MADRID, 25 March 2004 — British Prime Minister Tony Blair is to go to Tripoli today for talks with Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi, a Downing Street spokesman confirmed yesterday.
Blair, attending a memorial service for victims of the March 11 train bombings in Madrid, will fly to Libya from Lisbon and spend several hours before going on to Brussels for the start of a European Union summit late yesterday.
It will be the first by a British prime minister to the North African state in six decades, said the Downing Street spokesman in Madrid. He added that Qaddafi would receive Blair in a traditional Bedouin tent.
“We will be using the visit to continue the process of bringing Libya into the international mainstream and to make clear that we will be trying to get Libya’s relationship with the European Union developed in the months ahead,” a British official said.
In London, Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott all but confirmed Blair’s trip when he told Parliament that it was “right to continue” dialogue with Qaddafi’s regime.
“You have to make a balance, and I think the prime minister got the balance right,” replied Prescott when he was asked by the opposition Conservatives about a Libya trip.
Long blamed for sponsoring global terrorism, Libya has seen its stock rise with Washington and London after it renounced its discreet pursuit of weapons of mass destruction last December.
US Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs William Burns flew into Tripoli on Tuesday to see Qaddafi, in what was thought to be the highest-level talks between the two nations since Qaddafi seized power in 1969.
The United States hailed talks between the US official and Gaddafi as a sign of progress in relations since Tripoli decided to end weapons of mass destruction programs.
US Secretary of State Colin Powell said Burns had “good discussions” with Gaddafi, once reviled in Washington.
“It shows that we are moving ahead with the political road map that we laid out with the Libyans as a result of their determination to give up their weapons of mass destruction,” Powell told reporters in Washington.
One of Qaddafi’s sons, Saif Al-Islam Qaddafi, disclosed earlier this week that Blair “will visit Libya today” in an interview with Qatari newspapers that was picked up yesterday by some of the British press.
The very idea of Blair going to Libya prompted both criticism and praise in the context of the December 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 108 over Lockerbie, southwest Scotland that killed 270 people.
A Libyan agent was imprisoned in Scotland after being convicted of carrying out the atrocity, and Libya last year agreed to pay compensation worth $2.7 billion.
Michael Howard, leader of Britain’s main opposition Conservative party, questioned the wisdom of Blair going to Tripoli almost directly from Madrid.
“It is quite odd timing to go from a service which commemorates the victims of the biggest terrorist attack on Europe since Lockerbie, to go straight from there to Libya,” Howard said on BBC radio.
“I imagine it will cause considerable distress to the families of the victims of Lockerbie,” he said.
Kathleen Flynn, an American whose son John Patrick was on Pan Am Flight 108, told BBC Radio Scotland that Blair’s trip would be “insulting” to the families of the victims.
“I am not happy to hear that Tony Blair is going out to make nice with Muammar Qaddafi, the person who ordered the murder of my son,” she said.
