Gaddafi-Europe:the anatomy of a difficult relationship
20 - April - 2010 | 1Issue 20/April-June 2010
By A.B.
On March 27, after an Arab League summit in Sirt, Libya, the Spanish government, acting as rotating President of the European Union (EU), issued a formal statement in which it apologized with Libya and its leader Colonel Muammar al-Gaddafi for the inclusion-at the request of Swiss authorities-of 188 Libyan citizens in the blacklist of personae non gratae in the Schengen Area, a borderless travel zone of 22 EU countries plus Norway and Iceland, of which Switzerland is a member since December 2008. All the individuals were also promptly removed from the list.
This was only the last of the many points scored by the Libyan leader since the beginning in July 2008 of a dispute between the Gaddafi’s Jamahiriya and Switzerland. The controversy was triggered by the arrest in Geneva of the Colonel’s 29-year-old son Hannibal and his wife for allegedly maltreating their domestic staff. Libya responded with immediate retaliation, including a cut-off of oil supplies, a drastic reduction of commercial flights and the closure of Libyan branches of several Swiss companies. Also, two Swiss businessmen were arrested (or taken hostage, according to the Swiss authorities) for supposed visa irregularities. Further, Gaddafi inflicted Switzerland several public humiliations, ranging from his repeated claims for the country’s partition among Germany, France and Italy to last February’s declaration of jihad against the Swiss. In August 2009, Gaddafi also expressed his desire to “wipe Switzerland off the map”, if he owned nuclear weapons.