By ROBERT FISK
BEIRUT - Muammar Gaddafi must sometimes find it difficult to remember which `liberation' movement he has supported and which he has ignored.
Ten years ago, Sierre Leone's Foday Sankoh - famous for his group's leg, ear, hand and lip amputations - trained in Libya alongside Charles Taylor, Liberia's gangland boss who became President. In May, Gaddafi sent a delegation to Sierre Leone to work for the release of United Nations staff taken hostage by rebels.
Sankoh's Revolutionary United Front has been supported by Liberia and by Burkina Faso whose President, Blaise Compaore, has been accused of channelling weapons to the RUF and whose close ties with Gaddafi have been in evidence for years.
Taylor and Compaore have both been charged by an international investigation of exchanging guns - some of them from Libya - for diamonds that end up in international trading houses. Libyan weapons are said to be legally purchased by Burkina Faso and then sent on to Liberia.
Gaddafi is redesigning himself. Still the leader of pan-Arabism, still offering unity to Syria, Egypt and Sudan (none of whom want it) and still the messiah of Islam, he has acknowledged Libya's responsibility for killing a British policewoman outside the Libyan Embassy in London in 1984, he has handed over the two Lockerbie suspects - although partly on his own terms - and sanctions have been partially lifted. He admits that some of the "liberation"' movements he assisted were not really `"liberation" movements at all. It was a mistake.
And so international pariah Gaddafi has become international negotiator Gaddafi, ready to involve himself in the swamp politics of central Africa or offer his assistance to France in securing the release of hostages in the Philippines - albeit hostages held by a group whose mentors, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, were once funded by Gaddafi himself.
He returned to Africa as a trans-
continental figure when the Algerian President, Abdulaziz Bouteflika, welcomed him in July to the first Organisation of African Unity summit he had attended in 20 years. Gaddafi was thanked for trying (vainly) to end the 14-month border war between Eritrea and Ethiopia and for his efforts to send a peacekeeping force to the Congo. His 60 soldiers are still in their Entebbe hotel rooms.
At an Arab summit in Cairo last December, Gaddafi was hard at work trying to convince the Presidents of Sudan, Eritrea, Uganda and Congo to drop their differences and support Sudanese president Omar Bashir's new state of emergency in Khartoum. In Gaddafi's presence, Bashir and President Yoweri Museveni signed an agreement to establish diplomatic relations between their two countries.
By the middle of this year, Bashir was urging Gaddafi to persuade John Garang's Sudan People's Liberation Army to make peace with Khartoum, while Gaddafi all the time blamed the United States for encouraging the southern Sudanese rebels to delay an agreement. His successes in Africa may not always be obvious, but his delight in publicity has never been in doubt.
Last April, for example, Gaddafi travelled to a Togo summit in a large convoy that made its way across Niger, Burkina Faso and Ghana.
Gaddafi's support for the African National Congress during the apartheid years was a singularly shrewd policy, earning him the friendship of Nelson Mandela and a special visit to Tripoli last month by South African minister Ronnie Kasrils, to receive the two South African hostages from Jolo. At an Organisation of African Unity conference in Algiers a year ago, Gaddafi was supposed to end the Ethiopean-Eritrean border war and send a peacekeeping force to the Congo. He set up his tent on the hotel lawns refusing to stay inside the building because it was "a symbol of American imperialism."
Gaddafi it was who once turned up to a non-aligned summit in Belgrade with two horses and six camels on a separate plane; the Yugoslavs allowed him to graze the camels in front of his hotel - where he pitched his tent and drank fresh camel milk - but declined to permit him to ride to the conference on one of his white chargers. Several of the camels still languish in Belgrade Zoo.
- INDEPENDENT
Pariah becomes an international mediator
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