during World War Two.
“We believe that Gaddafi has made important strategic decisions on weapons of mass destruction and on Lockerbie and we want to demonstrate our support for those decisions,” the official said.
Blair is in Spain for a memorial service for the victims of this month’s Madrid train bombings that killed 190 people. He then flies on to Portugal for talks.
Libya announced in December it was abandoning any efforts to acquire nuclear, chemical and biological weapons in a new effort to mend ties with the West, after agreeing to pay damages for the 1988 PanAm plane bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland, which killed 270 people.
Britain played a key role in encouraging Gaddafi’s initiative on banned weapons and a meeting between the two leaders had been widely expected.
Washington, also rebuilding ties with Libya, sent a senior official to meet Gaddafi yesterday. Many of the Lockerbie victims were American.
Secretary of state Colin Powell said William Burns, a top US state department aide and the highest ranking member of an American government to visit Libya in more than 30 years, had had “good discussions” with Gaddafi, once reviled in Washington. Blair’s Conservative opponents however condemned the visit. “It’s quite odd timing to go from a service which commemorates the victims of the biggest terrorist attack on Europe since Lockerbie, to go straight from there to Libya,” Conservative leader Michael Howard told BBC Radio.
“I imagine it will cause considerable distress to the families of the victims of Lockerbie.”
But Jim Swire, a spokesman for some of the families of the Lockerbie victims, welcomed the moves to reintegrate Libya into the international community, culminating with a Blair visit.
“It would... greatly diminish the chances of backsliding into support for terrorism, so we are greatly in favour of such a move,” he said. The British official said UK business stood to gain from closer ties with Tripoli.
Royal Dutch/Shell may sign an outline deal within days for gas exploration rights off the coast of Libya, he said, and several other UK companies were likely to reap the benefits of improved relations. Libya is keen to boost foreign investment that could allow it to boost its oil production.
