Qaddafi a Roma

Muammar el Qaddafi, the Sarah Palin of Arab dictators(*), is in Rome this week--not to shop for new Prada eyeglasses (he appears swimmingly stocked), but to cash in on Italian crow and $5 billion.

Italy, you see, took over colonial cudgels in Libya where the Ottoman Empire left off in 1911 (after a 400-year occupation). Italians lorded it over Libyans for the next 32 years, back when the country was called Tripolitania and Cyrenaica, not very kindly. There was something about European colonial powers in Africa (the French in Algeria, the Belgians in the Congo, the Italians in Libya) that brought out the absolute worst of their brutal best. Italians spared no terror and left no stone unslung at the locals during their Libyan years. Edward Gibbon called Libyans "the most savage of mankind," but even Gibbon could not peer 150 years into the future, or he might have substituted Italians for that quote (though Libyans gave Italians a piece of their insurgent best).

By 1934, with Mussolini beginning to compete with Hitler for top honors in inhumanity, Italian peasants began pouring in, displacing local peasants by the thousands and ravishing their age-old farming communities. Italians were not liked. It wasn't until 1951 that the Libyans finally got rid of Europeans, including the French and British boots that had replaced Italy's and Germany's half-way through World War II. Libya became one of the first independent African states on Dec. 24, 1951. The United Kingdom of Libya, it was called with Union Jack flair at the time, though Libya as we know it today came into its own with Muammar el Qaddafi's ascendance in 1969.

His trip to Rome is to collect reparations. And to guarantee Italy a few sweet, gassy economic deals: Italy wants to drill for Libyan natural gas. (The $5 billion Italy will shovel Libya's way will more than make up for the $1.5 billion Libya agreed to pay in compensation to the victims of Pan Am Flight 103, which Qaddafi's terrorist scheming blew out of the skies over Lockerbie, Scotland, on Dec. 21, 1988, killing 270 people.)

“A sad chapter in history has been closed,” Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi said in a joint appearance with the born-again anti-terrorist. Hearing that line, Italians wish they could say the same about their own Berlusconi, whose sad and often hilarious chapters continue to bedevil Italy's operatic scene, though who knows, maybe it's Berlusconi's nuttiness that gives Qaddafi the sense of having a kindred playmate across the Mediterranean.

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_{(*) Don't panic: I'm not implying that Sarah Palin pals around with terrorists or that she would be an irrelevant showboating prima dona without her state's oil wealth, but that she and Qaddafi have the Andy Warhol gene for publicity stunts: Breathless headlines and middlebrow paparazzi known as television reporters chase after them wherever they go. Their 15 minutes of fame is a recurring coo-coo clock.}

See Also:

• Qaddafi à Paris
• Profile: Muammar el Qaddafi
• BFF: "Mad Dog of the Middle East" Qaddafi Meets His "Leezza"
• Understanding Qaddafi's Green Book
• How Do You Spell Qaddafi's Name?
• Muammar el Qaddafi: the Opera
• Libya's Intimate in the Remote