KEY POINTS:
Just behind the bagpipe band, in the ranks of unarmed conscripts in ill-fitting uniforms, and opposite the row of sweating foreign dignitaries, Nadia Ibrahim Calipha, 19, with thick black hair braided under her baseball cap, was awaiting her turn to march.
"I am proud to be here, proud
of our Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, proud of my country," she said brightly.
From the wall of the old citadel 100m away, the stern features of the Supreme Guide of the Revolution himself, 2.4m high on a green banner, looked over Tripoli's central square, a thin crowd of spectators, some haphazard fireworks, Nadia and the Mediterranean.
At the weekend Gaddafi celebrated the 38th anniversary of the military coup in which he ousted the British-backed King Idris. The 65-year-old, one of the last of a generation of strongman rulers, is no longer a pariah.
His support for fanatical terrorists, violent warlords and corrupt African dictators - and the decade and a half of United Nations and American sanctions that they brought - are over.
Libya's recent history, said former British Prime Minister Tony Blair during a visit, showed that "it is possible to go from a situation [of being] an outcast in the international community to one in which the relationship is transformed".
Libya is certainly changing. "We are now taking our rightful place in the international order," said Rafaa, a 63-year-old businessman. "We have been cut off for too long. It is as if we are waking from a long sleep."
Yet a week here makes clear that change is far more limited than Blair and others seem to think. Mohammed Ahmed, 43, who has sold fruit at Tripoli's Friday market for 18 years, agreed that "business is better than it has ever been", but otherwise, he said drily, "I haven't seen much change".
Any radical developments have been restricted to foreign trade and investment. The focus of Western nations is understandable: there is big money to be made in Libya.
During Blair's visit in May, a £450 million ($1292 million) gas exploitation contract for BP was signed and a major sale of British missiles and air defence systems announced.
"There's a bit of a Klondike atmosphere," said one British businessman. "Everyone is streaming in, looking for their bit of land to dig."
For Gaddafi's pockets are deep.
"He has way more cash than he knows what to do with," said one Western diplomat in Tripoli.
High oil prices have meant that the Supreme Guide of The Great Socialist People's Libyan Jamahiriya is sitting on estimated currency reserves of £35 billion and has annual oil revenues of £20 billion.
Other major powers are also taking an interest in the new "open and re-integrated" country. Days after Nicolas Sarkozy, the French President, negotiated the release of a group of Bulgarian nurses imprisoned in Libya on trumped-up charges of deliberately infecting children with HIV-infected blood, Paris announced a major arms deal - and more aid in the building of Libya's first nuclear power station.
Combined with a £10 billion Government construction programme, the result is a boom. All over the country, blocks of flats, hotels, shopping centres, parks and port facilities are being built, often by foreign companies.
Outside the al-Kouf showroom on the outskirts of Tripoli, six new excavators, each worth £100,000, sit beside the busy highway.
Nurredin, the manager, said he expects to sell them all quickly. "No problem. We are selling 40 cars and two concrete mixers a month."
The effects of the Libyan economic explosion - Tripoli claimed growth rates of 7 per cent last year - are being felt across North Africa. Mahmud, the Sudanese night-watchman at the al-Kouf showroom, is one of more than a million illegal immigrants drawn to Libya by the demand for labour and the relatively high local wages. He earns £100 a month. "It's not much," he said. "But without me my family of nine would not eat."
At roundabouts, groups of plumbers, electricians and labourers wait to be hired. Abu Bakr, a 24-year-old from Ghana, has invested in a power saw and is hired, for between £5 and £10, one day in two.
"Life is tough," he said.
Immigrants are notoriously badly treated by local authorities. Regularly beaten by police, they are frequently deported en masse.
It is tempting to dismiss Libya as a tinpot but relatively benign dictatorship. But the internal press remains tightly controlled, foreign journalists carefully monitored and no political dissent is tolerated.
Conversations in which criticism of the regime is voiced are rare and commentators talk of a culture of concealment and opacity. There is no telephone directory, and ministries and offices are not sign-posted.
But dissent within Libya is limited. There is no need for Saddam-style endemic brutality. The vast oil revenues may have been horrendously mismanaged but they have none the less allowed Gaddafi to buy off any unrest. Sixty per cent of jobs are provided by the state.
Today, Calipha will be bussed back to her single-sex state summer camp to resume a programme of sports, hobbies and reading from Gaddafi's Green Book. She has one parting message: "Tell your readers the truth. We are not terrorists, we want to be your friends."
Life and times of the Libyan leader
* Muammar Gaddafi was born in 1942 in the Sirte coastal area of Libya to nomadic parents. He went to Benghazi University to study geography, but dropped out to join the Army.
* On September 1, 1969, Gaddafi and nationalist officers staged a bloodless coup while King Idriss was in Turkey. The monarchy was abolished and in the 1970s Gaddafi drew up his "Third Universal Theory", a middle way between communism and capitalism.
* In 1977 he changed the country's name to the Great Socialist Popular Libyan Arab Jamahiriyah (State of the Masses).
* United Nations sanctions, imposed in 1992 to pressure Tripoli to hand over two Libyan suspects for trial for the 1988 Lockerbie airliner bombing over Scotland, which killed 270 people, crippled oil-rich Libya's economy and took the sting out of his anti-capitalist, anti-Western rhetoric.
* In 1998 Gaddafi agreed to surrender the two bombing suspects.
* Gaddafi, shunned internationally for much of his rule because the West accused him of terrorism, improved his standing in 2003 when Libya accepted civil responsibility for Lockerbie.
* Months later Tripoli announced it would abandon its weapons of mass destruction programmes, drawing praise from London and Washington.
* II September 2004, President Bush formally ended a US trade embargo.
* In August 2006, Gaddafi made a series of speeches scolding his nation for over-reliance on petroleum, foreigners and imports.
- Observer
