AP News, August 16th, 2007
The top U.S. diplomat for the Middle East will hold talks in Libya next week focused on planning a trip to the former pariah nation by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice this year, State Department officials said Wednesday.
David Welch, assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, is due in Tripoli midweek for two days of meetings on his first visit to Libya since the release last month of six foreign medical workers who had been imprisoned there for more than eight years, the officials said.
The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the trip has not yet been announced, said the Libya stop would be sandwiched between meetings in France and Oman. Welch leaves for Paris on Sunday, they said.
Welch aims to discuss improving relations between the United States and Libya since Tripoli accepted responsibility for the 1988 jetliner bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland, Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi dismantled his weapons of mass destruction programs and the release of six foreign medical workers jailed for allegedly infecting children with HIV, they said.
But, perhaps more importantly, he will be looking to lay out details of a possible trip to the country by Rice before the end of the year, the officials said.
After five Bulgarian nurses and one Palestinian doctor were released in July after nearly nine years in prison, Rice said she hoped to travel soon to Libya, an event that would mark full U.S. diplomatic acceptance of the North African country after decades of pariah status.
Officials said then Rice might visit Libya in October.
At the time, Rice said Libya had taken great strides to reintegrate itself into the international community and noted that many U.S. companies were eager to invest in the country.
President Bush recently nominated a U.S. ambassador to Libya, fulfilling pledges Washington made after Tripoli agreed to pay compensation to the victims of the Pan Am Flight 103 bombing and Gadhafi renounced nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.
Those steps earned Libya a reprieve from U.N., U.S. and European sanctions as well as removal from the State Department's blacklist of state sponsors of terrorism.
Bush's ambassadorial nomination, however, has met resistance from some in Congress who have vowed to block it until Libya pays the last installment of restitution to the families of the 270 Pan Am bombing victims and settles claims related to the bombing of a Berlin disco in which several U.S. servicemen were killed.
The disco bombing remains unresolved.
Rice's mere contemplation a trip would be a remarkable turnaround for Libya, which has long struggled with international isolation.
If and when she goes, she would be the first secretary of state to visit Libya since John Foster Dulles in 1953, according to the State Department historian's office.
Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte went to Tripoli in April mainly to discuss the situation in neighboring Sudan's troubled Darfur region, and in July Bush sent White House counterterrorism adviser Frances Frago Townsend to Libya to hand deliver a letter calling on Gadhafi to step up cooperation in battling extremist violence.
