By Arnold Cassola

With Colonel Moammar Gadhafi’s regime in ruins and the former Libyan leader himself on the run, it is time to ponder just how he survived in power for so long. Greed for markets and money, it seems, often trumped the West’s supposed concern for basic human rights.

Major Western countries compromised themselves over Libya for decades. After all, Gadhafi survived President Ronald Reagan’s punitive 1986 bombing raid on his compound only because former Italian Prime Minister Bettino Craxi and former Maltese Prime Minister Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici tipped him off.

Craxi, of course, later found refuge in the embrace of another recently fallen Arab dictator, Tunisia’s President Zine al-Abedine Ben Ali, when he fled Italy to escape imprisonment in 1992. Bonnici, for his part, continued cementing his ties with the Libyan dictator until the very end, through his association with – wait for it – the Gadhafi Prize for Human Rights. Moral squalor also permeated Gadhafi’s international “rehabilitation” in the years just before the outbreak of the Arab Spring. According to many observers, British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s role in launching this process of rehabilitation in 2004 was, almost from the start, motivated by a desire to do business with the regime in Tripoli.

And more than oil was at stake. According to an Associated Press report, citing Foreign Office statistics, Libya purchased from the United Kingdom “about £40 million ($55 million) worth of military and paramilitary equipment in the year ending Sept. 30, 2010.” Gadhafi’s shopping list included “sniper rifles, bulletproof vehicles, crowd-control ammunition and tear gas.” Certainly, that military hardware came in handy during the last six months.

According to the same Associated Press report: “The Bush administration approved the sale of $3 million of materials to Libya in 2006 and $5.3 million in 2007. In 2008, Libya was allowed to import $46 million in armaments from the U.S. The approved goods included nearly 400 shipments of explosive and incendiary materials, 25,000 aircraft parts, 56,000 military electronics components and nearly 1,000 items of optical targeting and other guidance equipment.”

Nor was Germany immune to temptation. In 2004, then-Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder inaugurated an oil well operated by the German company Wintershall in the Libyan Maghreb. Not to be outdone, French President Nicolas Sarkozy rushed off to Libya in 2008 to sell nuclear technology to Gadhafi.

Italy imports 60 percent of its oil and 40 percent of its natural gas from Libya, and soon after Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi was re-elected in 2008, he pledged to pay Gadhafi’s regime the equivalent of $338 million a year for 20 years in exchange for Libya’s acceptance of all North African refugees who were seeking political asylum in Italy.
Somehow, it seems, Berlusconi’s name never fails to pop up when lucrative business transactions with Libya are discussed. Indeed, Berlusconi and Gadhafi have shared common personal business interests since 2009, when Lafitrade, a Gadhafi family company, took a 10 percent stake in Quinta Communications, a cinema production company which is 22 percent owned by Berlusconi’s company Fininvest.

The case of little Malta, a couple of hundred kilometers from Libya’s shores, could be just the tip of a much bigger iceberg of complicity. The Maltese government has just revealed that it froze Libyan government assets in euros worth the equivalent of $509 million, of which the equivalent of $116 million belonged to the Gadhafi family or to entities in which the family is a majority stakeholder.

Where has all this money been invested – only in Maltese banks, or are there any business concerns also involved? And who are the Maltese partners of the former Libyan regime? Are politicians involved?

These questions matter because Libyan institutions in Malta used to offer “aid” to Maltese politicians in exchange for promoting Gadhafi’s image. Last Aug. 28, the pro-Christian Democratic newspaper Il-Mument revealed CIA documentation of direct financing by the Gadhafi regime for activities organized by the Malta Labor Party during the 1989 George Bush-Mikhail Gorbachev summit held in Malta.

The Labor Party’s former treasurer, Joe Sammut, is most often mentioned for his connection with Gadhafi. According to The New York Post daily, Sammut handled hundreds of thousands of dollars on behalf of Mutassim Gadhafi, the son of the former Libyan leader and a former security chief. Sammut, it is said, was involved in organizing parties featuring singers Snoop Dog, Nelly Furtado, and Enrique Iglesias, among others, for the entertainment of Gadhafi’s sons.

And it is not only Malta Labor Party politicians who allegedly have had connections with the Gadhafi clan. Malta’s current European Union Commissioner, John Dalli, a former Christian Democrat parliamentarian and government minister, has openly admitted that he had “established a strong network at the political and executive levels” in Libya.

Gadhafi and his family have been spreading money around Europe for years, buying influence and a blind eye from governments to the Libyan regime’s human rights transgressions. We can only hope that the International Criminal Court in The Hague will one day bring Gadhafi, his family, and his minions to justice. But one should also hope that Libya’s new government will expose the links between Western politicians and the Gadhafi regime. At that point, the court of public opinion, at the very least, can render its judgment on their actions.

Arnold Cassola was secretary-general of the European Green Party and a Member of Italy’s Parliament. THE DAILY STAR publishes this commentary in collaboration with Project Syndicate © (www.project-syndicate.org).