Word: gaddafi
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Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, 29, leader of Libya's revolutionary government, is a compulsive orator who occasionally stumbles over his own rhetoric. He did so again last week before a clutch of visiting Arab notables and a crowd of 10,000 attending a celebration marking the second anniversary of Libya's takeover of the former U.S. Wheelus Air Force Base outside Tripoli. Gaddafi scored the U.S. for racism and imperialism but thundered most harshly at Britain "because Britain handed Palestine over to the Jews and handed the Gulf islands to Iran"-a reference to three small islands...
...Gaddafi's high-flown statement angered the British, discomforted some Arabs and puzzled the Irish. The British and U.S. ambassadors to Tripoli walked out while he spoke. Next day Middle East newspapers suggested that in the battle against Israel, Northern Ireland's problems had low priority indeed. In Ireland, both branches of the Irish Republican Army insisted that they had received nothing...
...Marxist-oriented I.R.A. Official branch offered the unkindest rebuttal of all. When a Communist-backed revolt broke out in Sudan last year, one official remembered, Gaddafi captured some rebels as they passed through Libya and handed them over to Sudanese President Jaafar Numeiry for execution. That, said the I.R.A., hardly qualified him as a fellow revolutionary...
...Gaddafi mysteriously disappeared from sight for a time last year, and there are rumors that he suffers bouts of severe depression. But he remains firmly in charge of the youthful (average age: 28) clique of officers who overthrew Idris; in addition to being chief of state, he holds no fewer than nine titles-including Prime Minister, Defense Minister and commander in chief of the 22,000-man armed forces. Practically speaking, he has no opposition among the introspective, lethargic Libyan people, except perhaps at the University of Libya in Tripoli. Gaddafi stalked off in a towering rage not long...
...display of frugality, the colonel tools about Tripoli in a Volvo or Land Rover, but he recently publicly chided a slumdweller earning $2.80 a day for not building his family a better house. Gaddafi was married in 1969 to the daughter of an army officer, with Nasser as witness. He later divorced her and married a nurse he met while hospitalized with appendicitis; he has never seen a son by that first marriage. One reason for his impulsiveness and eccentricity, apparently, is that the handsome, introspective Libyan soldier sees the world through the tunnel vision of a True Believer...