Calling Kadafi’s Bluff

It has been a decade since a bomb aboard a Pan Am 747 flying over Lockerbie, Scotland, killed 270 people and seven years since U.S. and British investigators identified two Libyan intelligence agents as prime suspects in the terrorist act. Demands on Libya that the suspects be handed over for trial in a Scottish or American court were spurned. In time, however, Libya did offer to surrender the suspects if a trial were held in a country not directly involved in the case. Now, unexpectedly, Washington and London have agreed. The Netherlands has been chosen as the site for a trial that would be conducted under Scottish law before a panel of Scottish judges. That means that there is now a chance that justice will finally be done.

Libya long insisted on not just a neutral site for the trial but on an international panel of jurists to hear the case. Then, last January, Libya’s foreign minister, Omar Mustafa Muntasser, told the United Nations that the judges could be Scottish. What prompted this reversal is a mystery. Perhaps Libya’s vain and erratic leader, Moammar Kadafi, felt so confident that Washington and London were committed to their positions that he could safely risk a conciliatory gesture. If so, his bluff has now been called.

If the two Libyans are handed over to The Hague, the State Department says, U.N. sanctions against Libya--consisting mainly of a largely inconsequential air embargo--will be lifted. If Libya refuses, Washington will seek to cut off Libya’s chief source of income through a ban on its oil sales.

From what is publicly known, the forensic and other evidence of Libyan culpability amassed by U.S. and British investigators seems compelling. And in any trial, Kadafi himself would be an unseen presence in the dock. A conviction of his operatives would make further punitive actions against Libya virtually certain.

The U.S.-British proposal has won a mixed reception from the families of the Pam Am victims, 189 of whom were Americans, with some seeing it as a weakening of resolve. The desire of the families for justice demands respect. But a trial in a Dutch courtroom almost certainly represents the most feasible opportunity to achieve justice. Libya condemns itself--and invites serious consequences--if it now refuses to cooperate in a plan whose principles it earlier accepted.