Libya Stinks, But Hold Your Nose

There can be few more odious ruling families in the world than the Gaddafis of Libya. The decision by the Scottish government to release on compassionate grounds one Abdulbaset al-Megrahi, the convicted terrorist who killed 270 innocent people in the 1988 Lockerbie bombing, was shocking and has shocked people in Scotland, Britain, the US, which lost 170 dead that day, and around theworld.

Al-Megrahi has terminal prostate cancer but is well enough to be writing his memoirs. The hero's welcome he received in Libya, not least from Colonel Muammar Gaddafi's son and heir, Seif Gaddafi, was in every sense an obscenity.

The Scottish government has suffered a severe drop in the polls as a result of its gross moral lapse. Its decision indicates a provincial government bereft of principles.

The British government has been accused of complicity in the release, but there is no firm evidence to contradict its claim that it did not campaign for such an outcome.

Our own former deputy prime minister, Tim Fischer, now ambassador to the Vatican, was incongruously sent by the Rudd government to Libya to attend the 40th anniversary celebrations of Gaddafi's rule.

Readers expecting the rest of this column to be a sustained denunciation of all concerned will be disappointed. While I think releasing the terrorist a deep mistake, governments such as Britain's and Australia's are right to continue to engage the Libyans.

There is a simple reason for this.

Libya has abandoned its nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs and provided intelligence against terrorists, and more importantly against proliferators of nuclear weapons technology. Britain was pivotal in getting Libya to walk away from its weapons of mass destruction programs, but Canberra also played an important role.

First, though, let's not diminish for a moment the Gaddafi regime's egregious past.

Libya, under the Gaddafi dictatorship, is one of the chief historical sponsors of terrorism.

Way back in 1984 Tripoli organised for its embassies worldwide to be taken over by groups of alleged revolutionary students and transformed into people's bureaus.

A group of Libyan dissidents held a peaceful demonstration outside the Libyan embassy in London. A Libyan diplomat fired from within the embassy and killed an English constable, Yvonne Fletcher, a completely innocent victim. Diplomatic rules meant Britain had to let the murderer and his fellow diplomats return home and escape justice.

In the early 1980s Gaddafi's regime funded a series of tiny Trotskyist cells in the West.

In Australia the Socialist Labour League produced a newspaper, the Worker's News, which for a time I found compulsive reading. I used to walk down to a newsagent near Sydney's Town Hall each week to buy it.

Amid calls for coalminers strikes and articles defaming the police, each week there would be pages of supplements extolling Colonel Gaddafi's Green Book and the Libyan revolution. The English counterpart, the Workers Revolutionary Party, was an astonishing amalgam of extremist nuttiness, internal sexual violence and demagoguery. Libya advertised in Australian Arabic newspapers for military recruits to its worldwide revolutionary cause.

Nonetheless, the sheer eccentricity of the Libyan venture provided moments of black humour.

Michael Danby, now Labor's member for Melbourne Ports, then (as now) a fearless advocate for human rights, attended a Melbourne airport press conference held by Vanessa Redgrave and asked her if she was aware that a Libyan-backed film she participated in had been awarded the inaugural Sir Les Patterson Golden Goanna Award for fanatical filmmaking.

Most of Libya's behaviour was anything but funny. It was and is a thoroughgoing dictatorship at home and has been a promiscuous sponsor of terrorism abroad - not least giving Semtex to the IRA - and until 2003 pursued a nuclear-weapons program.

It was ultimately convinced by the US-led action in Iraq to abandon this effort. And this truly makes all the difference. An extremely offensive dictatorship is still offensive after it abandons nuclear weapons, but it is right to reward it and engage it for ditching the nukes, nonetheless. Australia played a role in bringing Libya in from the cold, a process that began before the Iraq war took place.

As part of this, Seif Gaddafi visited Sydney in 2003, and was wined and dined lavishly by the then Coalition government, especially the Nationals. I had the pleasure of interviewing him then and I must say it was about the weirdest interview I ever did. He was meant to be the new, moderate face of Libya, but he presented as the tyrant's son from central casting. Wearing a white suit and designer stubble, accompanied by overweight bodyguards with suspicious bulges in their suits and who looked as though they'd be fast and lethal over 2m, he came, I was told, bearing a message of peace.

He told me he was just a normal Libyan who liked to "dive in Australia, ski in France" - a lot of normal Libyans do that, you understand - and his achievements were almost on a par with papa's, exhibiting his art in Paris, pursuing a PhD in London. It was suggested I ask him about the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York. He was supposed to condemn them, demonstrating Libya's new opposition to terrorism, and at first he did. Except, of course, the attacks on the Pentagon.

The Pentagon, I recall him saying, was the building of the devil, it was a military target, and he supported an attack on the Pentagon. Libya would not co-operate with the Pentagon, he told me, but "the CIA is a different story from the Pentagon. Even now the CIA director (George Tenet) is a very clever, friendly and moderate person. We are very comfortable to co-operate with the CIA."

And remember, Seif Gaddafi was supposed to be the new, moderate, peace-loving face of Libya. Regimes such as Libya's provide brutal and impossible choices to democratic governments such as those in London, Washington or Canberra. We have an absolute responsibility to maintain solidarity with Libyan dissidents and to push for human rights improvements, but getting Libya to give up its nukes was a huge achievement for global security and we need to do everything to consolidate this and push it forward.

Iran is an equally offensive government and an even greater supporter of terrorism than Libya.

It has recently appointed a terrorist, General Ahmad Vahidi, wanted by Interpol for his part in the terrorist bombing of a Jewish centre in Buenos Aires in 1994, as its Defence Minister. But the key difference is not this, it is that Iran has not given up its nuclear weapons program. That makes all the difference in the world.