Last flight to Libya

By Nevine Khalil

Mubarak looking at Gaddafi's X-rays with doctors

It was the first time since the sanctions were imposed in 1992 that the UN sanctions committee gave special clearance for a head of state to travel to Libya by air.

Mubarak's surprise trip to check up on Libya's Col. Muammar Gaddafi, who had a hip operation last week, was cleared by the UN less than 24 hours ahead of take-off. The Egyptian president was accompanied by a number of ministers and aides as well as a medical team -- a necessity for the trip to qualify as a humanitarian mission.

Within hours, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat had put in a similar request to visit Gaddafi, but was turned down. Arafat instead flew to Tunis and made the trip by land from there to Libya.

US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said on Friday that the clearance for Mubarak was a one-time gesture. "A one-time humanitarian visit is appropriate, but we are not going to go along with any further visits for the purpose of just paying courtesy calls on Mr. Gaddafi," she told reporters at a joint news conference in Washington with Foreign Minister Amr Moussa.

"Egypt formally requested and received permission to go," chief UN spokesman Fred Eckhard said, adding that waivers are generally made for strictly humanitarian purposes.

Eckhard said the UN took into consideration the fact that Mubarak would be visiting Gaddafi with a medical team. Only three days earlier, Chadian President Idris Deby and his Niger counterpart Ibrahim Bare Mainassara had arrived in Libya by plane without seeking UN approval.

The African leaders' trips came only weeks after the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) decided partially to ignore the air embargo as of September. According to an OAU resolution adopted at the Ouagadougou summit last month, African countries will "cease to conform with the sanctions as of September 1998", the date they are scheduled to come up for review before the UN. The flight ban would be ignored for visits with humanitarian and religious implications as well as those related to official OAU work, the African leaders said.

An air and arms embargo was imposed on Libya in 1992 after it refused to hand over to Britain or the US two of its nationals suspected of carrying out the 1988 bombing of a PanAm flight over Lockerbie, Scotland, which killed 270 people.

Libya has since sought support from the 22-nation Arab League for its efforts to have the embargo lifted. Last September, the League urged member-states to "take steps to ease the toughness of the sanctions."

Tripoli has presented three alternatives to handing over the two suspects to Britain or the US: that they be tried by the International Court of Justice in the Hague by a Scottish judge and according to Scottish law; that the suspects be tried in a third country other than Britain or the US; or that a special tribunal be set up for the trial in any country acceptable to the UN Security Council. Britain and the US have categorically rejected the proposals, a position which drew criticism from the families of the British victims.

Last weekend UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan said he would make the Libya sanctions a "priority issue" in order to "find some way of bridging the differences between the two parties."

However, Annan emphasised that in the meantime Security Council resolutions should be respected and urged member-states not to "take measures which undermine the Council and the UN."

Gaddafi, who broke a hip bone the previous Monday while exercising, met Mubarak in the town of Al-Bayda, 1,400 kilometres east of Tripoli. The Libyan leader was sitting in a wheelchair. Mubarak was shown on television looking at the X-rays of Gaddafi's hip and talking with doctors.

"We are one nation and these borders are illusory," Mubarak told reporters with Gaddafi by his side. "Libyans come to visit us, and Egyptians visit Libya."

Mubarak has travelled to Libya several times since the 1992 sanctions were imposed, but always crossed the Egyptian-Libyan border overland.

The 56-year-old colonel has on several occasions violated the air embargo, most conspicuously by flying to Cairo for the 1996 Arab summit. Earlier this year, Gaddafi again went against UN sanctions by flying to Chad and packing Libyan pilgrims on a flight to Mecca.