Exit the Colonel (24 page)

In the ensuing years, additional questions surfaced regarding how and if the victims and their governments put themselves in vulnerable positions to begin with (again, by not understanding Gaddafi's modus operandi, or being willing to collaborate in atrocities in return for higher-level policy favors). A Bulgarian diplomat told an American diplomat that she felt the Bulgarian nurses had “contributed to the situation” by continuing to work in conditions where children were being infected under either suspicious or negligent circumstances. One of the nurses, Valya Chervenyashka, in her memoir,
Notes From Hell
, criticizes senior members of the Bulgarian mission for effectively ignoring the nurses' case.
¹¹

In the wake of the February revolution, many in Benghazi continued to believe the infection was deliberate. Many Libyans continue to believe the Bulgarians were responsible, while at least one senior diplomat is convinced Gaddafi himself ordered the infection to “punish” the East for continuing sedition.

Increasing attention to the case of the Bulgarian nurses coincided with Saif Al Islam's rise to public prominence from 2004 to 2007. Indeed, he was
positioned as the key negotiator, the good guy who assisted with lifting the ban on executions in 2007. Saif continued to be the “voice of reason,” even after the nurses issue had been resolved. “Yes, there was torture,” he would admit, contradicting previous official Libyan insistence that the detained medical personnel were treated with proper care.
¹²

Setting a precedent for future actions, French president Nicolas Sarkozy played a controversial role bringing the Bulgarian nurses case to a head, before the European Commission had managed to exhaust its processes, sending his then wife Cecilia with Benita Ferrero-Waldner to “take possession” of the nurses and doctor, while carrying on parallel negotiations for the sale of French armaments to Libya. The quid pro quo on the French side, as intimated by Pierini, was the sale of weapons to the regime and an immediate exchange of official visits: Sarkozy would come to Tripoli and would host Gaddafi with pomp in Paris (which he did).

Gaddafi understood that Sarkozy was playing politics with the nurses' case. According to Pierini, “In a sense, the inclusion of the subject in the conclusions of the EU Council of Ministers from October 2004, or Sarkozy's presidential campaign from May 2007, had encouraged the Libyans to ‘instrumentalize' a bit more the Benghazi nurses affair.”
¹³
Pierini noted in his memoir that, essentially, the ethical implications of French interference were something France's leaders should work out among themselves.
¹⁴

Indeed, the verve with which Sarkozy courted Gaddafi after his election in 2007 may well have played a role in his ultimate defeat by Socialist candidate François Hollande in May 2012, to the extent that the French believed Saif Al Islam's accusations that he (Gaddafi) had donated £42 million in 2005 to finance Sarkozy's first presidential campaign. The deal was allegedly brokered by a well-known arms dealer with ties to the Sarkozy campaign.
¹⁵
Sarkozy admits to a 2005 meeting with Gaddafi in Tripoli, but denies discussing any campaign contribution. The French leader's lack of scruples with respect to deals with Gaddafi perhaps was exceeded only by those of British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

The other major and much better publicized blight on the terms of the explicit and implicit Western rapprochement with Libya was the depth and sketchiness of the commercial dealings between European firms and the Libyan government, as highlighted by the case of now-former UK Prime
Minister Tony Blair. “The first thing that must be understood about the Megrahi affair is the vastness of the entanglements among Libya, the oil companies, and the Blair government,” writer David Rose would say in his exposé of the Blair-Libya ties in
Vanity Fair
, just before the revolution.
¹⁶

Blair's interest in Libya and Gaddafi dates back at least to his early days as prime minister. British intelligence played a key role in the Lockerbie deal and the lifting of UN sanctions in 1999; Blair made his first official visit to Tripoli in 2003 and spent the subsequent years heavily promoting Libya-UK commercial deals (recounted elsewhere in the book). The Libya Human and Political Development Forum, a UK group comprising well-known Libyan dissidents attacked Blair publicly for visiting Gaddafi without first demanding “serious human rights reforms.”
¹⁷

When Blair made his final commercial pitch to Gaddafi on May 29, 2007, just before the end of his last term as prime minister, he appeared to have been under the impression that Gaddafi was overflowing with gratitude for his personal efforts, dating back to 1998, to ease Libya out of the sanctions. On this trip to Tripoli, Blair had brought with him John Browne, CEO of British Petroleum (BP), and the heads of some other large British companies, including General Dynamics and another defense contractor, MBDA.
¹⁸
Blair's clear intent was to seal his exit with some massive contracts for British industry. At stake for BP were exclusive drilling rights for two large onshore fields and one offshore—a deal then thought worth potentially billions of dollars.

Blair's demonstrable eagerness for a “payback,” several witnesses attest, was a large part of his undoing. “Blair approached Qaddafi as a supplicant,” an aide subsequently noted, allowing Gaddafi to pressure Blair on key issues of interest to Gaddafi personally, as a quid pro quo. The proposed defense deals were less subject to blowback because Gaddafi was equally keen to have the assistance: In 2008, the UK Trade and Industry Defence and Security Organisation, an entity whose mission was to promote the sale of British munitions abroad, finally sealed a $165 million deal with General Dynamics, initiated during Blair's 2007 meeting with Gaddafi. The deal included a contract to supply and train the Khamis Brigade, a ten-thousand-man unit whose raison d'être was to protect Gaddafi from any internal threat.

The connection between Blair and Gaddafi did not end after Blair's tenure. After his retirement from UK public service, Blair made at least six visits to Libya for private commercial reasons, at least two on corporate jets
paid for by the Libyan government. During much of this time, Blair was Middle East Peace Envoy for the European Union. As of 2008, Blair was hired by the US bank JPMorgan to undertake business development in Libya. Blair spokesmen asserted that the former prime minister did nothing improper and was only advising Libya on “infrastructure and the future of Libya,” and did not engage in “any commercial dealing with Libyan companies or government.”
¹⁹
In the lead-up to the Libyan revolution, Blair said simply that he had “no regrets” about befriending Gaddafi.

In the wake of the opening of Libya, within the EU, the British, the Swiss, and the Italians were arguably the most brazen in cozying up to Gaddafi. The degree to which these countries' leaders were willing to let themselves be played against one another and to cave in to Gaddafi's increasingly outrageous demands was made patently clear in the wake of the July 2008 Swiss arrest of Gaddafi's fifth-oldest son, Hannibal, and his pregnant wife. Geneva police accused them of beating their servants. The act of arrest led to a vituperative Libyan barrage against the Swiss dubbed “Hannibal's War.” Among the many assaults Libya leveled against Switzerland were the withdrawal of €4 billion in Libyan funds from Swiss accounts, the expulsion of Swiss diplomats, and even the imprisonment of a Swiss businessman in Tripoli for over a year on trumped-up charges of visa fraud. Swiss businesses in Libya were shuttered, and oil exports to Switzerland ceased. Amazingly, the Swiss president Hans-Rudolf Merz agreed in late August 2009 to Gaddafi's demand for an official apology, after Gaddafi called Switzerland a “mafia state” at the G8 summit the previous month. This provoked widespread outrage on the part of many Swiss, who accused their government of humiliation, groveling, and “loss of Swiss honor.”
²⁰
Adding insult to insult, Libya formally submitted a proposal to the UN proposing that Switzerland be carved up and given to its neighbors, prompting one commentator in the Swiss paper
Le Matin
to object [ironically] that Austria wasn't being given its fair share.
²¹

Nor was Switzerland the only country to cave before Gaddafi. Italy's prime minister Silvio Berlusconi allowed himself to be bamboozled into providing Gaddafi surveillance equipment that even the Italians felt was too advanced for Libya to possess in return for promises to stem African emigration. Germany, a heavy participant in the Libyan arms trade, was criticized after the 2011 revolution for having given Gaddafi's youngest son, Saif Al Arab, effective diplomatic immunity and free passage to and from Germany while he was a student.
²²

Why did these individual European countries allow Gaddafi to manipulate them so brazenly? Some have suggested that, in the case of the Swiss, the leaders were simply not used to dealing with a person like Gaddafi (despite the fact that Switzerland hosted a number of Libyan officials, who found the Swiss environment a natural antidote to the Libyan desert and Swiss banking practices highly favorable), and were caught completely off guard by his “wild” reactions.
²³

The Italians were another case altogether. Gaddafi and Berlusconi, whom many Italians saw as an embarrassment symbolizing a marked decline in Italy's international reputation, got along famously. For the first few years after the lifting of UN sanctions, Gaddafi pressed Italy on the issue of reparations for thirty years of occupation, while Italy pressed Gaddafi on lucrative contracts. The two desires were satisfied in an agreement highly controversial among the Italian people and externally. According to the text of the Friendship Treaty, signed in 2008, Italy would pay Libya $5 billion in reparations for colonial actions in Libya in annual US$200 million increments, which would then be used to hire Italian contractors to rebuild, among other things, the coastal highway from Tunisia to Egypt.
²⁴
The agreement included significant extensions to ENI oil and gas contracts. It also authorized US$500 million in purchases of materials from the Italian government to help Libya guard 1,056 miles of coastline against illegal emigration to Italy. Here again, Gaddafi used the very real threat of waves of African emigrants as a lever to obtain monetary concessions and access to technology to track (presumably prevent) the exodus of African emigrants to Europe, but also to follow the movements of his own people.
²⁵

Gaddafi's threats aside, Italy's relationship with Libya was substantively very different from those between Libya and other European states, and perhaps bears some similarity to the relationship of Germany to Israel—the former brutalizer whose prey had managed to escape and make good. Not only did Italy feel some collective guilt for what it had done in Libya, it wanted to profit from good relations. The two countries fundamentally had, despite the past ugly history, more in common than not on some levels.

As Alan Friedman observed in his history of the former CEO of the Italian conglomerate Fiat, which had ample dealings with Gaddafi's Libya, “It is essentially difficult for the Italian mind to accept that an American journalist working for a British newspaper in Italy might simply find a subject extremely interesting and then—without any promptings or payoffs—he might choose to investigate.”
²⁶

In examining these deals from a postrevolution, post-Gaddafi perspective, it seems that one of the most lethal consequences of the deal making and rapprochement was the escalation of arms trade between Europe and Libya. According to Andrew Feinstein, an expert in international arms tracking, between 2006 and 2009—the years for which the most detailed statistics are available—EU governments authorized arms exports to Libya valued at more than €834 million, well over a billion US dollars, of which €276 million accrued to Italy, €210 million to France, and €119.35 million to the UK, for matériel including military-ready helicopters, riot-control gear, small arms, ammunition, and jamming technology.
²⁷
French military correspondent Jean-Marc Tanguy claims that €160 million worth in small arms and jamming systems alone were sold by EU countries to Libya after 2004, including €79.7 million in small arms from Malta, and €18 million in assorted military hardware from Belgium.
²⁸
In the years preceding the revolution, French companies Thales and Amesys sold radar systems, and a range of jamming and Internet filtering and tracking systems, respectively. Mobile land-to-sea radar sold by Thales apparently posed a serious threat to French forces during the initial stages of their attack on Libyan air defenses.
²⁹

While trade in arms to Gaddafi had been limited prior to the US-Libya rapprochement, it became frenzied after the lifting of the UN arms embargo in 2003, and then the EU embargo 2004. While the US was apparently not involved in major arms sales to Libya during this time, Russia, China, and the ex-Soviet states made full use of the opportunity to restock the Gaddafi regime.

Libya spread these contacts across multiple vendors, both to gain goodwill and to avoid raising eyebrows.
³⁰
The events of the first few months of the uprising and many revelations thereafter revealed just how deeply Libya had exploited the open door to arm itself against potential insurrection.
³¹

US policymakers continued to disagree about what exactly to do with Libya and how quickly to move forward. Those on the fence about the merits of the Libya reengagement insisted weakly that economic entrée to Libya would have a trickle-down effect on Libyan freedoms. The oil companies, such as the Oasis Group (Marathon Oil, ConocoPhillips—formerly Continental—and Amerada Hess), were very happy to pursue their reentry
arrangements, while they and new entrants went after new exploration rights under the EPSA IV process.