The Madness of Gaddafi
http://frontpagemag.com/2010/07/30/gaddafi-slaps-aide-in-public/
The true face of Libyan “humanitarianism” reared its ugly head again this week at the unlikely venue of the African Heads of State Summit in Uganda. Only two weeks after sending a ship of supplies to Gaza, ostensibly out of “humanitarian” concern for the curious Palestinian suffering under Israel’s alleged tyranny, Libyan president Muammar Gaddafi showed his personal understanding of compassion at the international conference, attended by about 30 African leaders, when he slapped an aide in public.
Gaddafi engaged in this act, which appeared to be completely normal behaviour on his part, when his protocol people brought him to the wrong conference building at a luxury resort outside of Kampala, Uganda’s capital, where the summit was held from July 25 to July 27. According to the Kenyan newspaper The Nation, Gaddafi had climbed halfway up the incorrect venue’s staircase before being informed of his error by a Ugandan presidential guard. This caused a discussion in Arabic between Gaddafi and one of his aides which ended with the Libyan dictator slapping the aide on both cheeks. Journalists who hurried to take a picture were blocked from doing so by his bodyguards.
An hour later, Gaddafi arrived at the correct venue but, according to The Nation, left the meeting after 30 minutes, ordering his aides to make him tea on a charcoal stove outside in the garden. Attracted by the unusual activity, it was reported other delegates and journalists started to crowd around and take his picture. But this only caused another temper tantrum by Gaddafi who “angrily lifted his chair and hid amongst the flowers.” His bodyguards proceeded to set up a security perimeter around the garden.
This was not the end, however, of the Libyan delegation’s egregious behaviour. Twice during the conference Gaddafi’s gaggle of bodyguards got into pushing and shoving matches with Ugandan security personnel responsible for the summit’s security. At the entrance to one of the venues, the scuffles, witnessed by other delegates, only ceased when the Libyan ambassador to Uganda yelled: “Don’t fight! Don’t fight!”
A similar “mighty scuffle” also ensued in South Africa in 2002 at the inauguration for the new African Union after 200 fully-armed Libyan bodyguards, looking like “a small army of invasion,” alighted from their Boeing 737. Only after the Libyan guards had left most of their weapons behind were they allowed into the country. A normal security contingent for a head of state, according to one report, usually numbers about ten.
Gaddafi is best known in the West as a main sponsor of state terrorism in the 1980s. He sent his assassins to Europe to kill Libyan dissidents and was responsible in 1984 for the death of British police constable, Yvonne Fletcher, who was killed by gunfire from inside the Libyan embassy in London. The Lockerbie Bombing of December 21, 1988 was also Gaddafi’s handiwork and is still making headlines as more details are revealed surrounding the controversial release of Abdel Baset al-Megrahi from a Scottish prison. Al-Megrahi, a Libyan intelligence agent, was found guilty in the deaths of 270 people when a bomb destroyed Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie Scotland.
However, the “Brotherly Leader and Guide of the Revolution,” as Gaddafi is called in Libyan publications, overreached himself when he had a discotheque bombed in Berlin in 1986, killing two US servicemen. President Ronald Reagan wasted little time in hitting Libya with a retaliatory air strike, from which Gaddafi himself barely escaped alive.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment