Gaddaffi

Remember Moammar Gaddaffi? The Libyan leader and expert turn-coat? Well, today he was coming to Nigeria for a summit. In his entourage were some 200 heavily armed bodyguards - all female - with a considerable amounts of weapons and ammunition. When he turned up at Abudja Airport, security staff refused to allow the entourage to travel with their heavy complement of weaponry. Flying into a rage, Gaddaffi stormed off and proceeded to walk the 40 km / 25 miles to Abudja. The Nigerian president, who also happened to be at the airport, intervened and suggested that the weapons would be allowed in, provided they were registered first. The Libyans rejected that, saying they would fly home. Fine with us, said the outraged Nigerians - you are still welcome, but only with 8 pistols as with any foreign security detail. Several hours later, the whole shebang was allowed into the country, with the superfluous weaponry left on the plane.

Gaddaffi has been in power in oil-rich Libya for more than 35 years. As I indicated in the first paragraph, he is a master turn-coat. During the 1970s and 80s, he was a well-known sponsor of the Palestine cause, and was also caught red-handed shipping armaments to the IRA in Northern Ireland. Libyan nationals were implicated in the bombing of PanAm flight 103, which crashed at Lockerbie, southern Scotland in December 1988. He himself was at the receiving end of Ronald Reagan's bombs in 1986, when US jets bombed Tripoli, the Libyan capital in retaliation for a bomb attack on a bar in Berlin, frequented by GIs, blamed on Libya.

Gaddaffi performed the most amazing U-turn in 2003, after Saddam Hussein was overthrown in Iraq. He started a reconciliation process with the United Kingdom, which had previously regarded Libya with animosity, after a siege at the Libyan Embassy in London, in 1984, resulted in the shooting and killing of a woman police constable. The shots were fired from inside the Embassy building. I reckon that Gaddaffi saw that his name would be next on the list.