Friday, Jan 09, 2004
A long diplomatic stand-off between France and Libya ended on Friday when Tripoli agreed to pay $170m (Ç133m, GBP92m) in compensation to the families of the 170 who died in the Libyan sabotage of a French airliner over Niger in 1989.
Although French officials voiced satisfaction that the tortuous negotiations had been concluded, Paris remains embarrassed by the preferential diplomatic treatment accorded to Britain and the US by Colonel Muammer Gadaffi, the Libyan leader.
The French compensation package has taken longer to conclude and is much smaller than the $2.4bn Libya agreed with Britain and the US last summer to pay the 270 victims of the Pan Am disaster over the Scottish town of Lockerbie. That deal ended Libya's diplomatic isolation and led to the lifting of United Nations sanctions even though France had yet to secure an agreement with Tripoli.
France considered blocking the lifting of sanctions to maintain diplomatic pressure on Libya but later considered the tactic counter-productive.
However, Libyan negotiators kept haggling well beyond Christmas, to the frustration of French officials and the association of victims' families.
France was kept in the dark over the secret Anglo-American negotiations leading to the surprise pre-Christmas announcement that Libya was willing to renounce production of weapons of mass destruction.
Friday's package will be paid in four instalments of $42.5m, with each victim's family eventually receiving $1m.
Originally Libya had agreed to pay only $35m to the victims of the French UTA airliner blown up over the Tenere desert in Niger on September 19 1989. This included payment to 54 French nationals and families of 17 other nationalities on the aircraft en route from Brazzaville to Paris.
The offer followed a 1999 French court judgment that condemned six Libyans in absentia, including a brother-in-law of Col Gadaffi, for their part in the sabotage.
The French government accepted this settlement although not all the families of the victims agreed with the amount. When it became apparent the Lockerbie pay-out was significantly bigger, the French government felt obliged to press Libya into raising its offer for the UTA victims.
Robert Graham in Paris
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