TRIPOLI, 16 October 2004 — German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi clashed over Iraq during their first-ever meeting in Tripoli while German business leaders yesterday touted for business in the oil-rich former pariah state.
In the latest visit by a Western leader since Libya returned to the international fold last year, Schroeder held two hours of talks with Qaddafi in a traditional Bedouin tent after arriving late Thursday.
The two leaders disagreed over Iraq, with Qaddafi blaming the United States for the continuing violence there and called for US troops to withdraw, while Schroeder expressed doubts over the wisdom of a sudden pullout, a German official said.
The two men were also at odds over the US role in the Middle East. However, they agreed on the importance of developing relations between Germany and Libya following a deal last month for Libya to pay compensation to 168 mainly German survivors of an attack on a Berlin nightclub.
Libyan Foreign Minister Abdelraham Shalgham told reporters Thursday that Schroeder’s trip was “very important for the development of relations with Western states, especially with Germany”.
Aside from the politics of the visit, Schroeder is accompanied by 25 leaders of German industry who are seeking business in the north African state. The chancellor said at the opening ceremony that the rebuilding of Libya’s infrastructure “offered great opportunities” for German industry. Schroeder spent yesterday morning opening an oil drilling well operated by German company Wintershall in the desert hundreds of kilometers south of Tripoli.
The company supplies oil from five Libyan inland fields as well as an offshore drilling platform. “Libya is one of the crucial targeted areas,” said Wintershall chairman Reinier Zwitserloot.
Schroeder, the first postwar German chancellor to visit Libya, met Qaddafi again later yesterday when he was expected to push him to cooperate more fully in the international war on terrorism.
In addition to the Berlin payout, Tripoli has also paid damages to the relatives of people killed in the bombing of a Pan Am jet over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988, and it reached agreements in January over a French airliner blown up a year later.
Schroeder’s trip comes during a week in which the European Union lifted an arms embargo against Libya, and follows a visit last weekend by Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. In other issues raised in their first meeting, Qaddafi told Schroeder he expected assistance from Germany in removing the landmines laid in Libya by Nazi forces during World War II.
Meanwhile, British Foreign Office minister Baroness Simons held talks with Libyan officials on boosting ties between London and Tripoli, the official Libyan news agency JANA said yesterday. At a meeting with Shalgham on Thursday, Simons handed over a message from Prime Minister Tony Blair for Qaddafi.
The agency said the two ministers discussed ways of “strengthening bilateral cooperation in all fields”. The visit by Simons, who is state minister for Middle East affairs, follows a landmark trip by Blair to Libya last March after the North African country renounced its program of weapons of mass destruction and emerged from years of international pariah status.
