Libya has found an unlikely ally — the United States — in a bid to convert a chemical-weapons plant into a factory making life-saving drugs to battle AIDS, malaria and other deadly diseases.
The Executive Council of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons yesterday approved, in principle, “technical changes” to the global treaty on chemical arms that would make such conversions possible.
The council has yet to grant Tripoli’s request.
The Bush administration said it is “very supportive” of Libya’s effort and urged the 41-member council to endorse the Rabta facility’s conversion “to produce low-cost pharmaceuticals to treat HIV/AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis, for use mainly in Africa.”
“The United States supports the proposal both because it makes sense in this particular instance — we strongly support redirecting this equipment to pharmaceutical production for the benefit of the developing world — and because it provides a means of dealing with similar situations if they arise in the future,” the State Department said.
“The process of conversion, and the facility once converted, will be subject to international verification to ensure that no materials are misused for chemical weapons purposes,” it said.
The Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) regulations allow its signatories to convert chemical-weapons plants for peaceful purposes, but gave them up to six years after the treaty entered into force, in 1997, to do so.
Because the deadline expired last year, the conversion option is not available to Libya, which did not join the convention until February.
The change adopted yesterday would allow up to six years for conversion after a country becomes a party to the treaty — or, in Libya’s case, 2010.
The amendment, which was sponsored by 17 countries, including the United States, was approved by consensus during an Executive Council meeting at The Hague, a senior State Department official said.
Iran, Cuba and Sudan are among the council’s members.
The council’s recommendation has to be endorsed by a conference of all 166 state parties to the CWC, which is scheduled for late November.
The senior official said he expected a positive outcome, although some members could raise objections in the process.
The next step will be for Libya to present a detailed proposal of how it plans to transform the Rabta facility, what old equipment it wants to keep and what new equipment it would bring in.
“It has already contracted an Italian firm to do the conversion,” the official said.
The Rabta plant was part of Libya’s weapons program, which Tripoli agreed to scrap in December, after secret negotiations with Britain and the United States.
Since then, Washington has improved relations with Tripoli and lifted most economic and trade sanctions, although Libya remains on the State Department’s blacklist of state sponsors of terrorism, which keeps in place an arms embargo.
On Wednesday, prosecutors in Switzerland opened an investigation into two Swiss citizens suspected of illegally exporting nuclear bomb-making technology to Libya.
One of the suspects is thought to be engineer Urs Tinner, who was arrested in Germany last week. He is thought to have been part of the clandestine international network of Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan, which helped Libya’s nuclear program.
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