The Hindu : International : Qadhafi visit to France triggers controversy

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Monday, Dec 10, 2007
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Qadhafi visit to France triggers controversy

Vaiju Naravane

Sarkozy plans red carpet welcome for Libyan leader coming on a five-day visit

Sarkozy adopts pragmatic foreign policy
Libya tipped to sign several contracts

Paris: The red carpet welcome being planned for Libyan leader Muammar Qadhafi, who begins an unprecedented five-day state visit to France on Monday, has caused a major stir here.

Until recently the bete noire of Western governments and completely isolated because of his alleged support to terrorist organisations, Mr Qadhafi will hold two private meetings with President Nicolas Sarkozy. Libya is tipped to sign contracts for a nuclear reactor, Rafale fighters and Airbus aircraft during the visit.

On Friday, Mr. Qadhafi, whose country spent years in diplomatic isolation for its alleged support to terrorists, said he considered it “normal that the weak had recourse to terrorism”.

The same day in Lisbon, he also called on former colonial powers to “compensate the people they colonised and whose riches they plundered”.

But Mr. Sarkozy, with his new and pragmatic approach to foreign policy, did not refer to such incidents on Saturday as he shook the Libyan leader’s hand at a summit of European and African leaders in Portugal.

“I am very pleased to receive you in Paris,” Mr. Sarkozy said. In a radio interview, Mr Sarkozy also hotly defended his decision to invite the Libyan leader with such pomp and ceremony.

In an interview with France’s Le Figaro daily, Mr. Qadhafi’s son, Seif el-Islam, also described bilateral differences as past history. “For us, [the visit[ should crown the new relations between France and Libya,” he told the newspaper.

Mr. Qadhafi’s trip was triggered by the release of five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor accused in Libya of infecting children with HIV/AIDS. Mr. Sarkozy’s former wife, Cecilia, played a role in brokering the release and Mr. Sarkozy visited Tripoli in July.

But the circumstances of the Bulgarians’ release have sowed political controversy in France, where the government denies opposition charges it bought the nurses’ freedom by offering inducements.

“No signature of commercial contracts can legitimise such blindness on the part of Nicolas Sarkozy,” said Francois Hollande, head of the leading opposition Socialist Party. “This visit is unworthy of France and unworthy for France,” said centrist politician Francois Bayrou.

Leftist French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy was even blunter. “One cannot invite a terrorist and taker of international hostages,” he said, adding he was “shocked” by the Libyan leader’s stay here.

The two countries then signed commercial and military accords, including arms sales and an agreement to build a nuclear reactor for water desalination. Franco-Libyan relations have steadily improved since a 2004 accord on a Libyan compensation deal for the victims of a French DC-10 airliner bombing over Niger. The 1989 crash killed 170 persons, including 54 French.

The upturn paved the way for a visit by the then President Jacques Chirac in November 2004. The two countries resumed defence cooperation in February 2005.

Besides warming ties with Libya, they point to the President’s continued support of certain authoritarian African regimes and Mr. Sarkozy’s congratulatory call to Russian President Vladimir Putin after his party’s victory in legislative elections on December 2 — even as other countries expressed concern about the vote. But Axel Poniatowski, a member of Mr. Sarkozy’s governing Union for a Popular Movement party, defended a policy of “realpolitik” toward Libya, saying “it was better to stop marginalising” the country.

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