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Tripoli — As the hour neared midnight and the bonfire burned down to embers last night, the aides began to glance nervously past the sleeping camels into the big tent behind them.
Prime Minister Paul Martin had been inside Libyan dictator Colonel Moammar Gadhafi's tent for more than an hour. The meeting, utterly unscheduled and spontaneously ordered by Col. Gadhafi over dinner, had no agenda or topic. A protocol officer threw his hands in the air. No Canadian leader had ever visited this mercurial leader, and things had very much not gone according to plan.
What were these two men doing? What deals were made in this huge Arab tent, ringed by armed soldiers, on a Libyan army base? What had the Prime Minister got himself into?
It was a strange climax to a very strange day.
While a neatly organized Canadian schedule had called for a conventional one-day state visit filled with official meetings, visits to factories and signings of contracts, Mr. Martin ended up spending a good part of the day seated on couches in a tent listening to Col. Gadhafi's unorthodox theories. At one point, as their talks dragged on, two camels mated clumsily just outside the tent.
"In terms of the camels outside and the scene, it was not the usual situation," Mr. Martin acknowledged at one point. "I have to ask myself, however, that when leaders come from the south in the middle of January, what they think of our 10-foot snowdrifts."
The Great Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, as Libya has been known since its 1969 socialist revolution, has little in common with the Dominion of Canada, except perhaps a mutual desire to make money from Libya's considerable oil resources, now fully open to exploitation after the end of years of international embargos against the former terrorist state.
From the moment his Airbus jet landed at a former U.S. Air Force base that was seized during the revolution, Mr. Martin repeatedly offered his rationale for this unprecedented and controversial meeting.
Yesterday marked the first anniversary of Libya's decision to rid itself of chemical and nuclear weapons, he noted. This, along with Libya's apologies for bombings of jetliners and nightclubs in the 1980s and its payment of billions of dollars to the victims, has led this rogue country to make peace with the West.
Following in the footsteps of British, French and German leaders who visited earlier this year, Mr. Martin said he wanted to encourage Libyan moves toward normalcy while helping Canadian companies make profitable deals with Libya.
But such an olive branch would not be easy to extend. Col. Gadhafi, renowned for having financed dozens of international terrorist groups and liberation movements in the 1970s and '80s, still rules Libya as a cult of personality. His socialist republic permits no conventional democracy, punishes any form of dissent, and operates prisons and courts that have raised serious alarm among human-rights groups
The Prime Minister's aides said he spent time at both meetings criticizing Libya's rights record, which includes summary trials, seemingly arbitrary imprisonments, mass roundups of immigrants and severe punishment for people who attempt to form political parties or criticize Col. Gadhafi's rule.
Mr. Martin said his discussion with Libyan Prime Minister Shukri Ghanem included "everything from due process to the rights of families, the need for consular services. And we got down into individual cases, and had quite a detailed discussion as to what is required."
Aides said this included the imprisonment of Mustapha Muhammad Krer, a Canadian citizen imprisoned in Libya for political dissent, and two other prisoners with Canadian ties.
In an effort to give weight to these criticisms, Mr. Martin also extended to Col. Gadhafi one of the few things Canada can offer to encourage the country to mend its ways: an offer of most-favoured-nation trading status, a political recognition that could eventually help Libya win membership in the World Trade Organization. His aides did not say what conditions were attached to this offer.
Mr. Martin described a meeting in which human rights and money-making opportunities were discussed almost in the same breath — a natural combination, he said.
"I certainly believe, and I think history has demonstrated, that in fact increasing trade is a major encouragement to sounder human rights. You're not going to get strong human rights in countries that isolate themselves," he argued.
In business-trip terms, yesterday's pinnacle was the signing of a $1-billion memorandum of understanding between the Libyan government and the Canadian engineering firm SNC-Lavalin for the expansion of the Great Man-Made River project, an enormous system of underground rivers that use aquifers beneath the Sahara to provide irrigation and drinking water for Libyan cities.
But Canadian officials quietly acknowledged that the hours spent in the tent yesterday had not been devoted as much to Canadian interests as to the Libyan leader's lectures on his own idiosyncratic theories: his belief in direct democracy, his ideas about complex conspiratorial links between the world's terrorist organizations and his belief that Israel and the Palestinian territories should unite to become a single nation known as "Isratine."
At one point late in the evening, Col. Gadhafi ushered a small group of Canadian journalists into the tent. After they had made a breakneck drive across the countryside and were searched by a sequence of increasingly menacing soldiers, they were invited into the spacious, incense-scented enclosure to hear the Libyan leader praise Canada's multicultural democracy and commitment to rights.
"Very soon, I expect Canada to be a Jamahiriya," Col. Gadhafi declared, unexpectedly, referring to his style of government which operates, in theory, as a state of the masses.
The Prime Minister looked briefly mortified. Then Col. Gadhafi roared with laughter, rocking back in his sofa.
Mr. Martin allowed himself a tight smile and a brief chuckle. But he seemed too shocked by the whole affair to propose, in return, that Libya maybe ought to turn itself into a dominion, or maybe a constitutional monarchy
I <3 insane dictators. I mean, Isratine? I think he lost his mind when Reagan bombed his daughter dead.
