Print

Email story

Comment

Email editor

Negroponte to make unusual Libya visit

He will be the highest-ranking U.S. official to visit in half a century.

By ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published April 6, 2007

WASHINGTON - The U.S. State Department's No. 2 official will travel to Libya this month, the highest-ranking American diplomat to visit the country since 1953.

Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte will go to Tripoli as part of a four-nation Africa tour that will include Sudan, Chad and Mauritania.

Spokesman Sean McCormack said the focus of the trip will be the humanitarian crisis in the Darfur region of Sudan, which shares a border with Libya and Chad. The government of Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi has facilitated delivery of humanitarian relief to Darfur through Libyan territory.

The highest-ranking U.S. official ever to visit Libya was Secretary of State John Foster Dulles 54 years ago.

Gadhafi's decision in 2003 to dismantle his nuclear weapons program was a breakthrough in U.S.-Libyan relations. Mid level U.S. officials have visited Libya but, because of continuing disputes, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has not agreed to Libyan wishes that she go there.

One purpose of a Rice visit would be to inaugurate officially the new U.S. Embassy in Tripoli. The embassy opened last year, but there was no ceremony.

One dispute with Libya involves its refusal to make the final payment on the $270-million in compensation it promised to families of the victims of the 1988 Pan Am 103 bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland.

Libya has also ignored U.S. demands that it release five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor who have been sentenced to death after being convicted of deliberately injecting hundreds of Libyan children with the AIDS virus.

[Last modified April 6, 2007, 01:14:01]