LIBYA’S PAST and present collided in an untidy heap on the tarmac of Tripoli airport, where the long-engrained instinct to celebrate a victory over the West tussled with the new-found need to hold on to the country’s tenuous respectability.
The result was both noisy and messy. A flag-waving extravaganza was painstakingly prepared and then hastily dismantled in the middle of the show. It is not clear what brought about the abrupt reversal.
The triumphal hero’s return could have been the brainchild of Col Muammar Gadafi’s flamboyant son, Saif al-Islam, with an eye to currying favour among Libyan nationalists, and may have been cancelled when his father found out about it.
Or the ageing leader himself could have had a last-minute change of mind. It is possible he only belatedly came across the personal appeal from Gordon Brown to tone down the celebrations. The whims of dictatorships are usually hard to fathom. But, whatever the reason, the about-turn came too late to stop pictures of the event ricocheting around the world, scarring Libya’s prodigal image.
Meanwhile, the confusion in Libya was mirrored by equivocation in London and Washington, where officials were also struggling to find a convincing narrative.
The British and US governments declared the pictures of the Megrahi homecoming “distressing” and “offensive” respectively, but in both capitals there was reluctance to even contemplate any punitive measures – short of reconsidering a visit to Libya by the duke of York to attend the 40th anniversary of the revolution.
This will not cause much embarrassment in Tripoli, which had yet to send out the invitations.–