Newsnight 25 March

Presented by Kirsty Wark.

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Colonel Gaddafi

Tony Blair was sitting cheek by jowl with Libya's Colonel Gaddafi, in a tent just outside the capital Tripoli. He has acknowledged that meeting the man President Reagan called "the mad dog of the Middle East" was a risk, but said after the meeting that we must put aside the past without forgetting it.

The Government is keen to see in the repentance of Libya's unpredictable leader a lesson learned from the attack on Iraq, and hope other recalcitrant countries - including Syria and Iran - will follow suit.

We examined if this theory holds water, or is Libya a one-off - a country with so much to gain and very little to lose from closer relations with the West.

The contributors to our discussion were:
Ashur Shamis, Founder Libyan Human & Pol. Development Forum
Abdel Bari-Atwan, Editor, Al-Quds al Arabi
Mike O'Brien MP, Foreign Office Minister

European Summit

After his visit to Libya, the Prime Minister moved on to Brussels, and the latest European Summit. Two topics dominated - the need for greater security co-operation after the Madrid bombings, and the sudden opening up of the possibility that the European Union could reach agreement on its controversial constitution in the next few months.

Our Political Correspondent, David Grossman was there and reported on what the leaders came up with.

The contributors to our discussion were:
David Heathcoat-Amory MP, Conservative
Pat Cox MEP, President of the European Parliament

Fishing

A Government report recommends further cuts to Britain's white fish fleet - we examined if fish farming could replace altogether the more dangerous and environmentally dubious practice of scooping them out of the wild.

Francois Bizot

And a remarkable story from one of the twentieth century's most horrific chapters - we had the first UK interview with the Frenchman, Francois Bizot - a man imprisoned and tortured by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia over thirty years ago, who not only lived to tell the tale, but befriended his interrogator before discovering years later that the man was a mass killer, responsible for tens of thousands of victims in a death camp.

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