TRIPOLI: Libyan leader Moamer Kadhafi, who applauded Barack Obama's election, has said the United States under the new president is a "new America."
"Today, America is a different America," Kadhafi said on Wednesday in a video link-up with students at Washington's Georgetown University, according to extracts published on Thursday by the state news agency Jana.
Kadhafi, who for years was Washington's bete noire, underscored what he said was the "need to give an historic world opportunity to President Obama and the new America ... to permit the new America to be a state that is loving of peoples and freedom."
He said he hoped Obama's campaign call for change would mean that the country is neither "imperialist nor hostile to the peoples."
Kadhafi said there are "now positive signs, such as the (expected) closure of the prison in Guantanamo, the withdrawal from Iraq and a review of the American presence in Afghanistan."
The Libyan leader had already welcomed Obama's election, calling it a victory for former slaves who are "now becoming masters."
"This can be considered the beginning of the victory of blacks in America, who were slaves but are now becoming masters," Kadhafi said during a visit to Ukraine just after the November election.
US-Libyan relations were severed in 1981. They were restored in early 2004, a few weeks after Kadhafi announced Tripoli was abandoning efforts to acquire weapons of mass destruction and took responsibility for a 1988 airliner bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland that killed 270 people.
Source: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/4018276.cms?TOI_mostread
"Today, America is a different America," Kadhafi said on Wednesday in a video link-up with students at Washington's Georgetown University, according to extracts published on Thursday by the state news agency Jana.
Kadhafi, who for years was Washington's bete noire, underscored what he said was the "need to give an historic world opportunity to President Obama and the new America ... to permit the new America to be a state that is loving of peoples and freedom."
He said he hoped Obama's campaign call for change would mean that the country is neither "imperialist nor hostile to the peoples."
Kadhafi said there are "now positive signs, such as the (expected) closure of the prison in Guantanamo, the withdrawal from Iraq and a review of the American presence in Afghanistan."
The Libyan leader had already welcomed Obama's election, calling it a victory for former slaves who are "now becoming masters."
"This can be considered the beginning of the victory of blacks in America, who were slaves but are now becoming masters," Kadhafi said during a visit to Ukraine just after the November election.
US-Libyan relations were severed in 1981. They were restored in early 2004, a few weeks after Kadhafi announced Tripoli was abandoning efforts to acquire weapons of mass destruction and took responsibility for a 1988 airliner bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland that killed 270 people.
Source: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/4018276.cms?TOI_mostread
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