Gaddafi slams UN Security Council

http://english.aljazeera.net//news/americas/2009/09/2009923164415325345.html

Gaddafi slams UN Security Council
Thursday, September 24, 2009

Libya's president has attacked the permanent members of the United Nations' Security Council during his first ever address to the UN General Assembly.

In a one-and-a-half hour speech in New York on Wednesday, Muammar Gaddafi said the veto-wielding nations of the Security Council were ignoring the views of the full 192 members of the General Assembly and the principles of the UN charter.

"The preamble [of the charter] says all nations are equal whether they are small or big," Gaddafi said in his address.

But he accused the permanent members of the council of undermining other states.

"The veto [held by the five permanent UN members] is against the charter, we do not accept it and we do not acknowledge it," Gaddafi said.

"Veto power should be annulled."

'Terror and sanctions'

In a speech that far exceeded the 15-minute slot he was allocated, the Libyan leader read aloud sections from a paperback copy of the UN charter, before throwing it over his shoulder on several occasions.

"I think the Libyans deserve much better than this. It is a disaster for Arab world opinion. Tearing up the UN Charter is shocking, but this should have been expected from the beginning"

Mohamed Ben-Madani, editor of the Maghreb Review

"The Security Council did not provide us with security but with terror and sanctions," he said.

He said the council, comprising the United States, Britain, France, Russia and China, had failed to prevent or intervene in 65 wars that have taken place since the United Nations was established in 1948.

He called for $7.77 trillion in compensation to be paid to Africa from its past colonial masters, and one point questioned the assassination of US President John F Kennedy.

"The assassination of Kennedy in 1963 - we want to know, who killed him? Lee Harvey? Why was Harvey killed?" he said, referring to the man who was arrested in connection with Kennedy's murder and shot dead while being transferred between jails.

Mohamed Ben-Madani, editor of the Maghreb Review, told Al Jazeera's that Gaddafi's speech was a "disaster" for the African Union and Arab and Muslim delegations at the UN General Assembly.

"I think the Libyans deserve much better than this. It is a disaster for Arab world opinion. Tearing up the UN Charter is shocking, but this should have been expected from the beginning," he said.

"He said nothing about Libyan human rights and better education [for Libyans]. He said nothing about climate change or the enviroment."

'No respect'

The five permanent members should lose their veto, or the UN should expand the council with additional member states, Gaddafi also said.

"It should not be called the Security Council, it should be called the 'terror council'," he said, adding that the permanent members treat smaller countries as "second class [and] despised" nations.

"Now, brothers, there is no respect for the United Nations, no regard for the General Assembly," he said.

As Gaddafi spoke, the US senate approved a resolution condemning the "lavish" welcome-home ceremony that Libya gave last month for Abdel Basset al-Megrahi, who was convicted of the bombing over a US passenger aircraft over the Scottish town of Lockerbie in 1989.

The US senate demanded that Tripoli apologise for the celebration, which came after Scotland's justice minister released al-Megrahi, a former agent, on compassionate grounds.

Libya has a temporary seat on the Security Council until the end of 2010.

Sudan Agrees to Darfur Peace Talks

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/07/world/africa/07nations.html

September 7, 2007
Sudan Agrees to Darfur Peace Talks
By WARREN HOGE

KHARTOUM, Sudan, Sept. 6 — The United Nations and Sudan announced Thursday that rebel leaders from Darfur would hold peace negotiations with the government next month to seek an end to a conflict that many in the world contend constitutes genocide.

The talks, under the auspices of the United Nations and the African Union, will begin on Oct. 27 in Tripoli, the capital of Libya.

In a joint statement, the government of Sudan pledged “to contribute positively to secure the environment for the negotiations, fulfilling its commitment to a full cessation of hostilities in Darfur and agreed upon cease-fire.”

Sudan also promised to “facilitate the timely deployment” of the new 26,000-member African Union United Nations peacekeeping force, which it had long resisted but then agreed to this summer under intense international pressure.

The announcement came on the fourth day of an African trip devoted to Darfur by Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, who declared on taking office in January that ending the killing and pillaging in the war- ravaged area of western Sudan state was his top international priority.

“We have taken a big step toward our shared goal of bringing peace to Darfur and long term development in Sudan,” Mr. Ban said.

Rebel groups and the government have held peace talks before, and a peace agreement was reached with one faction last year. But that has hardly stopped the violence in Darfur, where there are many armed factions of rebels, Arab militias and bandits.

Omar Hassan al-Bashir, the president of Sudan, joined him on stage at the outset of the announcement ceremony in Friendship Hall but then left with no comment before Mr. Ban and Lama Akol, the Sudanese foreign minister, formally presented the agreement.

An announcer said that Mr. Bashir’s departure was prearranged so he could go greet an unnamed visiting president

Mr. Ban has been pressing for wide ranging political talks to precede the arrival of the new peacekeeping troops, arguing that “there must be a peace to keep.”. Officials said he had been on the phone with political figures and leaders of neighboring countries in recent days during trips to Juba in southern Sudan and El Fasher in North Darfur.

They said the suggestion of Libya as a venue for the talks came from Mr. Bashir, the Sudanese president, in a private dinner with Mr. Ban Monday night at the presidential guest house in Khartoum.

“We were thrown by the choice at first,” said a United Nations official who said he was not authorized to discuss internal decision-making by name. “But the more we thought about it, the more it made sense as a way to convince the Africans that they would maintain possession of the process.”

He added that Sudan was concerned about rebel arms coming across the Libyan border and saw involving Tripoli as a way of getting it to curb the flow.

Mr. Ban leaves Friday for Chad and is scheduled to see Libya’s leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, on Saturday in Tripoli.

Mr. Ban said the talks would be supervised by Jan Eliasson, his special representative for Darfur, and Salim A. Salim, the Darfur envoy of the African Union.

The two men have been traveling extensively in the region in recent weeks, trying to bring the fragmented Sudanese rebel movement together so that the groups could take advantage of what the United Nations believes is a new willingness in Khartoum to talk.

A key test of Thursday’s joint proposal will be how many people from the rebel side show up, but Mr. Eliasson said the time was right for taking the initiative.

“The common denominator was that all sides have realized now that there is no military solution,” he said.

Mr. Eliasson noted that Libya had helped in two meetings, in April and July, to convince reluctant rebel leaders, some of whom are based in Tripoli, of the need to seek a political solution. Libya also had the advantages of being close to Sudan, thereby cutting travel costs and assuring a better turnout, he said.

The bloodletting in Darfur began four years ago when ethnic African fighters took up arms against the Arab-dominated central government, accusing Khartoum of hoarding resources and neglecting their area. Khartoum retaliated by unleashing militias in an ethnic cleansing campaign that has ended up costing more than 200,000 lives and leaving 2.5 million villagers homeless.

Washington has called the scorched earth policy genocide. Sudan has denied the accusations and puts the death toll at 9,000.

Mr. Ban said his visit to Darfur Wednesday had “made my resolve stronger and firmer to work for peace and security.”

“I was so shocked and humbled when I visited the I.D.P. camp,” he said. The United Nations calls refugees in their own country internally displaced people.

Several Sudanese questioners Thursday challenged Mr. Ban’s motives in coming here and asked whether he wasn’t taking sides against the government. “The United Nations is not interested in interfering in any way in any internal matters in Sudan,” he said.

Mr. Ban also said that among the invited would be Abdel Wahid al-Nur, an influential rebel leader who is now based in exile in Paris and refused to attend a meeting run by Mr. Eliasson and Mr. Salim last month in Arusha, Tanzania where seven other major rebel figures drew up a framework for sharing power and wealth in any ultimate settlement with the government.

Mr. Akol, the foreign minister, was asked if he wanted to see Mr. al-Nur, a government opponent with a wide following, at the talks. “Great leaders in history are the ones who know when to take the right decision at the right time,” he said.

Was Libya framed for Lockerbie bombing?

http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_2387.shtml

Was Libya framed for Lockerbie bombing?
By Linda S. Heard
Online Journal Contributing Writer
Sep 6, 2007

On December 21, 1988, a Pan Am plane mysteriously exploded over Scotland causing the death of 270 people from 21 countries. The tragedy provoked global outrage. In 1991, two Libyans were charged with the bombing.

In the event, only Abdulbaset Ali Mohammad Al Megrahi, a Libyan agent, was pronounced guilty by a panel of three judges, who based their decision on largely circumstantial evidence. Al Megrahi and the Libyan government have protested their innocence all along.

Nevertheless, after suffering punitive UN sanctions which froze overseas Libyan bank accounts and prevented the import of spare parts needed for the country's oil industry, Tripoli reluctantly agreed to pay $2.7 billion to victims' families ($10 million per family), on condition the pay-out would not be deemed an admission of guilt.

In February 2004, the Libyan prime minister told the BBC that his country was innocent but was forced to pay-up as a "price for peace."

Al Megrahi is currently serving a life sentence, but earlier this year the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission ruled there may have been a miscarriage of justice on the basis of lost or destroyed evidence.

Later this month, a Scottish appeals court is due to revisit the case and is expected to overturn Al Megrahi's conviction as unsafe.

The Libyan leader's son Saif Al Islam recently said he is confident Al Megrahi will soon be found innocent and will be allowed to return home.

On Sunday, an Observer expose written by Alex Duval Smith reported "a key piece of material evidence used by prosecutors to implicate Libya in the Lockerbie bombing has emerged as a probable fake" with allegations of "international political intrigue and shoddy investigative work" levelled at "the British government, the FBI and the Scottish police."

The Observer story maintains Ulrich Lumpert, a Swiss engineer who was "a crucial witness," has now confessed that he lied about the origins of a timer switch.

Recently, Lumpert gave a sworn declaration to a Swiss court, which read "I stole a prototype MST-13 timing device" and "gave it without permission on June 22, 1989, to a person who was officially investigating the Lockerbie affair."

The owner of the company that manufactured the switch -- forced into bankruptcy after being sued by Pan Am --- says he told police early in the enquiry that the timer switch was not one his company had ever sold to Libya.

Moreover, he insists the timer switch shown to the court had been tampered with since he initially viewed it in Scotland, saying the pieces appeared to have been "carbonised" in the interim. He also says the court was so determined to prove Libya's guilt it brushed aside his evidence.

In 2005, a former Scottish police chief signed a statement alleging the CIA had planted fragments of a timer circuit board produced at trial, evidence supporting earlier claims by a former CIA agent to the effect his agency "wrote the script" to ensure Libya was incriminated.

There are also allegations that clothing allegedly purchased by the bomber in Malta before it was wrapped around the bomb, was intact when discovered but by the time it reached the court it was in shreds.

Life sentence

The shopkeeper who sold the item made a statement to the effect Al Megrahi had never been a customer. Instead, he identified an Egyptian-born Palestinian, Mohammad Abu Talb, now serving a life sentence in Sweden for a synagogue bombing.

Professor Hans Koechler, appointed by the UN to be an observer at the trial, has termed its outcome "a spectacular miscarriage of justice." Koechler has repeatedly called for an independent enquiry, which, to date, the British government has refused to allow.

Oliver Miles, a former British ambassador to Libya, insists "no court is likely to get to the truth, now that various intelligence agencies have had the opportunity to corrupt the evidence."

Jim Swire, the father of one of the Lockerbie victims, said, "Scottish justice obviously played a leading part in one of the most disgraceful miscarriages of justice in history."

Craig Murray, a former British ambassador, who was earlier second-in-command of Britain's Aviation and Maritime Department from 1989 to 1992, writes about a strange incident on his website.

Murray says a colleague told him "in a deeply worried way" about an intelligence report indicating Libya was not involved in the Pan Am bombing. When he asked to see it, his colleague said it was marked for named eyes only, which Murray describes as "extremely unusual." Earlier, a CIA report that had reached a similar conclusion had been conveniently buried.

If Al Megrahi walks, as is likely, Libya will be vindicated and would presumably be able to reclaim monies paid in compensation along with its reputation.

This would also be a highly embarrassing turn of events for Britain and the US, not to mention their respective intelligence agencies, and would leave the question of who bombed Pan Am Flight 103 unanswered.

In a perfect world, Libya should also receive an apology from its accusers and should be allowed to sue for damages for all that it lost as a result of UN sanctions.

But in a world where political expediency often triumphs, the appeal has no foregone conclusion despite the exposure of dubious "evidence" and suspect "witnesses."

Linda S. Heard is a British specialist writer on Middle East affairs. She welcomes feedback and can be contacted by email at heardonthegrapevines@yahoo.co.uk.