| |
US, Spain caught in Libya missile
mixup
By Tito Drago
MADRID -
The US government needs to explain why the missile
shipment on a vessel intercepted a year ago on the high
seas by the Spanish navy ended up in Libya, a spokesman
from Spain's Defense Ministry said this week.
The official was referring to declarations made
by sources from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization
(NATO) to the Madrid daily El Mundo that claim 15
complete Scud missiles, a set of conventional warheads
and 85 containers of chemical products - some 20 holding
nitric acid - were ultimately delivered to Libya under a
Washington decision.
The episode began on
December 5, 2002, when US intelligence services informed
Madrid about the route of a freighter named So San,
which they suspected of trafficking weapons and which
was, at the time, crossing a zone under Spain's
authority in the Indian Ocean. Four days later, a
Spanish frigate and warship intercepted the So San after
ordering the captain to halt and firing warning shots.
The vessel was found to be sailing under the Cambodian
flag.
The weapons and chemicals came from North
Korea and did not appear on the ship's manifest, which
showed only that the merchant vessel was carrying bags
of cement. After intercepting the freighter, Spain then
handed the ship over to the US Navy. Immediate official
explanations out of Washington and Madrid said the
missiles might have been headed for the al-Qaeda
network, which the US government holds responsible for
the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in New York
and Washington. However, just hours later, the US
administration took Spain by surprise by turning the So
San over to Yemen, explaining that the cargo was
actually a legal shipment of weapons purchased from
North Korea by the Yemini government.
The
handover was preceded by a telephone conversation
between US Vice President Dick Cheney and Yemeni
President Ali Abdullah Saleh. When that conversation was
made public, the White House justified the move by
calling Yemen a friendly nation. So what initially came
off as a brilliant Spanish military operation to prevent
illegal trade in weapons of mass destruction was reduced
to a suspected manipulation directed from Washington,
with Madrid in the role of receiving and carrying out
orders that were not very clear in their purpose.
The NATO sources cited in El Mundo said that at
the time the shipment was intercepted, the United States
was secretly negotiating the possibility that Libya
would accept Saddam Hussein, then still president of
Iraq, in exile. And Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, who
played the role of go-between during the Gulf War in
1991 by assisting in Iraq's withdrawal from Kuwait, had
hopes of gaining access to the weapons.
"Gaddafi
wanted the missiles and Yemen acted as intermediary. In
the context of gestures with Libya, it was decided to
look the other way, given that there was no
international regulation that impeded it," said the
newspaper, citing sources from the Pentagon.
Today, as it was a year ago, Madrid's reaction
of disappointment regarding the United States' handling
of the shipment was immediate, but not very explicit,
because Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar continues to be
a staunch, unconditional supporter of the policies of
his US counterpart, President George W Bush.
As
a result, the opposition United Left (IU) has announced
that it will petition Defense Minister Federico Trillo
to inform parliament about the country's participation,
"past and present", in relation to the case of the
weapons shipment. Madrid's handling of the issue "is one
more demonstration of [Aznar's] erratic foreign policy
and his troubling submission and total dependence on the
policy marked by the US," IU general coordinator Gaspar
Llamazares said. "The IU is highly concerned that Spain
is extending political and commercial ties to a country
that does not provide any democratic guarantees," such
as Libya, he added.
Neither the Spanish
government nor the opposition and civil-society
organizations categorize the Gaddafi regime as terrorist
and they agree on the need to facilitate his integration
into the international community. In fact, Spain has not
drawn up a list of countries it considers terrorist,
noted a Foreign Ministry spokesperson, but the United
States has, and Libya, which figures on that list, is
subject to a commercial and military embargo. No US
company is authorized to sell weapons to Libya directly
or indirectly, nor to facilitate the delivery of arms.
When the United Nations Security Council lifted
sanctions against Libya, then-US ambassador James
Cunningham abstained from the vote, stating that
Washington did not want to give the idea that it
believed Libya had done an about-face, because, said the
ambassador, the country continued to try to obtain
weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles. But
things appear to have changed radically, given that the
weapons shipment intercepted by Spain, and which ended
up in Libya, includes such arms.
(Inter Press
Service)
|
| |
|
|
 |
|
