UK MPs to question Blair over relations with Gaddafi
The UK parliament is set to question former Prime Minister Tony Blair on the nature of his relationship with Libya’s ex-dictator Muammar Gaddafi.
Blair will face questions next month about his role in orchestrating British foreign policy towards Libya when he appears before the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee.
The British MPs say Blair is fully responsible for Britain’s Libya policy.
“The policy construct inherited in 2011 was Blair’s. He was the one who reset Libya – it was his signal achievement, he claimed, to disarm Colonel Gaddafi of his weapons, his WMDs,” Committee chairman and Conservative MP Sir Crispin Blunt.
According to Blunt, Gaddafi was allowed to “buy himself out of the sanctions” even though he was “certainly a supporter of terrorists.”
Now the select committee is conducting an investigation into the controversial 2004 “deal in the desert” brokered by Blair, under which Libya relinquished attempts to acquire nuclear weapons in exchange for allowing Gaddafi to stay in power and reopening diplomatic ties between Libya and the West.
The deal, signed just one year after the US-led invasion of Iraq, was heavily ciriticized y observers, who resented the Gaddafi regime’s support of terrorism.
Tony Blair was revealed to have spoken to Gaddafi several times on the telephone in 2011 in an attempt to secure a peace deal during the uprising.
Documents discovered in abandoned Libyan government offices following the 2011 revolution revealed Blair’s government colluded with Gaddafi to kidnap and fly Libyan dissidents to Tripoli from the UK.
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