Beneficiary of Lockerbie given Nobel by US masters

[Paul Rigby]

Paul, thanks for posting this. I had forgotten all about it. But duly prodded I now remember Ahtisaari returning from the former Yugoslavia to be welcomed like a conquering hero by the then German Chancellor Helmut Kohl ---- lots of back-slapping, hand shaking and grins.

He now joins such other Nobel peace loving (ahem) luminaries as Dr. Henry Kissinger and Elihu Root to mention a few.

For the benefit of those slightly younger than our estimable selves, I hasten to add the following extracts by way of explaining the pliant Finn's earlier service to the US:

Patrick Heseldine*, “Letters to the editor: Missing diplomat links and the Lockerbie tragedy,” The Guardian, 5 August 1991

“If Mrs Thatcher harbours any lingering hopes of succeeding Mr Perez de Cuellar as UN Secretary-General…In my view Mrs Thatcher has disqualified herself from taking the UN’s top job by her behaviour on at least two previous occasions:

a) her connivance with the South African government in 1984 over bail-jumping in the UN arms embargo case of the Coventry Four…

b) the improper pressure put she put on the UN special representative in Namibia, Mr Martti Ahtisaari, during her visit on April 1, 1989 for him to permit the South African Defence Force (SADF) to take action against SWAPO soldiers who were peacefully returning to Namibia to take part in the 1989 elections. As a result, as many as 308 SWAPO soldiers were killed…Whether Mrs Thatcher could have persuaded the UN Commissioner for Namibia, Mr Bernt Carlsson, to agree to such treachery we shall never know as Mr Carlsson was assassinated four months earlier, on December 21, 1988…

Patrick Heseldine, “Letters to the editor: Flight Path,” The Guardian, 22 December 1992

Now that the case against Libya has been undermined by Edwin Bollier’s revised evidence (Guardian, December 20), it is time to cut through the mess of theory on the culpability for Lockerbie. Applying the scientific principle of Occam’s Razor to the problem (look for the simplest solution), the first question to ask is: what was so special about PanAm flight 103 to make it the target of international terrorism?

The answer is that Bernt Carlsson, UN Commissioner for Namibia, was on that flight to New York to attend the signing ceremony at UN headquarters of Namibia’s Independence Agreement…

*Formerly of the Information Department, Foreign & Commonwealth Office