Documents first published by Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail showed that during the last months of Gadhafi’s regime, senior security officers traveled to China and met with three state-affiliated Chinese weapons companies that expressed their willingness to offer their services to Gadhafi forces. Reporters with The Globe and Mail found the documents in the trash in a rich Tripoli neighborhood.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu admitted on Monday that Gadhafi representatives met with a Chinese weapons company in Beijing. But she said that the Chinese regime had not been informed of the talks at the time and no weapons were sold.
Max Abrahms, a postdoctoral fellow of the Dickey Center for International Understanding at Dartmouth College, said in a telephone interview with The Epoch Times that he wouldn’t be surprised if the state-run companies were supported by the Chinese regime.
“When you’re dealing with a communist country, it’s more likely that the businesses that you’re associating with are under the nose of the government or may, in fact, be the same people,” he said.
Weapons listed in the memos added up to a cost of at least $200 million, including the QW-18, a shoulder-fired missile that could bring down aircrafts; rocket launchers; night vision goggles; and shells. The memos do not prove whether the weapons were sold or not.
The three companies are China North Industries Corp. (Norinco), which produces weapons to be used on land; China National Precision Machinery Import & Export Corp. (CPMIC), the maker of the air weapons; and China XinXing Import & Export Corp., which makes military equipment.
According to the documents, the companies suggested using Algeria or South Africa as third-party exporters because of previous Chinese dealings with those countries.
China and Libya share a history of arms sales talks, according to one of the memos.
Colonel (Ret.) Ahmed Mohammed Ubaidah wrote in the memo, “The People’s Republic of China is a good friend of ours, and we previously imported several kinds of weapons, ammunition and equipment from them.”
Abrahms, who studies terrorism and the political success of revolutions such as the Libyan one, spoke of the oddness of China’s alleged decision to side with the Gadhafi regime when the rest of the world supported the rebels.
“It may well be that China has a personal interest not only in taming its own dissidents but in discouraging dissidents internationally from overturning their governments,” he said.
Whatever the case, if the international community discovers that the Chinese regime is backing a dictator, it would “further isolate China internationally,” he added.
National Transitional Council members who were interviewed by media expressed anger that the Chinese could have been selling weapons to Gadhafi forces while rebels were struggling to fight back.
The memos were written on the official letterhead of The Supply Authority, a department of Gadhafi’s regime that obtained goods and services.
Omar Hariri, chief of the transitional council’s military committee, told The Globe and Mail that he was almost certain the weapons from China’s talks with Libya arrived and were used against the rebels.
Abrahms says that the new weapons allegedly shipped from China were not enough to secure a Gadhafi victory but may be used by Libyans to fight against other Libyans for civil war.
He explained that Libya does not have a history of democracy, and that factions in the new leadership could be tempted to use the weapons made available to Gadhafi by the Chinese regime and others.
The National Transitional Council reaffirmed its vow for democracy on Friday, while deciding how to spend Gadhafi’s billions of dollars’ worth of frozen assets.
