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Backgrounder: How Libya Got Off the List

Council on Foreign Relations

Author: Eben Kaplan, Research Associate
June 8, 2006

Introduction

On May 15, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice announced that the United States was removing Libya from its list of state sponsors of terrorism and would soon resume normal diplomatic relations with the one-time pariah. Rice said the move was in response to "historic decisions taken by Libya's leadership in 2003 to renounce terrorism and to abandon its weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs." Yet the resumption of diplomatic ties remains unsettling to some Americans. Though Libya has made a concerted effort to enter the good graces of the international community, the nation's despotic leader, Muammar el-Qaddafi, has amassed notoriously bad human-rights record since he took power in 1969.

Why was Libya designated a state sponsor of terror?

In the early 1970s, Qaddafi established terrorist training camps on Libyan soil, provided terrorist groups with arms, and offered safe haven to terrorists, say U.S. officials. Among the groups aided by Qaddafi were the Irish Republican Army, Spain's ETA, Italy's Red Brigades, and Palestinian groups such as the Palestine Liberation Organization. Libya was also suspected of attempting to assassinate the leaders of Chad, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Tunisia, and Zaire (now Democratic Republic of Congo).

A court in The Hague connected Libyans to the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland that killed 270 people on board, and Qaddafi's regime was also implicated in the 1989 bombing of a French passenger jet over Niger in which 171 people died. In 1986, Libya sponsored the bombing of a Berlin disco popular among U.S. servicemen, killing two U.S. soldiers.

Also of concern was Libya's pursuit of WMD. As early as the mid-1970s Qaddafi expressed interest in gaining nuclear-weapons capability to match that of Israel. Libya has been accused of using chemical weapons against Chadian forces during clashes in 1986 and 1987.

Read the rest of this article on the cfr.org website.

Copyright 2006 by the Council on Foreign Relations. This material is republished on GlobalSecurity.org with specific permission from the cfr.org. Reprint and republication queries for this article should be directed to cfr.org.