TRIPOLI: Flying glass fragments partially blinded Nasser Gerana’s mother when a US missile smashed into their home in the Libyan capital in 1986.
For the 48-year-old businessman, her disability is a daily reminder of what Libyans see as a crime: an overnight raid that killed 40 people, including young children, as they slept.
As the north African country marks the 20th anniversary of the attack on Saturday, Libyans say the lack of any US apology hinders renewed efforts by both sides to build trust.
US forces bombed Tripoli and Benghazi in the early hours of April 15, 1986, in retaliation for what then President Ronald Reagan said was Libyan complicity in the bombing of a discotheque in Berlin a month earlier in which three people, including a US serviceman, were killed and dozens wounded.
“A 2am attack on people sleeping? That’s behaving like a monster,” said Gerana, pointing out homes in Tripoli’s upscale Bin Ashour district that were rebuilt after being hit.
The missiles that hit Gerana’s neighbourhood were apparently intended for a government building nearby, but went astray.
Among the dead was Qadhafi’s adopted baby daughter.
The attack pushed US-Libyan ties to what was then their lowest point. They sank lower still when a Pan Am flight was blown up over Scotland in December 1988, killing 259 people on board and 11 people on the ground in the village of Lockerbie.
Libya cast off more than a decade of international ostracism in 2003 when it accepted responsibility and began paying compensation for Lockerbie and for the bombing of a French airliner over Niger in 1989 in which 170 people were killed.
It promised to dismantle its nuclear, chemical and biological programmes and signed additional protocols with the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency.
The next year Libya agreed to compensate more than 160 victims of the Berlin nightclub bombing.
But the 1986 US raid has left a residue of mistrust and a feeling amongst Libyans that they have made most of the concessions to facilitate a rebuilding of relations.
The United States has always dismissed Libyan calls for compensation for the attack. Libya remains on the State Department’s list of state sponsors of terrorism.
“Even today relations between Libya and the US are still in a state of suspicion,” said Libyan analyst Ahmed Al-Atrash.
Two lines in Reagan’s address to the nation announcing the attacks are still seen as particularly offensive in Libya.
One is that they were carefully targeted to avoid civilian casualties. The other is that Washington would carry out the attacks again if necessary.
“I can forgive, because we all make mistakes,” said Hussam Mohammed, who works in a Bin Ashour computer shop, pointing to homes hit in the raid. “If you say you’re sorry, that’s fine. But if you say you can do it again, we have a problem.”—Reuters
