One of them likes to call himself an “emancipator of women”. The other likes women to call him “papi”. So when two of the world’s most flamboyant and eccentric politicians — the Libyan leader, Colonel Moammar Gadaffi, and Italy’s prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi — met on Wednesday in Rome, women figured large.
The Libyan leader was accompanied by his all-female, 40-strong bodyguard squad, its members dressed in khaki uniforms and red berets. And the schedule for his controversial first visit to Italy included, at his own request, a meeting on Friday with large numbers of Italian women. Very large numbers.
The plan was for “only” 700. But officials said on Thursday that such was the colonel’s drawing power the event had had to be moved to a concert hall with a capacity for 1 000.
Berlusconi has had more than a little trouble lately with embarrassing photos. So it must have been with a sinking Âfeeling that he watched the Libyan leader descend the aircraft steps with another one pinned to his chest.
The photograph Gadaffi wore to several of the ceremonies on the opening day of his visit did not show young women in underwear by Berlusconi’s poolside, let alone a former Czech prime minister in the altogether. But it was discomforting for his hosts all the same: it showed the Libyan resistance leader, Omar Mukhtar, the “Lion of the Desert”, on the day before he was hanged by ÂItalian colonialists in 1931.
Gadaffi flew in with a 300-strong retinue, on three Airbuses. As ever, he brought with him a giant Bedouin tent, which was erected in a Rome park.
Security for his visit was tight. But that is partly because, while Gadaffi may have bones to pick with Italy, some Italians have bones to pick with him.
Officially on Thursday it was all smiles as the colonel praised Italy for having “turned a page on the past”. Relations have improved since Berlusconi’s Âgovernment agreed last year to pay $5-billion in reparations for Italy’s Âcolonial rule. Italy, Gadaffi said, had “apologised, and that is what allowed me to be able to come here today”. But not everyone is happy about the visit. Gadaffi is set to encounter protests over a deal that allows Italian patrols to return would-be migrants, including asylum seekers, to Libyan ports. On Wednesday he dismissed claims that the deal prevented asylum seekers from applying for protection, in a way that visibly disconcerted his host, normally a champion of political incorrectness.
“This is one of the lies that is put about,” the colonel declared at a joint press conference after his talks with ÂBerlusconi. “The Africans do not have problems of political asylum. People who live in the bush, and often in the desert, don’t have political problems. They don’t have oppositions or majorities or elections.”
The Libyan leader, who is also chairperson of the African Union, went on: These are things that only people who live in cities know. [Other Africans] don’t even have an identity. And I don’t mean a political identify; they don’t even have a Âpersonal identity. They come out of the bush and they say: ‘In the north, there’s money, there’s wealth’ — and so they go to Libya, and from there to Europe.”
According to the United Nations, an unusually high proportion of the migrants who cross from Libya are Âasylum seekers fleeing wars and disorder. But Gadaffi was having none of it. “Please, don’t take seriously this business about political asylum. The idea they are all asylum seekers makes you laugh sometimes.” — guardian.co.uk