Split Security Council OKs Libya Sanctions : Terrorism: U.N. action would halt commercial flights and arms sales if Pan Am suspects are not turned over.

Taking a page from its book on dealing with Iraq, a divided U.N. Security Council voted Tuesday to impose sanctions on Libya for failing to turn over two agents accused of taking part in the 1988 terrorist bombing of Pan American Airways Flight 103.

The sanctions, which take effect April 15 unless the government of Col. Moammar Kadafi relents, were approved by 10 council members, with five abstentions.

The abstainers, all of them developing nations from Asia and Africa, included China, which has the power of veto. Although no country voted against the resolution, the margin of victory was smaller than the Bush Administration had anticipated. Two more abstentions would have killed the sanctions.

The sanctions, if followed scrupulously by all countries of the United Nations, would stop all commercial flights in and out of Libya, prohibit the sales of arms to the Kadafi government and “reduce significantly” the numbers of Libyan diplomats allowed into foreign countries.

It marked only the second time in U.N. history--Iraq in 1991 was the first--that the Security Council has imposed mandatory sanctions on a country under Chapter 7 of the U.N. Charter. That provision allows the United Nations to authorize military force later if the sanctions fail.

Citing the destruction of the Pan Am flight over Lockerbie, Scotland, just before Christmas in 1988 and of a jetliner of the French airline UTA over West Africa a year later, U.S. Ambassador Thomas R. Pickering told the council that Libya’s participation in the terrorism had “resulted in the cold-blooded murder of 441 innocent civilians from over 30 countries.”

“This act was no anomaly,” Pickering said, “but unfortunately part of a long, well-known history of support for terrorism and efforts to destabilize other governments.”

To purge the sanctions, Libya would have to extradite the two suspects to either the United States or Britain, cooperate with French judicial authorities investigating the UTA crash, renounce terrorism and “commit itself definitively to cease all forms of terrorist action and all assistance to terrorist groups.”

But diplomatic sources reported Tuesday that Libyan officials were delaying the processing of exit visas for foreigners who want to leave the country. That raises the specter of Kadafi holding foreigners hostage in much the way that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein did in the first months of the Persian Gulf crisis.

Libya, a country with a population of less than 5 million, has more than a million foreign workers, including 1,000 Americans and more than 7,000 Europeans, mainly in jobs in the oil fields that produce 1.5 million barrels a day. Since U.S. law prohibits commerce with Libya, most American workers are there illegally.

State Department Spokesman Richard Boucher said the United States, which does have an embassy in the Libyan capital of Tripoli, has received no report of Americans encountering delays. But he acknowledged that the United States does not have full information on the status of Americans in Libya, all of whom were urged by the State Department to leave more than a week ago.

The proceedings at the Security Council were watched from the gallery by family members of the victims of Pan Am Flight 103 and by former flight crews of the now-disbanded airline in their old uniforms. Bruce Smith, a pilot whose British wife Ingrid died in the explosion over Scotland, said that he had come to “show the Libyans that we remember.”

Susan Cohen, the mother of another victim, said that the sanctions are too light.

“We need an oil embargo,” she said. “We won’t get the truth unless a lot more goes into this.”

The sanctions made no mention of oil, Libya’s main export and source of income.

In the Pan Am case, two Libyan agents, Abdel Basset Ali Megrahi and Lamen Khalifa Fhimah, were indicted in both Washington and Scotland last November. The charges said they conspired to fashion a bomb out of a cassette player and plastic explosive, put it inside a suitcase on an Air Malta flight and arranged for the suitcase to be transferred to the Pan Am 747 at Frankfurt Airport.

When the bomb exploded a half-hour after the plane took off from London on Dec. 21, 1988, it killed all 259 people aboard and another 11 on the ground.

The vote in the Security Council appeared to reflect a serious division within the United Nations. While the members from Europe and Latin America and the economic powers of the United States and Japan voted for the resolution, the developing countries of Asia and Africa abstained.

The resolution, sponsored by the United States, Britain and France, received only one vote more than the required nine votes to pass. Aside from the sponsors, those voting for the resolution were Japan, Russia, Austria, Belgium, Hungary, Ecuador and Venezuela. China abstained rather than risk enraging the Bush Administration with a veto. India, Morocco, Zimbabwe and Cape Verde joined China in abstaining.

The abstainers told the council that they believe more time is needed to find a diplomatic solution to the crisis. There is even a greater need for patience, they argued, since the International Court of Justice in The Hague still has not ruled on a challenge by Libya to the United Nations’ right to demand that it give up the two suspects.

In a plea to the council against sanctions, Libyan Ambassador Ali Elhoudri warned that they would lead to military action. He said that he fears that the United States is “paving the way for another act of aggression against Libyan cities such as the one in 1986.”

In April that year, American warplanes bombed the Libyan cities of Tripoli and Benghazi after accusing the Kadafi government of involvement in the bombing of a West Berlin discotheque that killed three--two American servicemen and a Turkish woman.

Under the Security Council resolution, the most potent sanction against Libya would probably be the embargo against commercial aviation. Under the rules, countries would not even be allowed to sell planes or spare parts to Libya. If enforced scrupulously, this sanction would so isolate Libya that Tripoli could only be reached by ferry from Malta 300 miles away, by road from Tunis 400 miles away or by road from Cairo 1,200 miles away.

What the Sanctions Require

The sanctions the U.N. Security Council is imposing on Libya call on all nations to take the following steps until Libyan leader Moammar Kadafi turn s over suspects in two airline bombings:

Air embargo: All nations must prohibit an aircraft from using their territory or airspace on its way to or from Libya, unless it carries humanitarian supplies approved by a U.N. committee. All nations also must prohibit the supply of aircraft or aircraft components to Libya.

Arms embargo: All nations must prohibit providing weapons, ammunition and military equipment of all types to Libya. They also must not provide military technical advice or training and withdraw any officials or agents now in Libya for those purposes.

Diplomatic personnel: All nations must “significantly reduce” their diplomatic staffs at Libyan diplomatic missions and consular posts, restrict the movement of Libyan staff members on their territory and shut down all Libyan Arab Airlines offices. They must also expel or deny entry to Libyan nationals who have been expelled from or denied entry to other nations because of terrorist activities.

Terrorism: Libya must renounce terrorism and “cease all forms of terrorist action” and must prove it has done so “promptly, by concrete actions.”

Source: Times Wire Services