KEY POINTS:
The mercurial dictator of Libya has reinvented himself yet again. He has been a pariah of the West; a sponsor of terrorism; the maverick autocrat with female bodyguards; the man who comes to Brussels for a summit, erects his tent and puts his camels out to graze in
the local park.
Thirty years ago with his little Green Book and his "Third Universal Theory", he proposed himself as the Mao Zedong of the Middle East, fashioning what he claimed to be a new ideology from the customs of his clan. But today Libya is in a different place. The worst of its diplomatic headaches are behind it and the world is keen to do business.
And now the ruler is trying on a new hat. Meet Muammar al-Gaddafi: screenwriter.
A series of impressionistic sketches he has written evoking his country as it was on the eve of invasion by Italy in September 1911 - placid, rustic, traditional - and then as it roused itself to fight to expel the foreigners, is to become the basis for a film costing at least US$40 million ($52m) which begins shooting in Libya next year.
Aimed principally at a non-Arab audience, and entitled Dhulm (injustice in Arabic) - Years of Torment, it will tell the story of Libya's traumatic experience at the hands of Italy.
To the other European powers, it was hard to take Italy seriously. Its first adventure, against the supposedly easy target of Ethiopia, ended in the worst defeat suffered by a European army in Africa.
Libya, just across the pond from Sicily, was thinly defended by a small Turkish garrison, at a time when the Ottoman Empire was on its knees. It was expected to be a pushover. Instead, after quick early success, Italy found itself embroiled in an insurgency that dragged on for the next 20 years.
Ramzi Rassi, the Lebanese producer of the new film, says that by the time the Italians fled home in 1943, one-third of the Libyan population had been killed and one-third forced into exile.
This is not Gaddafi's first foray into film. In 1980 he paid US$30m (NZ$39 million) to make an epic about Omar, a Bedouin schoolteacher, who became the leader of the Libyan resistance.
- INDEPENDENT