Kohl Assailed in Parliament Over Libyan Plant

Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s policies in the matter of the Libyan chemical plant have deceived the West German public and severely damaged relations between West Germany and the United States, an opposition political leader charged Wednesday.

Norbert Gansel, an armaments expert of the Social Democratic Party, said during a two-hour debate in the Bundestag, the lower house of Parliament, that Kohl had encouraged “the business of death.”

He said Kohl and spokesmen for his government were “still not able to understand the political dimensions” of the Libyan affair.

The Kohl government refused, Gansel said, to accept warnings from U.S. intelligence services that West German firms were helping to build a plant at Rabta, about 40 miles southwest of Tripoli, the Libyan capital. U.S. officials say the plant was designed to produce chemical weapons; Libya insists it was intended to make pharmaceuticals.

Gansel accused Kohl of being arrogant and of damaging Bonn’s international reputation by allowing the world to assume that West Germany is tolerant of its companies’ aid in setting up poison gas factories.

Kohl, he said, has not measured up to West Germany’s special moral responsibility stemming from Germany’s Nazi past. In the Nazi period, from 1933 to 1945, poison gas was used to kill millions of Jews and others in death camps.

Gansel said that Libyan leader Moammar Kadafi, with chemical weapons supplied in part by West Germany, could endanger the existence of Israel, and he added:

“The Jews will not forget, the Americans have not forgotten and the Germans are not allowed to forget.

“German-American relations have never been so severely burdened as today,” he said.

Wednesday’s debate in the Bundestag was opened by Wolfgang Schaeuble, chief of Kohl’s chancellery, who admitted that as early as August, 1987, the West German government had received intelligence reports indicating that West German firms were involved with the Libyan plant.

But Schaeuble, echoing previous statements by Kohl, said the intelligence was not hard enough to initiate formal proceedings against the companies in light of West Germany’s lax export rules.

“The West German government and West German authorities must abide by German law and nothing else,” Schaeuble told a chamber that was only half full. “Businessmen are also citizens.”

Gansel replied that West Germany should restrain the sale of sensitive materials, and he accused Kohl of implicitly pushing the export of West German armaments.

“Distinctions must be drawn between foreign trade and the business with death,” he said, as Kohl sat stolidly on the front bench listening to the exchange.

“You, Chancellor Kohl, are politically and personally responsible that the world and the West German public were not informed,” Gansel said.

Last week, Kohl’s government announced that it would tighten export sales of arms and materials that might be used by chemical weapons plants.

Expertise for Plant

West German firms have also been accused of helping provide materials and expertise for a chemical weapons plant that Iraq is said to have built near Samarra.

When U.S. officials first let it be known that they had hard evidence linking West German companies to the Libyan plant, Kohl and his spokesmen reacted angrily. The chancellor reportedly passed a message to Washington through retiring U.S. Ambassador Richard R. Burt that he was fed up with the United States’ treating West Germany like “a banana republic.”

But as the days passed, the Kohl government was forced to admit that West German companies were indeed involved and that the controversy was not simply something dreamed up, as Kohl suggested, by opponents in order to embarrass him.

In Jerusalem, Israeli Foreign Minister Moshe Arens, citing what he called “German help to radical Arabs to build weapons to kill Jews,” complained Wednesday to the West German ambassador about the reported sale of materials to the Libyan plant.

“Minister Arens called the ambassador to express Israel’s deep concern and to protest about the assistance given by German factories to build a chemical warfare infrastructure in Libya,” Arens’ spokesman, Mordechai Amihai, said.

Arens also asked the ambassador, Wilhelm Haas, and his government to help verify if German companies were involved in providing similar help to Iraq and Syria, Amihai said. He declined to give more specifics on the possible German involvement in those two countries.

Haas told reporters later that West Germany “would do everything in its power to prevent German firms or individuals from assisting foreign countries in acquiring chemical warfare capabilities.”

Meanwhile, a state prosecutor in Frankfurt announced Wednesday that legal proceedings have been undertaken against IBI Engineering, a firm run by Iraqi-born, London-based Ihsan Barbouti, who reportedly coordinated the sale of millions of dollars worth of materials to the Rabta plant.

Similar proceedings were started last week against Imhausen-Chemie, a chemical company based in Lahr, in the Rhine Valley at the edge of the Black Forest.

And in Munich, prosecutors said Wednesday that they have begun a criminal investigation of a Bavarian firm that the news magazine Der Spiegel says helped Libya develop the ability for in-flight refueling of warplanes. Munich Prosecutor Heinz Stocker said the Intec Technical Trade Logistic Co. was suspected of violating export laws, but he did not elaborate on the equipment involved or what uses it had been put to in Libya.

19 Tons of Solvent

It was not immediately clear whether investigators were also looking into a report by Der Spiegel that Intec engineers had helped refit Libyan warplanes for mid-flight refueling.

In recent days, other German firms have been coming forward to authorities with details of their dealings with Libya or with firms suspected of dealing with Libya.

The Merck chemical company said it shipped 19 tons of a chemical solvent to Libya last year, and it said the destination may have been the Rabta plant.

The Alfred Teves company of Frankfurt said it supplied $2.8-million worth of ventilation equipment to IBI in 1986. A spokesman said Teves believed at the time that the material was to be used for a pharmaceutical plant in Hong Kong. The West German news magazine Stern says the Hong Kong plant was built to disguise West German involvement in the Libyan facility.

The Rhenus transport company in Cologne said federal officials seized some of its records in conjunction with the growing Libyan investigation. A spokesman for Rhenus said the firm entered into contracts with IBI in 1986, 1987 and 1988 to deliver construction materials and chemicals to Libya.