News Service from House Harris

EUR: Gaddafi 'turns page on past' with visit to Italy

ROME, June 10 AFP - Italy rolled out the red carpet on Wednesday for Libyan leader Moamer Gaddafi who said he has "turned the page on the past" after arriving for a landmark visit.

Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi met Gaddafi and his 200-strong entourage at Rome's Ciampino airport at the start of the three-day visit aimed at consolidating a friendship treaty signed last year.

"The page on the past has been turned and a new page of friendship has opened," the leader of the oil-rich north African state said after meeting President Giorgio Napolitano, hailing "this new generation of Italians for having had the great courage to resolve questions of the past."

The visit seals a major rapprochement with the August 2008 treaty under which Italy will pay five billion dollars (3.5 billion euros) over the next 25 years as compensation for Rome's 1911-47 military occupation and colonisation of Libya.

While "no compensation is possible for what colonial Italy did to the Libyan people, (the treaty) is the sign that Italy condemns colonialism (and) has apologised for what happened, and that is what allowed me to come here today," Gaddafi said.

The flamboyant leader's visit comes amid criticism over Italy's decision to return to Libya some 500 would-be immigrants caught in international waters under a new policy introduced last month.

The rights group Human Rights Watch on Wednesday slammed the visit, saying it "celebrates a dirty deal" under which the two countries "run roughshod over refugee and migrant rights."

"It looks less like friendship and more like a dirty deal to enable Italy to dump migrants and asylum seekers on Libya and evade its obligations," the group said in a statement.

Rome has stepped up its relations with Tripoli in recent years in a bid to rein in a massive influx of migrants, many of whom come by boat from Libya across the Mediterranean.

The European refugee agency noted last week that Libya is the only African country that is not party to the 1951 Refugee Convention, does not have any asylum procedures and often detains people seeking protection indefinitely in extremely poor conditions.

Gaddafi, the Arab world's longest serving leader who has been in power since 1969, is to address the Italian Senate on Thursday.

Senators of the opposition Democratic Party and others plan to boycott the speech in protest over Gaddafi's policies.

In 2007, Tibetan spiritual leader and Nobel peace laureate "the Dalai Lama wasn't allowed to address the Senate while it is allowed for Gaddafi, a dictator," the head of the small Italy of Values (IDV) group in the Senate, Felice Belisario, said in a statement.

Benedetto Della Vedova, a lawmaker from Berlusconi's People of Freedom party, also spoke out against the event, saying: "A solemn speech... before the Senate seems neither justified nor opportune."

Gaddafi, who will also attend next month's Group of Eight summit in Italy as the rotating president of the African Union, has returned to the international fold since abandoning ambitions to build weapons of mass destruction in 2003.

The eccentric Libyan leader has pitched his trademark tent in Rome's Villa Doria Pamphili park, where he will sleep in the sumptuous 17th-century palace of the same name.

Gaddafi is proud of his nomadic heritage and maintains a lavish tent in the desert outside the central town of Sirte where he often receives foreign guests.

Africa's third largest oil producer after Nigeria and Angola but with a far smaller population, Libya has also become a major investor in the Italian economy.

Thanks to its oil revenues, Libya has stakes in several large Italian companies such as oil giant Eni and banking group UniCredit.

"Italy's goal is to involve Libya more in the concert of nations to make it more responsible, to encourage it to carry out reforms, to fight terrorism. Libya is a strategic actor," said analyst Raffaello Matarazzo of the Italian think tank Istituto Affari Internazionali.