(CNSNews.com) – Muammar Gaddafi on Tuesday marks the 40th anniversary of the coup that brought him to power, but with the row still brewing over the release of the man convicted in the Lockerbie bombing, the event will not be the showpiece of Libya’s return to international standing that he had hoped.
 
Instead, the celebrations have drawn mostly African leaders – including Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, wanted for war crimes in Darfur, and Zimbabwean autocrat Robert Mugabe – as well as a few others, such as Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and President Gloria Arroyo of the Philippines.
 
Gaddafi’s decision to hold a “special summit” of the 53-nation African Union on Monday, less than two months after the bloc held a regular summit, helped to boost the numbers of leaders who will be present for Tuesday’s events.
 
Among the list of cancellations were senior European leaders including French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Prince Andrew, the Duke of York, who was to have attended in his capacity as Britain’s special representative for international trade and investment.
 
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev’s office also said he would not attend, citing previously scheduled arrangements. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin will be in Poland for events commemorating the outbreak of World War II, as well German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
 
Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, whose country has close economic ties with Libya, traveled to Tripoli at the weekend but left ahead of Tuesday’s events, and was also planning to attend the ceremonies in Poland.
 
Berlusconi’s visit drew strong protests at home, together with the decision to send the Frecce Tricolori squadron – Italy’s equivalent of the U.S. Air Force Thunderbirds and U.S. Navy Blue Angels – to participate in the celebrations.

Members of a centrist opposition party protested outside the Libyan Embassy in Rome Monday. UDC party secretary Lorenzo Cesa told reporters the aim was “to defend Italy’s dignity and to state clearly that we have nothing in common with those that do not respect the victims of massacres and human rights.”
 
State Department spokesman Ian Kelly said Monday he was not aware of any “plans for somebody from our Embassy in Tripoli to attend” the celebrations. The embassy’s phone went unanswered on Tuesday morning.
 
Some European countries will be sending officials to Tuesday’s celebrations. Spain’s socialist government has dispatched its foreign minister and Malta, the E.U. member closest in proximity to Libya, will send its head of state.
 
The scramble by others to avoid the Libyan celebration follows the controversy stoked by the decision by Scottish authorities to release Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the Libyan sentenced in 2001 to life imprisonment for the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie.
 
Megrahi, who is purportedly terminally ill and was freed on “compassionate grounds,” was greeted as a hero on his return to Tripoli, further embarrassing the British government which is accused of freeing the prisoner in exchange for lucrative oil deals.
 
Guide of the Great Revolution
 
Gaddafi has come a long way since toppling the Western-backed government of King Idris I at the age of 27 on September 1, 1969. Idris was undergoing medical treatment in Greece at the time of the coup.
 
Declaring himself at various times chairman of a Revolutionary Command Council, prime minister, and Leader and Guide of the Great al-Fatah Revolution, he turned Libya – officially, the Great Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya – into a haven for terrorist groups and a supporter of despots, including Liberia’s Charles Taylor and Sierra Leonean rebel Foday Sankoh, notorious for amputating victims’ limbs.

Gaddafi’s Libya was blamed for the Lockerbie bombing, as well as the bombing of a French airliner over Niger in 1989. Seven Americans, including the wife of the American ambassador to Chad, were among the 170 mostly European and African passengers killed on board the UTA DC-10.
 
A French court later sentenced six Libyan officials, one of them Gadaffi's brother-in-law, in absentia to life imprisonment for the bombing.
 
The 1980s also saw the bombing of a disco in Berlin frequented by U.S. troops, two of whom were among the three killed. Libya was implicated in the 1986 attack and President Reagan ordered retaliatory air strikes against Tripoli.
 
The U.N. Security Council in the 1990s imposed sanctions against Libya over the Lockerbie bombing.
 
Gaddafi’s eventual handover of Megrahi and another suspect for trial in 1999, his agreement to pay compensation to the families of victims of both the Pan Am and UTA bombings, and his subsequent decision to abandon non-conventional weapons programs following the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003, set him on the road to international respectability.
 
Relations with the West improved significantly, and the U.S. removed Libya from its list of terror-sponsors and restored diplomatic ties. In March 2004, then British Prime Minister Tony Blair became the first Western leader to travel to Libya.
 
Once sanctions had been lifted, Western energy companies rushed to Libya, which with oil reserves estimated at 43 billion barrels is Africa’s most promising source (Nigeria, Africa’s number two, has an estimated 36 billion barrels, according to U.S. Energy Information Administration statistics.)
 
Critics charged that Gaddafi did not deserve rehabilitation, pointing to a poor human rights record and repressive system of government. Democracy watchdog Freedom House gives Libya its lowest possible scores for political rights and civil liberties – lower than China, Saudi Arabia, Cuba and Zimbabwe and on a par with Burma, North Korea and several others.
 
Newly-emerged from isolation, Libya has increased its profile at the U.N. in recent years. It was elected onto the Security Council as a non-permanent member for the 2008-9 period; a Libyan will preside over the annual session of the General Assembly beginning later this month; and Gaddafi, as chairman of the A.U., he is scheduled to address the opening session in New York immediately after President Obama.
 
‘Revolution changed the course of events in the world’
 
Tuesday’s celebrations, which launch six days of events, include a two-hour show extolling Gaddafi, being performed in a tent which at 400 feet long is being described as the world’s biggest.
 
Libya’s Jana news agency quoted Gaddafi as thanking African leaders on Monday for coming to the “historical grand celebration marking the 40th anniversary of Great al-Fatah Revolution, the universal revolution that has changed the course of events in the world since its outbreak in 1969.”
 
He used his address to African leaders to accuse the U.S. of using “brute force” and wanting to get its hands of African oil and gas, and to blame Israel for Africa’s woes, including the strife in Sudan’s Darfur region. (Bashir, who has been indicted by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity in Darfur, was in the audience.)
 
Gaddafi charged that “so-called Israel” intervened in Africa’s internal problems in a bid to “plunder its wealth,” and reiterated earlier calls for all Israeli embassies in Africa to be shut down.
 
“Do be deceived by the Israelis – they will not give you useful aid since they take rather than give,” Jana quoted him as saying.
 
“We have demanded many times that Israeli embassies must get out of Africa because they are not diplomatic embassies and this is not a state, but a gang that declared its creation unilaterally on a disputed land.”
 
Israel has diplomatic ties with most countries in sub-Saharan Africa and missions in South Africa, Angola, Senegal, Cote d’Ivoire, Cameroon, Ethiopia, Egypt, Eritrea, Nigeria, Kenya and Mauritania.