Libya Says Curbs Are U.S. Plot to Topple Kadafi

The Libyan government charged Wednesday that President Reagan’s imposition of economic sanctions is aimed at toppling the regime of Col. Moammar Kadafi.

Reagan’s call for an international boycott of Libya is “tantamount politically to a declaration of war,” wire services quoted the official Tripoli radio as saying.

“The American President has treated the Libyan people with a barbarism that exceeds anything we had become accustomed to from past American administrations,” the broadcast declared.

Reaction was muted among the 1,500 or so Americans living in Libya, who were ordered by Reagan to leave the country by the end of the month.

Several American workers contacted by Western journalists here reacted negatively to Reagan’s executive order, announced Tuesday. It directs U.S. companies to break off economic dealings with Libya and orders all Americans out of the country. Some of them said they had gone from unemployment in the United States to high-paying jobs in Libya’s oil industry and would be sad if forced to leave.

The economic sanctions--followed Wednesday by a freeze on Libyan assets in the United States--came in retaliation for what Reagan called Kadafi’s complicity in the terrorist attacks on Rome and Vienna airports last month.

The Libyan news media have warned citizens about the possibility of U.S. military retaliation, and that concern apparently continued Wednesday. The government twice closed Libya’s airspace to civilian traffic Wednesday morning. Tripoli airport was also reported closed for brief periods but later reopened, as flights brought hundreds of foreign workers into the country, returning from Christmas vacations abroad.

Tripoli Seems Calm

Outwardly, Tripoli seemed calm, with little traffic on the streets and no extraordinary military presence beyond the Soviet-supplied surface-to-air missile batteries in the city center, a normal sight.

In the aftermath of Reagan’s Tuesday night news conference, at which he announced most of the sanctions, Tripoli radio described the President as “an Israeli dog barking in the Zionist kennel” and said he failed to produce any evidence of a Libyan connection to the European airport attacks.

A Wednesday morning broadcast said Washington’s economic moves against Libya are “a design openly aimed at overthrowing the . . . revolutionary regime.”

Libya’s Foreign Minister Ali Tureiki said that American workers in Libya will be allowed to continue living here or may leave the country if they so desire.

“I can assure you the American people can live peacefully in Libya,” Tureiki told reporters in Fez, Morocco.

Tripoli radio later said the Americans in Libya “are well aware that Libya is different from the way Reagan tries to portray it, so they will be the first to see through the lies and allegations of their President.”

Training and Sanctuary

The United States has maintained that the Arab socialist Libyan regime provided training camps, sanctuary and other material assistance to the Palestinian guerrillas who launched the nearly simultaneous attacks against the airports in Rome and Vienna in which 15 travelers, including five Americans, were killed.

Under the terms of Reagan’s executive order, Americans who remain in Libya after Feb. 1 may be subject to punishment of up to 10 years in prison. There are an estimated 1,500 Americans here, many of them believed to be employed by the Libyan National Oil Co. or its affiliates.

An American engineering firm, Brown & Root Inc., is helping in the early stages of the construction of a massive pipeline project that will carry subterranean water from under the desert to the populated coastal region of the country.

The Houston-based firm is apparently the largest American company employing Americans in Libya. A company spokesman said the firm has fewer than 20 Americans on the payroll here.