Algeria’s Libyan Link: how British arms sales cost British lives

Above: Labour PM Tony Blair pictured with esteemed trading partner and equally-reviled war criminal Moammar Gaddafi.

[First published in The Morning Star, 26/01/13]

When news broke late last week that three British nationals were among dozens of hostages killed in a disastrous firefight between Algerian soldiers and Islamic terrorists, David Cameron was unequivocal.

Whatever people said about the Algerian government’s pointed refusal to negotiate or their unilateral decision to attack the besieged BP-owned compound was irrelevant, the PM insisted.

“I would just say that the responsibility for these deaths lies squarely with the terrorists who launched a vicious and cowardly attack.”

But within days reports surfaced that the fighters had arrived fresh from the Libyan border, with uniforms, bombs, rockets and guns all bought from the former stockpiles of the deposed Gaddafi regime.

US secretary of state Hillary Clinton confirmed the reports on Wednesday, telling Congress there was “no doubt that the Algerian terrorists had weapons from Libya”.

And if that wasn’t enough, the plot’s mastermind Mokhtar Belmokhtar said as much himself in an interview with the Mauritanian news agency ANI in 2011.

“We have been one of the main beneficiaries of the revolutions in the Arab world,” he said, referring to the loose regional alliance Al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb.

“As for our benefitting from the weapons, this is a natural thing in these kinds of circumstances.”

So while Belmokhtar’s men pulled the triggers, the guns they wielded against Paul Morgan and Kenneth Whiteside and Garry Barlow and dozens of other Brits were a consequence of Britain’s own foreign policy — its complicity not only in the “liberation” of those weapons in 2011’s civil war, but the sale of them to Moammar Gaddafi’s regime to begin with. Read the rest of this entry »