Patrick Haseldine on Lockerbie

I am grateful to Patrick Haseldine for the following e-mail setting out his reasons for believing that apartheid South Africa may have been responsible for the bombing of Pan Am 103:

Dear Robert,

Now that a "US court orders Libya to pay $6bn" in damages to the relatives of seven US victims of the September 1989 UTA Flight 772 bombing, and to the American owner of the DC-10 aircraft (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/7191278.stm), the United Nations should investigate both Pan Am Flight 103 (http://indymedia.org.uk/en/2007/12/387992.html) and UTA Flight 772.

The way that Libya was "fitted up" for both crimes is succinctly explained by French investigative journalist, Pierre Péan, at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Péan#FBI_fabricated_evidence_against_Libya.

The obvious starter question for the UN Inquiry to address is: But if Libya didn't do it, who did?

There is no shortage of suspects but for my money apartheid South Africa is the clear favourite. This is why:

1. The Reagan/Gorbachev summit in Moscow in May 1988 decided that South Africa had to grant Namibia its independence, in return for Cuba's withdrawal of troops from Angola and the cutting off of military aid by the Soviet Union (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Accords)

2. It was US presidential election year in 1988, and Democrat nominee Michael Dukakis would have declared South Africa to be a "terrorist state" (along with Libya and Iran) if he were elected US president (see http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=940DEFDC133BF930A25755C0A96E948260).

3. South Africa's nightmare was to have SWAPO take control of Namibia with more than 66% of the vote, since this would have allowed SWAPO to re-write the independence constitution (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Namibia#Negotiations_and_transition). Measures were therefore taken for South Africa's Civil Cooperation Bureau to disrupt the election process, to harass the UN Special Representative Martti Ahtisaari (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martti_Ahtisaari#Diplomatic_career) and to take out prominent SWAPO activists (eg Anton Lubowski). The Koevoet paramilitary force was also deployed to prevent SWAPO's military wing returning from overseas bases. And, according to The Guardian of July 26, 1991, Foreign Minister Pik Botha told a press conference that the South African government had paid more than £20 million to at least seven political parties in Namibia to oppose SWAPO in the run-up to the 1989 elections. He justified the expenditure on the grounds that South Africa was at war with SWAPO at the time.

4. UN Commissioner for Namibia, Bernt Carlsson, was in an anomalous position. In theory, Carlsson was the UN's Governor of Namibia (http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=940DE4D9143EF931A15751C1A96E948260). But, United Nations authority over Namibia was never recognised by the South African Government, who administered the territory through an Administrator-General, Louis Pienaar, and it is unclear what role Bernt Carlsson would have played in the run-up to Namibia's independence. A UN Inquiry into Carlsson's death on Pan Am Flight 103 will doubtless help to resolve this anomaly.

The full text of ten letters I had published in The Guardian is at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Patrick_Haseldine#Letters_to_The_Guardian. The first letter was published 14 days before the Lockerbie bombing. The nine subsequent letters all seek to incriminate the apartheid regime for Pan Am Flight 103, and one even suggests that South Africa was responsible for the UTA Flight 772 bombing (The bearer of strange tidings from Islamic Jihad)!

Yours sincerely,

Patrick.