Libya Offers Millions in Aid to Island Nations

The Libyans are coming.

And they’re bearing gifts--more than $20 million in vital economic aid and millions more in potential investment for four island nations in America’s backyard.

That was the message the leaders of two of those eastern Caribbean countries sent out Monday after joining a controversial state visit to the Libyan capital last week.

Reporting to their cash-strapped countries in simultaneous news conferences, the prime ministers of St. Vincent and the Grenadines and of Grenada announced that the government of Col. Moammar Kadafi has pledged at least $1 million in grants and $3 million in “soft” loans--at low interest and long-term--to each of their nations, along with similar aid packages for Dominica and St. Kitts and Nevis.

The Libyans have also written off an outstanding $6-million construction loan Grenada used to build its international airport in 1981. They agreed to create a holding company that will give low-interest loans to small businesses, farmers and entrepreneurs throughout the region. And Libya will send a team of investors here next month to seek joint ventures with the region’s governments and private sector.

But the leaders of St. Vincent and the Grenadines and of Grenada--nations that are longtime U.S. allies--are keenly aware of the message Libya’s major new toehold so near U.S. shores may send to Washington, which has imposed sanctions on the oil-rich North African nation for sponsoring global terrorism.

Even before the two premiers left for Libya, “our friends on the U.S. side had some reservations,” Grenadian Prime Minister Keith Mitchell acknowledged Monday. “But they never indicated we should not go.

“This is not an anti-American position.”

Said Ralph Gonsalves, prime minister of nearby St. Vincent and the Grenadines: “It’s economics, pure and simple, economic assistance and, more importantly, investment.

“We have very strong relations with the U.S. Those relations have not been jeopardized and will not be jeopardized,” he added.

Still, two of the five Caribbean leaders originally scheduled to join the delegation that traveled to Tripoli, the Libyan capital, last week dropped out. Several analysts suggested that Prime Ministers Denzil Douglas of St. Kitts and Nevis and Lester Bird of Antigua and Barbuda did so to avoid angering America--a charge both denied.

Several prominent Grenadians have noted the special irony of a new Libyan presence in Grenada--a nation President Reagan sent the U.S. Marines to invade in 1983 largely to wrest it from the hands of a radical Marxist regime that was pro-Libyan.

Mitchell and Gonsalves, whose trip included a lengthy session with Kadafi, took pains Monday to stress that their new relations with the Libyan leader have nothing to do with ideology--either for Libya or for them.

Both concluded that if, in fact, alliances are shifting anew in the region, that is based purely on pragmatism: Small island states are desperate for aid and investment at a time when American assistance has slowed to a trickle.

And what’s in it for Libya?

Legitimacy and image, according to both leaders.

“The Libyans are seeking to be seen as responsible, searching for social development partners, and they see us as democratic governments that, in a sense, represent a bridge to the Western Hemisphere,” Gonsalves said in an interview Monday.

Mitchell added that the Libyan officials they met stressed that many of the armed revolutionary movements Tripoli supported in the past are now in power and no longer need to fight.

The days of setting up guerrilla bases have given way to the search for new “economic spaces,” Mitchell said. Even Britain, which blamed Libya for blowing up a Pan Am airliner over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988, has reestablished diplomatic relations with Kadafi, they noted.

The bottom line, according to Mitchell, Gonsalves and many independent analysts in the region: The eastern Caribbean’s ties to the U.S. are deeper than any donor’s pockets.

As Dominica’s prime minister, Pierre Charles, put it before the visitors departed for Libya: “It is still to the American Embassy that we have to run to get our visas.”