Kadafi Flexes Muscles Again on Anniversary

TRIPOLI, Libya —  Col. Moammar Kadafi, whose vision of Arab unity and international terror turned a tiny desert nation into a feisty global power broker, celebrated the 20th anniversary of his revolution Friday, vowing that Libya will continue to finance violent rebellion against “colonialist intervention” in Panama and elsewhere in the world.

Throwing off for the moment his recent conciliatory overtures to the West, Kadafi declared that his revolution “will not stop in the middle of the way” and promised to commit Libya’s gradually recovering oil revenues to export the revolution.

“We are a rich country, and can support the initial struggle through both material and moral support until the struggle gains victory,” he said, pledging aid to rebels and revolutionary regimes in Panama, Nicaragua, New Caledonia, South Africa and elsewhere to carry out Libya’s “world program.”

Vows Support for Panama

“The U.S. has made it conditional that in order to hold talks with Libya today, Libya should specify the question of (support for Gen. Manuel Antonio) Noriega’s regime in) Panama,” he said. “This means that the . . . revolution is present in Panama. We say we will not withdraw our supportive stand alongside the people of Panama in countering U.S. imperialism.”

Flanked by more than a dozen Third World leaders including Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega and Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat, Kadafi was in a clearly revolutionary humor. But diplomats here said that for all the rhetoric, the Libyan strongman has mellowed and is apparently eager to end three years of U.S. sanctions that have had a powerful impact on Libya’s struggling economy.

For the past three days, however, economic troubles have taken a back seat here in a city ablaze with festivities commemorating Sept. 1, 1969, when Kadafi and a band of military colleagues overthrew the monarch, established the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, or State of the Masses, and set the small North African country on a dizzying course of cultural revolution and Arab activism.

Downtown Freshly Painted

Throughout downtown Tripoli, apartments, office buildings and shops have been splashed with fresh coats of green and white paint, the colors of the Revolution, and strings of white lights have been festooned along trees, lampposts and rooftops from the seaport to the central square.

In a city that is normally drab and eerily silent at midday--shops are only beginning to open again under a new privatization program--thousands of Libyans lined the streets for a parade of the new “People’s Army.” Kadafi had issued a decree earlier in the day abolishing the traditional army in favor of what he called “the principle of collective defense,” making the military in some ways subject to the same system of committees that governs public life here.

As thousands of citizens carrying rifles marched by, others pushed forward from the streets to watch, chanting and singing.

Suspended above the crowds, a grinning likeness of the colonel stretched across the sides of an enormous balloon bobbing above the square. Although Kadafi says he has turned power over to the 800 or so Revolutionary People’s Committees that govern this country of 4.3 million people, few question that his influence remains nearly absolute. This week quotes from his “Green Book” manifesto for the Cultural Revolution have been posted virtually everywhere.

Kadafi’s Visage Everywhere

Even at a spectacular production Friday night featuring a reported 35,000 Libyan youths dancing, marching and waving flags, the images framed on thousands of cards in the stands changed continually from revolutionary slogans back to Kadafi, his face ringed by pink roses or, in one case, the luminous corona of a huge sun, its rays spinning slowly around Kadafi’s smiling visage.

Of more than 40 heads of state invited for the festivities, most of the 18 leaders and two dozen delegations that accepted came from Africa and the Middle East, where Kadafi has worked in recent months to mend fences with neighbors he has in the past courted and enraged in turn.

Morocco’s King Hassan II, Algerian President Chadli Bendjedid and Tunisian President Zine Abidine ben Ali were all in attendance, but Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak declined to attend, sending instead his deputy prime minister--this despite the fact that Egyptian-Libyan relations have warmed enough in recent months that the border has been reopened and twice-a-week flights resumed.

Among the most enthusiastically received guests at a special session of the People’s Congress was Syria’s President Hafez Assad, who rarely travels. Sources said Kadafi and other leaders of the Maghreb countries of North Africa are likely to use the occasion to pressure Assad into resolving the worsening crisis in Lebanon.

But plans to have a full-scale summit conference on economic unity in the Maghreb region were reportedly stymied.