Gaddafi and the Irish

Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, 29, leader of Libya's revolutionary government, is a compulsive orator who occasionally stumbles over his own rhetoric. He did so again last week before a clutch of visiting Arab notables and a crowd of 10,000 attending a celebration marking the second anniversary of Libya's takeover of the former U.S. Wheelus Air Force Base outside Tripoli. Gaddafi scored the U.S. for racism and imperialism but thundered most harshly at Britain "because Britain handed Palestine over to the Jews and handed the Gulf islands to Iran"--a reference to three small islands in the Persian Gulf claimed by both Iran and Arab nations. He intended to retaliate where Britain herself was vulnerable. "There are arms," he said, "and there is support for the revolutionaries of Ireland."

Gaddafi's high-flown statement angered the British, discomforted some Arabs and puzzled the Irish. The British and U.S. ambassadors to Tripoli walked out while he spoke. Next day Middle East newspapers suggested that in the battle against Israel, Northern Ireland's problems had low priority indeed. In Ireland, both branches of the Irish Republican Army insisted that they had received nothing.

The Marxist-oriented I.R.A. Official branch offered the unkindest rebuttal of all. When a Communist-backed revolt broke out in Sudan last year, one official remembered, Gaddafi captured some rebels as they passed through Libya and handed them over to Sudanese President Jaafar Numeiry for execution. That, said the I.R.A., hardly qualified him as a fellow revolutionary.

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