Word: tripolis
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Only days after President Reagan called upon all U.S. citizens to leave Colonel Muammar Gaddafi's Libya, the first of some 1,500 Americans expected to depart by the end of next month were dutifully queuing up at the Tripoli International Airport for the flight home. Despite well-publicized U.S. reports that Gaddafi had dispatched hit men to assassinate Reagan, few believed that they were in any real danger of Libyan retaliation. For the occasion, Gaddafi eased usually tight restrictions on journalists to invite members of the foreign press to hear him, presumably, denounce Washington's claims. TIME...
...press conference, or rather the non-conference, was vintage Gaddafi. After two days of waiting, anxious revolutionary committeemen herded the press out of our hotels for a breathtaking, Libyan-style drive through the narrow streets of Tripoli. Lights blinking and horns blaring, the wild caravan raced to a walled compound where soldiers wielding submachine guns waved us through a gate flanked by two Russian T-72 tanks. For the fifth time since my arrival I was thoroughly searched. Inside the handsome government offices with beautifully crafted wooden Arabic arches, television crews set up their equipment on priceless rugs. Then...
Those thoughts are enshrined in the Green Book, a three-volume work of revolutionary philosophy penned by Gaddafi. Cryptic excerpts are plastered all over Tripoli. "Representation is a falsification of democracy ... In need, freedom is latent . .. The party system aborts democracy." In the airport, the traveler is inundated with illuminated signs in Arabic and English that read: NO DEMOCRACY WITHOUT POPULAR CONGRESS. Portraits of Gaddafi are everywhere, in private homes, musty old hotels, on billboards in service stations. Pointedly, there are also anti-American posters depicting Libyans shoving a spear through the head of a bleeding pig clothed in Uncle...
...Gaddafi will go to extreme lengths to avoid allowing Soviet technicians to come in and help with the oil production. Indeed, Gaddafi seems careful to keep the 3,000 to 5,000 Soviet advisers now in Libya isolated in outlying military posts. The representative of TASS news agency in Tripoli complained openly last week about the Soviet inability to persuade Gaddafi to allow them to open a military base...
...They tried many things to do this . . . you are a superpower. How are you afraid? America must get rid of this administration . . . as they did with Nixon, and elect another respectful President to get respect for America. . . He is silly, he is ignorant, . . . Reagan is liar." His interviewer in Tripoli, ABC's Lou Cioffi, asked Gaddafi what message he had for Reagan. "I would have to tell...