DUBAI (AlArabiya.net)
Libyan leader Muammar al-Gaddafi, due to visit France for the first time in 34 years, has asked his hosts to put up a tent near his hotel so he can receive guests in Bedouin style, a source close to the French presidency said.
Gaddafi has made "this request so that he can receive his guests in his Bedouin tent as he normally does and not to sleep in it" during the December visit, the source said.
French magazine Le Point said advisers to the 65-year-old Libyan leader had told Paris he wanted a tent because he suffered from a phobia brought on by being confined indoors.
The official guest house is the Hotel Marigny, a stone's throw from the Elysee Palace, the official residence of the French president.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy has confirmed that he will receive the Libyan strongman before the end of the year. Gaddafi is expected to visit France just before or after the EU-Africa Summit, around December 8 or 9.
Sarkozy earlier said Libya had abandoned three "appalling" approaches by ending its quest for nuclear weapons, renouncing its support of terrorism and freeing the Bulgarian medics whom it had accused of infecting children with the HIV/AIDS virus.
Colonel Gaddafi, who has ruled the North African country for 38 years, greets visitors in a Bedouin tent in Libya and requested a similar installation when he traveled to Brussels for talks with the Belgian Government in 2004, the Times of London reported.
A black, Saharan-style tent was erected for him in lush parkland by a lake in the grounds of the Val Duchesse chateau in the suburbs of the Belgian capital.
Dubbed the "mad dog of the Middle East'' by former U.S. president Ronald Reagan in the 1980s over his backing of terror groups, Gaddafi is now seen by Western leaders as an ally in the fight against al-Qaeda. |
