Jack Straw, the former foreign secretary, has denied that British commercial relations with Col Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya held back compensation demands for people killed or injured by IRA weapons supplied by Tripoli.
Straw told a parliamentary committee on Wednesday that the main priority of Tony Blair’s government in negotiations with Gaddafi was to dismantle Libya’s chemical and nuclear weapons programme.
Questioned by the Northern Ireland affairs committee at Westminster, Straw said that while “it is a matter of record that we encouraged British companies to do business with Libyan companies … the issue of compensation was never set aside because of commercial considerations”.
Straw said compensation for victims of weapons supplied by Gaddafi’s regime to the IRA was “not an active issue” at the time of the 2003 discussions with the then Libyan leader.
He said: “Even if this had been raised as an active issue, and my recollection is that it was not, I might well have said, ‘Let’s concentrate on getting the Libyans to agree to give up their chemical weapons and their nuclear holdings, and then we can move on to another track.’”
The former foreign secretary said there had been “no sense that victims of PIRA killings come at the back of the queue” during these negotiations.
Straw said it would be “cruel” to keep pursuing compensation for victims with the Libyan state in disintegration and the country at war with itself.
Photograph: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images
In relation to his former boss at 10 Downing Street, Straw said: “The issue was never swept aside. Mr Blair devoted great effort into securing peace in Northern Ireland.”
The former prime minister has faced accusations he personally blocked any inclusion of Irish and British victims of Tripoli-supplied weapons in any compensation scheme designed to reinstate Libya on the international diplomatic stage. Blair’s spokesman described these allegations as “malicious”.
Sylvia Hermon, the independent unionist MP for North Down, challenged Straw to ask the current Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, to support the IRA victims’ campaign for compensation from Libya. “If you want me to write to him I will do so,” Straw said, “but all of us will wait for a reply with great interest!”
Gaddafi’s regime had paid out compensation for the 1984 murder of PC Yvonne Fletcher outside the Libyan embassy in London, as well as for the Lockerbie plane bombing in 1988. Neither the Gaddafi regime nor the current administration in Tripoli has agreed to any compensation for hundreds of IRA victims killed or injured by Libya-supplied semtex explosives and other weapons.
The US government under George W Bush approved legislation that allowed Gaddafi’s regime to pay $1bn in compensation for American victims of Libya-sponsored terrorism.
In the early 1970s and later in the 80s, the Gaddafi regime supplied the Provisional IRA with tonnes of weapons including semtex, which was made in the Czech Republic.
The explosive was used as a powerful booster for bombs that devastated parts of the City of London as well as other British cities during the Troubles.
In 1995, as part of efforts to improve relations with western nations, the Libyan regime supplied John Major’s government, via the UN security council, with the entire inventory of weaponry it gave the PIRA and vowed to stop smuggling guns and explosives to Irish republican terror groups.
During the parliamentary hearing, it emerged that there are still millions of dollars of frozen Libyan assets in the British financial system.
