Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, the Libyan leader, was yesterday greeted by protesting left-wing politicians with photos of the 1988 Lockerbie bombing pinned to their chests as he arrived to make a speech at the Italian Senate.
The photos of the wreckage of the Pan Am plane, brought down over Scotland by a terrorist bomb, were a riposte to Colonel Gaddafi’s gesture on his arrival in Rome on Wednesday. He wore a photo on his chest of the capture in 1931 of Omar al-Mukhtar, “The Lion of the Desert”, who was hanged by Italian colonial forces for leading a rebellion against the country’s Fascist rule.
The Lockerbie photos, worn by senators from the left-of-centre Italy of Values party, bore the inscription “270 dead”. The senators also displayed a fake academic award to Colonel Gaddafi “for violating human rights”. Felice Belisario, leader of the group, said that Colonel Gaddafi was responsible for “a series of terrorist acts” including Lockerbie, as well as being guilty of dictatorship and torture.
Mr Belisario said that although Libya had agreed to co-operate with Italy in preventing boatloads of illegal immigrants heading for the Italian island of Lampedusa, this amounted to blackmail since it would “send new waves of immigrants” if Italy did not live up to its promises to invest billions of euros in the country.
Pier Ferdinando Casini, a Christian Democratic leader, said that the red-carpet welcome for the Libyan leader and his 200-strong entourage — including his all-female squad of bodyguards, dubbed “the Amazons” by the Italian press — went “beyond decency and good taste.”
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Colonel Gaddafi has accepted responsibility for the Lockerbie outrage and Libya has paid compensation to the families of the victims as part of his campaign to emerge from international pariah status, of which his Italian trip — his first since taking power in a coup in 1969 — is the culmination. He has also abolished Libya’s nuclear and chemical weapons programmes.
In his speech at the Senate the Libyan leader reverted at one point to old style anti-Western rhetoric, hitting out at the United States for invading Iraq and comparing the 1986 US strikes on Tripoli and Benghazi with the terrorist attacks by Osama bin Laden. He added that he was being deliberately provocative, however, and urged “dialogue”. He did not refer to Libya’s retaliation for the 1986 attacks in firing two missiles at Lampedusa, the tiny Italian island just off the North African coast which is now a magnet for would-be migrants.
He said that he condemned terrorism, al-Qaeda and bin Laden, but added that “there are reasons behind terrorism, and we must look at these reasons”. Because of opposition protests the speech was made not in the Senate chamber, as planned, but in an adjoining hall.
Earlier he hailed a “new era” in relations with Italy, saying that a history of hatred and destruction had been replaced by one of friendship and co-operation. Italy occupied Libya in 1911 and it later became an Italian colony. At a press conference Colonel Gaddafi said that the photo he had worn of Omar al-Mukhtar’s capture symbolised the tragedy of Italian occupation in the same way that Christians wear a cross to mark the death of Christ.
Both sides expect commercial gain from the trip, with a series of business deals lined up to follow the visit to Libya by the Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi last summer, when he apologised for colonial rule and offered £3 billion in compensation. Italy, which is largely dependent on foreign energy, receives about a third of its requirements from Libya.
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Colonel Gaddafi said: “An era is closed. A new era has begun. Berlusconi is a man of great courage, he has taken the historic decision to apologise for Italy’s colonialist damage to Libya, and he is the only Western leader to have done so. This is why I am here today in Rome.”
Mr Berlusconi replied that he enjoyed a “true and profound friendship” with the Libyan leader, whom he described as “a wise man of the world”.
Colonel Gaddafi later faced protests from students on a visit to Rome University amid a big security operation. The protests focused on an accord setting up joint naval patrols to intercept would-be immigrants, who would be sent back to Libya without checks on whether they have legitimate asylum claims. Human Rights Watch said that the visit was a celebration of the “dirty deal” over immigration.
Colonel Gaddafi said that most of the immigrants were not seeking political asylum but were attracted to Europe’s wealth, a viewpoint shared by Mr Berlusconi. “They come out of the forests and say ‘There’s money up north’ and they go towards Libya and Europe,” the Libyan leader said. “Don’t take this political asylum issue seriously . . . Sometimes it makes me laugh.”
Colonel Gaddafi, who has pitched his Bedouin tent in the grounds of the 17th-century Villa Doria Pamphili, where he is staying, will tomorrow meet 700 Italian women at an encounter organised by Mara Carfagna, the former calendar girl and TV presenter who last year was made Equal Opportunities Minister by Mr Berlusconi.
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The newspaper Corriere della Sera said that with his extravagant uniform, straggly black hair and sunglasses Colonel Gaddafi was “a Michael Jackson lookalike”. The left-wing paper Il Riformista said that Colonel Gaddafi, 67, and Mr Berlusconi, 72, looked like “two old men with tinted black hair and faces creased by too much plastic surgery”.