Libya Hints at Future Military Base for Soviets

Maj. Abdel-Salam Jalloud, the No. 2 man in the Libyan government, said Friday that Libya is holding “extensive contacts” with the Soviet Union and is “reviewing” its previous refusal to allow establishment of a Soviet military base here as a result of Tuesday’s U.S. bombing attacks.

Addressing a news conference at the Libyan Foreign Ministry, Jalloud also called upon Arab nations to unite and “liquidate immediately American political, economic and military interests in the Arab world.”

However, he skirted questions about whether Libya would retaliate for the U.S. attack, which President Reagan said he ordered because of Libya’s support for terrorism and specifically, its role in the April 5 bombing of a West Berlin discotheque in which a U.S. Army sergeant and a Turkish woman were killed and more than 200 were injured.

“We have not declared war, and we do not want to make war on America,” Jalloud said. “However, America is making war on our houses, hospitals and schools. We are fighting in defense. To be at war or not depends on America,” he said.

Jalloud said the raids had killed 37 people and injured 93, although doctors and diplomats have said the toll is nearly twice as high. Twenty of the victims, including four children, were buried in a mass funeral in Tripoli on Friday. A crowd of about 5,000 chanted anti-American slogans after the pine coffins had been driven through the streets of the Libyan capital in a noisy procession of several hundred young revolutionaries.

Jalloud is the highest-ranking Libyan official to meet with reporters since the raid four days ago against targets in Tripoli and Benghazi, 400 miles to the east of the capital. It was also his first public appearance since then. The fact that he did finally appear suggested to observers that the regime of Col. Moammar Kadafi was in firm control following reports, denied by Libyan officials, of serious dissension within the armed forces.

‘Ludicrous, Silly’ Reports

Asked about those reports, which have been the subject of intense speculation both in Washington and among diplomats in Tripoli, Jalloud said they were “ludicrous and very silly.”

“This is the dream of the American Administration. Shultz has declared that he wants to see a coup d’etat take place in Libya and that there is dissension in Libya and that Libyans are not happy,” Jalloud said, referring to reports of comments by Secretary of State George P. Shultz that the United States chose the strike targets in hopes of fueling a possible coup.

“There is no possibility of a coup in Libya because the people are in power,” he said.

Jalloud, one of the five surviving members of the original 12-man Revolutionary Command Council that overthrew King Idris I in September, 1969, said the air strikes had been a “complete military and political failure” and would not deter Libya from continuing to support “liberation” groups around the world.

‘We Shall Fight’

“We shall continue to support world liberation movements and we shall continue to fight capitalists and imperialist forces. . . . As revolutionaries, we can never be intimidated by power,” he said.

However, Jalloud said the raids have caused Libya to “review our stands and policies” toward the Soviet Union.

Libya spends an estimated $1 billion a year buying military supplies from the Soviet Union and there are an estimated 3,000 to 6,000 East Bloc military advisers in Libya, most of them Soviets. In addition, Western diplomats say East Germans supervise Libya’s security forces.

Despite Libya’s growing indebtedness to Moscow for arms, Kadafi has refused so far to allow the Soviets to establish a military base that would give them a strategic foothold in the southern Mediterranean.

“These days we are conducting extensive contacts with the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union. . . . We are reviewing our stand and policies,” Jalloud said.

May Look to Soviets

Asked if that meant that Libya would now invite the Soviets to set up a permanent military base, Jalloud said: “We have not decided yet. But if the (U.N.) Security Council continues to be paralyzed by America, if America and the Atlantic Pact (Atlantic Alliance) remain out of control and if the world is a jungle, what do you expect?”

Jalloud devoted all of his opening statement and most of his answers to various questions to a bitter denunciation of Tuesday’s air strike, which he called the most “barbaric, aggressive and hostile” attack launched by one country against another “in the history of mankind.”

He said it proved that the “real terrorist” is President Reagan, whom he likened to a latter-day Hitler. Reagan should be “toppled and put on trial for his crimes” and thrown “into the garbage of history,” Jalloud said.

At the Martyrs of El Hani cemetery, Jalloud’s invective was matched by mourners and demonstrators at the mass funeral for the raid’s victims.

Orchestrated Demonstrations

The anti-American speeches were already under way when two busloads of Western reporters arrived ahead of the procession to set up their cameras and record what turned out, like all sanctioned demonstrations in Libya, to be a carefully planned and orchestrated political event.

The 20 coffins were driven through the streets of Tripoli in a noisy procession led by several hundred young revolutionaries chanting “God is great” and “A storm will devastate imperialism.”

At the cemetery, they were placed side-by-side on wooden platforms while the demonstrators shook their fists and chanted for a “holy war” against the United States in front of the cameras.

“America is the first terrorist in the world,” shouted one speaker. “God is great. We are not afraid of the 6th Fleet.”

Several Familiar Faces

Most of the demonstrators, it seemed, had come not to mourn the victims but to shout in front of the American television cameras. Reporters here last month to cover the Gulf of Sidra crisis between the United States and Libya noticed several familiar faces from earlier anti-American demonstrations.

Raised onto the shoulders of adults and thrust to the front of the screaming crowd to be beside their father’s coffin, Najib and Namen Moustrati were given their first lesson in hating the United States.

Najib, who is 6 and Namen, who is 8, appeared at first to be reluctant revolutionaries. But the two men holding them showed the boys how to flash victory signs in front of the television cameras and chant “Unity and holy war” along with the adults.

Namen, perhaps because he is the older, caught on quicker. While at first he appeared frightened and confused, he had by the end of Friday’s demonstration memorized the anti-American slogans.

Boy Wanted to Hide

Najib, on the other hand, could not make a fist; the man who carried him had to grab his arm and wave it in the air for him. The boy kept looking around frantically as though wanting to hide from the TV cameras, the demonstrators and his father’s plain pine coffin draped in a green cloth that signified a martyr for Islam.

Seeing no escape, Najib sat on the man’s shoulders and cried.

Other friends and family of the deceased had come to mourn, not demonstrate. In many instances, they stood apart from the demonstrators weeping or embracing one another in silence.

One well-dressed man stood a bit apart from the rest, trying to be alone with his grief in the jostling, noisy crowd.

He was a Palestinian petrochemical engineer who works in Libya for the Los Angeles-based Occidental Petroleum Corp. His 18-year-old daughter, Rafat Bassam Hussein, had been at school in England and was home visiting her parents during Easter recess.

She was killed when a bomb apparently meant to hit a building housing Libya’s General Security Headquarters missed its target and fell instead on her parent’s house next door to the French Embassy in the Ben Ashur neighborhood of Tripoli. It was the same house that Najib’s family lived in and, like the little boy, the father was also crying.

He, too, looked around the angry, chanting crowd where he seemed to be as out-of-place as the young boy.

“It is better that she is gone,” he said. “At least she is at peace with her God, but the world is full of evil and there is more evil to come.”