LIBYA - Pragmatism Behind An Eccentric Facade.

What Qadhafi has been demonstrating is that, behind his eccentric rhetoric, there is someone who is able to allow pragmatic policies to prevail. It is this approach that helped end the country's isolation under a UN sanctions regime. The embargo ended on April 5, 1999, when the UN Security Council suspended sanctions based on resolutions 731 (1992), 748 (1992) and 883 (1993) - after Tripoli released two suspects in the Lockerbie airliner bombing for trial by Scottish prosecutors at Camp Zeist, the Netherlands.

The UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan, was then asked by the Security Council to report to it within 90 days on Libya's commitment to ending all forms of terrorist action, assistance to terrorist groups and renunciation of terrorism. The UN Security Council on July 9, 1999, welcomed "positive progress" by Libya in meeting its obligations in the Lockerbie case, and promised to lift sanctions "as soon as possible". Despite some mild and occasional frictions over the issue, sanctions have remained suspended.

From the perspective of the US, which was the country mainly interested in isolating Libya, Qadhafi has been "behaving relatively well". He has not been overtly linked to any terrorist events in recent years, and has limited his anti-US feelings largely to rhetoric. Having seen the benefits of pragmatism, Qadhafi is not likely to change course. Speaking after British Minister O'Brien's talks with Qadhafi last August, Libya's foreign secretary Abdelrahman Shelgam said Libya also wanted to formalise relations with the US.

A more telling comment about the way Libyan attitudes towards the West have changed came earlier, on July 25, when Qadhafi's son Seif Al Islam told 'Reuters' that Libya has embarked on a new era free of the old animosities of Lockerbie and the Cold War. "We all have to change our way of dealing with the West", he said, adding: "The whole architecture of the world has changed. There is no more Cold War, no more Lockerbie. It's the start of a new era". One month earlier, in June, Seif spoke at London's Royal Institute for International Affairs and gave one of the first real hints that Libya would, in the end, accede to Western demands for compensation to the victims of the Lockerbie bombing. He said: "We are a very small country compared to the US. If you met Mike Tyson (the boxer) around the corner and he asks you for money, you cannot say no".

Libyan pragmatism extends beyond dealings with the West to regional matters as well. Qadhafi has essentially given up on the Arab World, after several attempts made at unity with Arab states or groupings proved to be failures. Currently, he is focusing on Africa. The shift towards an Africa-centred regional approach began some years ago, when Qadhafi first sensed that he could use his connections to the continent to break out from under the UN embargo.

In February 1998, Qadhafi took the initiative in establishing the Community of Sahel-Saharan States (Comessa), with the aim of linking landlocked African countries to Libya, which was prepared to fund projects like the asphalting of the Trans-Saharan Highway to Niger. As envisaged, the Comessa project included the founding of the Eastern and Southern African Trade and Development Bank with 75% Libyan capital. Libya also acted as mediator in a number of African conflicts, for example in Sierra Leone, Somalia, Sudan and Burundi among others. Several African leaders subsequently broke the air embargo and flew into Tripoli, in an open challenge to the UN sanctions regime.

At the fourth extraordinary OAU summit, convened in the Libyan city of Sirte in September 1999, the goal was to decide on the principle of an African union. It was attended by almost all African states, and Qadhafi declared at the meeting: "Africa must be united... There is no time to waste". The African Union (AU) was launched at a summit in Durban on June 28-July 10 this year, but it did not meet Qadhafi's expectations. South Africa has emerged as a serious contender for continental leadership, despite good personal relations between Qadhafi and Nelson Mandela, the founder of post-Apartheid South Africa. It is becoming clear that, if Qadhafi does not get a leadership role on the continent, the regime will work to ensure that the AU does not develop along lines envisaged by South Africa.

Qadhafi has also been widening links with China. Chinese President Jiang Zemin on April 13, 2002, paid the first ever visit to Libya by a Chinese leader. The two-day state visit, during which more than 100 government and business officials accompanied Zemin, ended with the signing of a joint communique on bilateral ties and co-operation. Bilateral co-operation agreements focused on the economy, trade and the oil and railways sectors. "This visit is by all means a historic one, and the future will witness great development in relations between the two friend countries", Libyan Foreign Minister Shelgam said later.