Kadafi Thwarted in an Improbable Quest--Vanuatu

The burning sands of North Africa may be half a world away, but Libyan leader Moammar Kadafi has found a new revolutionary laboratory here in the tropical splendor of the South Pacific.

Although Kadafi has not been welcomed with open arms and has made only modest inroads at best, Australia, the regional power, has already taken steps to derail whatever long-range plans he may have for the pro-Western, strategically situated island-nations in this part of the world.

The Australians have increased their regional intelligence gathering and put Vanuatu, the sole Pacific member of the movement of nonaligned nations, on notice that a Libyan presence in the South Seas is unacceptable.

Prime Minister Bob Hawke has further underscored the situation by closing the two-man Libyan People’s Bureau, or embassy, in Canberra, saying it has been used to promote political instability.

“Libya’s record of subversion and terrorism justifies the gravest concern,” Hawke said.

Friend to Many Rebels

According to diplomats and government officials here and elsewhere in the South Pacific, Libya is providing military training to Melanesian nationalists in the French overseas territory of New Caledonia, funneling money to the ruling Vanuaaku Party in Port Vila and supporting the Free Papua Movement in Irian Jaya, the western half of the island of New Guinea, and the Fretilin guerrillas in East Timor, both of which are fighting Indonesian control.

Kadafi’s contribution to the rebel movements is not yet significant, and the leader of the Melanesian nationalists in New Caledonia, Jean-Marie Tjibaou, denied in an interview in Noumea that he is getting support from Kadafi, though he admitted that some of his aides have visited the Libyan capital of Tripoli.

“What’s the danger of going to Libya?” he asked. “Besides, they come back with nothing--no money, no weapons. This Libya thing has been exploited by the mass media. I’d be happy to take money from anyone who offered, but at the moment I’m not getting any from Libya.”

Western intelligence sources are not convinced. They say that Kadafi has offered money to help Australia’s 170,000 aborigines set up an independent homeland; that he has entertained delegations from Fiji, Tonga and the Solomon Islands, and financed a new, union-based party in the Solomons.

Several Maori extremists from New Zealand have visited Tripoli, and seven people from Vanuatu went to Libya last November for three months’ security training. The government here says it may send a number of senior policeman to Tripoli for training later this year.

“The number of islanders going to Libya and the amount of money coming into the region from Libya are both still small,” an informed source in Honolulu said. “But let’s not forget that it only took 11 men to overthrow the Fijian government (in May).”

Given Libya’s financial problems, brought on by a worldwide oil-price slump that has only recently reversed itself, some Pacific politicians are wondering why Kadafi is interested in a cluster of remote, deeply Christian islands thousands of miles from home. Was Kadafi, who on April 20 called on Pacific radicals to begin “gathering the forces fighting for freedom,” looking for a revolutionary Melanesian bastion in the South Pacific?

When Vanuatu signed a fishing agreement with the Soviet Union last January, an agreement that will earn this impoverished country $1.5 million and give Soviet trawlers access to local ports, some diplomats theorized that Kadafi was acting as a representative of East Bloc interests.

But that seems unlikely, for Kadafi’s international adventurism has frequently been as embarrassing to Moscow as to the West.

What appears more likely, according to specialists who have analyzed the situation, is that Kadafi sees the Pacific as a region where he can strike back at his two prime enemies--France, which helped engineer his army’s recent humiliating defeat in Chad, and the United States, which bombed Libya in April, 1986.

If he can destabilize the region, according to this line of reasoning, the path of revolution could lead to Tahiti, the heart of French Polynesia.

Kadafi’s zeal for revolutionary causes has never known geographic boundaries. Looking for a foothold in the Pacific, Kadafi chose an unlikely candidate--Vanuatu, which provided the setting for much of James Michener’s “Tales of the South Pacific.” Vanuatu, known as the New Hebrides before independence from France and Britain in 1980, consists of about 80 islands with endless beaches, a sleepy capital of 15,000 and open-air hotels usually full of Australian tourists.

Last September, Prime Minister Walter Lini, a New Zealand-educated Anglican priest, was approached by Libyan officials at the summit conference of nonaligned nations in Zimbabwe. They promised him cheap oil--”much cheaper than we could get from Australia, Singapore or anywhere,” Lini said.

‘Coconut War’

Vanuatu’s own road to independence had been troubled and nearly derailed by a French-supported revolt on the island of Espiritu Santo that the press dubbed “the coconut war.” The revolt attracted Libya’s interest, and that interest was heightened by Lini’s support of independence for New Caledonia (a position shared by Australia and New Zealand), by his nonaligned sentiments generally including his successful efforts to have the Pacific declared a nuclear-free zone.

Last year, Vanuatu became the first Pacific island-nation to establish diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union.

On April 26, while Lini was recovering here from a stroke suffered two months earlier in Washington, two Libyan diplomats accredited in Malaysia arrived, unannounced and uninvited, to set up an embassy. The two, Taher Marwan and Fathi Farhat, checked into the Inter-Continental hotel, where a member of the staff remembers them as “very quiet, always complete gentlemen.”

The next day, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Vernon A. Walters, who was on a tour of the Pacific, happened to arrive in Port Vila and also checked into the Inter-Continental. He was assigned to a room one floor above the Libyans’ suite. A Secret Service agent traveling with him learned of the Libyan presence while checking hotel registration cards.

Lini, perturbed that proper protocol had not been observed, did not receive Marwan and Farhat. Later he told them to leave the country, saying he was suspending plans to let Libya open an embassy. The two Libyans checked out of the Inter-Continental but have not left Port Vila. The government has extended their 30-day visas.

By the time the Libyans were asked to leave, they had business cards printed that identified them as members of the Vanuatu People’s Bureau, and they had opened an embassy checking account at the Westpac Bank. Now Lini is telling aides that he will soon let the Libyans open a mission after all.

Vanuatu has particular appeal for the Libyans because it is an international tax haven, and nameless, numbered bank accounts can be opened here. This, diplomats point out, would give Kadafi an excellent cover to channel funds to various groups in the Pacific region.

Lini’s courtship of the Libyans has created Pacific controversy. The Australian foreign minister, Bill Hayden, flew off at midnight for a secret meeting with New Zealand’s Prime Minister David Lange, in part to discuss Libyan activities in the Pacific.

New Zealand, which has built up its exports to Libya, mostly dairy products, to $30 million a year, was not eager to join Australia’s denunciation of the Kadafi regime, and Lange said Vanuatu was a “containable situation.”

Lini, who had come back to work prematurely in an attempt to regain control of his country’s foreign affairs, said he would not tolerate Canberra’s intelligence gathering, and on the eve of a visit by the Australian destroyer tender Stalwart, he cut military ties to Australia, his main aid benefactor. Australian warships were banned from harbors.

But though Lini is committed to the nonaligned nations’ movement, he is neither a radical nor an ideologue, and what seems to be behind the Libyan connection seems to be nothing more than money and naivete.

“We don’t consider the Libyans terrorists until we see them doing terrorist acts in Vanuatu,” Lini told The Bulletin, an Australian news magazine.

Australia provides Vanuatu with about $6 million a year in aid, a paltry amount compared to the $40 million that Kadafi is said to be willing to pay for a Pacific base of operations. One reason Lini may have wavered on the subject of a Libyan embassy is that Kadafi, as is his custom, was promising more than he was willing to deliver.

Not Communists, Just Poor

“The American State Department should realize,” Joe Jatuman, a spokesman for Lini, said, “that when we sign a fishing agreement with the Soviet Union or make deals with Libya, it is not because we are Communist. It is because we are desperate and we want to give our people a chance.”

Indeed, Vanuatu’s economic problems are severe. The island--which exports copra, fish, beef and not much else--had a $60-million deficit last year and is still recovering from the cyclone that caused $200 million worth of damage, destroying three resorts and three restaurants.

Adding to the country’s woes, the Australian tourist trade has been severely hurt by stories about the Libyan link. That,in itself, is testimony to Kadafi’s remarkable international reputation. It took just two Libyans in coats and ties to persuade hundreds of tourists to avoid a quiet little country about as wicked as a Sunday school choir.