Libyans on Wednesday marked the 35th anniversary of Moammar Gadaffi’s seizure of power, with the familiar posters of their mercurial leader, who has shed his long-held pariah status, adorning city streets.
After more than three decades, the Arab world’s longest-serving leader has kept his title as leader of the revolution while mending fences with his Western foes who backed the monarchy he ousted in his coup in 1969.
Gadaffi, the charismatic nationalist army officer, publicly renounced his ambitions to make Libya a nuclear power last December, opening the way for his return to the international fold.
Throughout the oil-rich desert state, Libyans commemorated the Great Fateh Revolution that ushered in Gadaffi’s Great Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya.
On Tuesday evening, their leader delivered one of his set-piece speeches, relayed live by state media, in which — despite his fledgling reconciliation with the West — he took a swipe at the United States political system.
With the Republican party convention in full swing in New York, Gadaffi commented: ”The US, as a strong and influential country, should lead the way by abandoning its outdated multiparty system and becoming a Jamahiriya.”
He was referring to his constitutional brainchild in which power is supposed to rest with a system of people’s congresses right down to parish level.
Gadaffi said US politicians will not understand his call, which he said is directed at academics and intellectuals.
He also appealed for the release of two French reporters held hostage in Iraq.
”I find it astonishing that they are kidnapping French people,” the veteran leader said in the address, broadcast live on state television from his base in the central coastal city of Sirte.
Wearing a Western-style white jacket for the broadcast, the Libyan leader also took a swipe at his other current bugbear — the Arab world.
The onetime Arab nationalist turned defiant supporter of African causes called on Egypt to build an Israeli-style separation barrier with the adjacent Middle East and join him in pursuing an African destiny.
The Arab League and the Arab Maghreb Union of North African states are both useless organisations, he said, calling on Egypt to favour the African Union, which he said should form the basis of a future United States of Africa.
Gadaffi’s newfound pragmatism, based on economic realities, has seen him mend fences with all the key Western powers.
His regime has paid out millions of dollars in compensation for the various attacks it was held responsible for in its militant heyday.
First was the 1988 Lockerbie bombing in which 270 people were killed when a Pan-Am jet was bombed over a Scottish town; second an agreement with France to compensate the victims of the 1989 bombing of an airliner over Niger; and finally a deal with Germany for a 1986 attack on a Berlin nightclub.
That agreement is to be formally signed on Friday, paving the way for a visit by Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, a German government spokesperson said.
Pragmatic economic concerns lie at the heart of Gadaffi’s reconciliation with the West — the United Nations sanctions that followed the airliner bombings ravaged his country’s oil industry. — Sapa-AFP
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