Word: gaddafi
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Libya's Colonel Muammar Gaddafi is often depicted in the West as a volatile dictator, unloved and distrusted on the world stage but firmly in command of his people. That assessment may no longer be altogether true. While his diplomats in London were creating havoc before their expulsion from Britain late last month, reports were circulating in Libya that Gaddafi's troubles were mounting at home. According to Western residents and Libyans in Tripoli, he is less popular today with his 3.2 million countrymen than at any time since he seized power in 1969 from the aging...
Until now, students and young adults have been the most forceful backers of "the Leader" as he swept aside many traditional social values and replaced them with his own populist ideas. But some of Gaddafi's more recent "reforms," including obligatory military training, have produced considerable disenchantment. Many younger Libyans are also uneasy about the regime's internal repression and its penchant for forcing Gaddafi's austere life-style on everyone. The seriousness of the situation is heightened by the fact that Libya's petroleum-based economy is ailing as a result of the worldwide...
There were reasons for the British concern. From within the sealed-off embassy on St. James's Square, the militants sent Gaddafi a message, reported from outside sources, pledging that they were prepared to die "in defense of our principles and aims." The British government understood that such rhetoric comes easily to Libyan revolutionaries, but it also knew that it could not rule out the possibility of a Libyan act of ultimate defiance. In the meantime a coroner's court was told that Constable Fletcher had died of stomach wounds from shots fired by a high-velocity weapon...
After the British government responded by breaking relations with the government of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi and giving his representatives until midnight Sunday to vacate the premises in London, it seemed at first that the petulant Gaddafi might hold out until the last possible moment before repatriating his people. The British remained fearful that a slip-up could lead to a gun battle in St. James's Square and a greater loss of life. In the end, however, after more than a week of painstaking negotiation, the withdrawal of diplomats and the closing of embassies was accomplished without further mishap...
...week was a tense and painful one for the government of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. The British public was outraged by the murder of the policewoman, Constable Yvonne Fletcher, 25, and by the thought that the Libyan "diplomat" who had fired an automatic weapon into a crowd of anti-Gaddafi demonstrators should go unpunished. Even as the diplomats of the two countries were preparing to fly home on Friday afternoon, the funeral of Constable Fletcher was being held at the 13th century Salisbury Cathedral in southern England...