US Lockerbie families slam France over veto threat (new info)

WASHINGTON (AFP) - Americans who lost loved ones in the Lockerbie bombing slammed France as "utterly disgraceful," "meddling" and "ridiculous", after it threatened to block a compensation deal with Libya.

Paris has threatened to veto the lifting of United Nations sanctions against Libya, mandated under a deal in which Tripoli agreed to pay 2.7 billion dollars to relatives of victims of the bombing.

"I think it is ridiculous; it's blackmail," Glenn Johnson, whose daughter Beth Ann died in the disaster, said after a meeting with top US officials.

Pan Am Flight 103 exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland on December 21, 1988, killing all 259 people on board and 11 on the ground.

France wants similar compensation for families of 170 people killed when a plane operated by French airline UTA was blown up over the Sahara desert the following year.

Another bereaved parent, Dan Cohen, accused France of selling the UTA victims short, over a previous settlement in which Libya paid 30 million euros (33 million dollars) in compensation -- a fraction of the Lockerbie deal.

"They are the ones who made this original deal with the UTA families. ... After that, (French President Jacques) Chirac wrote a letter to (Libyan leader) Moamer Kadhafi welcoming him back into the community of nations."

"Now suddenly, after all these years, they are making heavy weather. I think this is utterly disgraceful."

But Cohen sympathized with families of the UTA disaster, whom he said had been "screwed" by the French government.

"The blame falls on Libya, the blame falls on France, and France has no business meddling in this way," he said.

"This is nothing but sour grapes," said one official. "We're getting a better deal and they're upset. It's not our fault that the French let their people get screwed."

But French foreign ministry spokeswoman Cecile Pozzo di Borgo said Thursday that France "is not prepared to waver on this."

Britain is to introduce a sanctions-lifting resolution immediately after Libya delivers to the Security Council a letter accepting responsibility for Lockerbie.

The letter had yet to be delivered to the council on Friday, a casualty of the mammoth power outage which shut down huge swaths of the northeastern United States and Canada.

The UTA plane was carrying 54 French nationals and 116 others -- the majority African -- on a flight from the Democratic Republic of Congo (news - web sites) to Paris when it blew up over Niger on September 19, 1989.

Ten months later, a Congo-Brazzaville national came forward to declare that a Libyan diplomat had given him an explosives-packed suitcase and instructed him to hand it to a passenger boarding the plane.

Another Libyan agent, Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, was sentenced to life in prison by a Scottish court in January 2001 for carrying out the Lockerbie bombing, while a second Libyan was acquitted.

Yeah, but at least the French press is reporting these angles.

Here's more, I believe the Libyans this time:

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/afp/20030815/wl_uk_afp/france_libya_lockerbie_030815181849

NDJAMENA (AFP) - Libya accused France of blackmail after Paris threatened to block a deal lifting UN sanctions in exchange for compensation for the 1988 Lockerbie bombing, demanding a matching payout for the bombing of a French airliner.

"France is using pressure and blackmail and we do not accept this," said Libyan Foreign Minister Abdel Raman Shalgham.

He was speaking a day after France threatened to block the lifting of sanctions against Tripoli, a move which would undermine the compensation deal in which Libya has agreed to pay out 2.7 billion dollars (2.4 billion euros) to Lockerbie victims' families.

... France, which has a veto on the UN Security Council, has made clear it wants similar compensation for the families of 170 people killed when a plane operated by French airline UTA was blown up over the Sahara desert the following year.

But the Libyan foreign minister dismissed the French demand. "We have reached a comprehensive, global agreement with the Americans, the British and the lawyer for the families to resolve this problem," Shalgam said, adding that Libya had made its position clear to French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin.

"From now on it's between the French and the Americans. If the French want to use their veto, it's their decision."

Libya has already paid 30 million euros (33 million dollars) in compensation for the UTA bombing -- a fraction of the Lockerbie payout -- in what Tripoli and Paris described last October as "a definitive resolution" of the matter.

But the French foreign ministry said on Thursday a "complementary settlement" should now be made to match the Lockerbie deal, adding that this was "an indispensable condition for the permanent lifting of sanctions against Libya".

.....

...The settlement dwarfs the payout to around 1,000 bereaved relatives of victims of the French passenger jet bombing -- each of which received between 3,000 and 30,000 euros (3,400 and 34,000 dollars) under the deal struck in 1999.

Ben Aryeah said it was a "matter of deep regret" that the UTA families had obtained such a comparatively small settlement.

"But that's a question that the Quai d'Orsay (French Foreign Office) has to answer and the people who represented the relatives in the negotiations with Libya," he said.
.....

Look at it from the French point of view. Chirac recently lost a major source of personal, seceret, and untaxed revenue when Saddam was ousted. Even if he, personally, only got the same percentage cut from the new Libyan money as he did ffrom the original settlement, it would go a long way in covering the missing Iraqi money.

Chirac is going to have to pay a lot of EU politicians if he is going to get another profitable job after retiring from the French government. So, it is not that Chirac is being intenionally obstructionist like, say, a democrat, it is just the he and his family and his mistress and their family and his girl friends and their families really do need the cash.

Let me get this right. The French, who repeatedly voted for continuation of U.N. sanctions on Iraq while, at the same time, repeatedly violating those sanctions and providing Iraq with prohibited military armaments, proposes to veto the dropping of sanctions on Libya after it has settled with other members of the U.N. on matters that caused the imposition of those sanctions.

One might conclude that those members of the U.N. that have settled with Libya might enforce those sanctions with the same vigor that the French enforced the Iraqi sanctions.

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