Abroad

As he begins his 13th year in power as the absolute ruler of Libya, Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi is entertaining serious thoughts of aligning himself openly with the Soviet Union, according to diplomatic observers here. Although such a decision to abandon “positive neutralism” in favor of joining the Communist bloc will not be announced immediately, there is no question about his thinking; he has already made known his views to the Libyan Communist Party, for example. Qaddafi’s change of policy is said to have been triggered, if not caused, by the incident on August 19 in the Gulf of Sidra, when American naval planes shot down two of his fighters. At that moment, Qaddafi found himself in the Communist satellite of South Yemen negotiating a treaty. At dinner, South Yemeni President Mohammed Ali Nasser told him that his own treaty with the Soviet Union “not only does not bother us, but it has guaranteed our independence and territorial integrity.” Meanwhile, Qaddafi has been riding high. This summer in Nairobi he was elected president of the Organization of African Unity, which will hold its next year’s meeting in Tripoli and clothe Qaddafi with Third World prestige. He avoided at that meeting any hostile reaction to his occupation of the neighboring Saharan Republic of Chad. He was able effectively to interfere with the King of Morocco’s attempts to come to terms with the Saharan guerrilla organization, Polisario. Finally, at his 12th anniversary celebrations at the beginning of this month, he assembled leaders and representatives from more than eighty countries, including Daniel Ortega, coordinator of the Sandinista junta in Nicaragua, who saluted Libya as “the international center of the struggle against imperialism and racism.” To which Qaddafi replied: “America, for its part, is the queen of terrorism; it terrorizes peoples who resist imperialist domination, who are only looking for their places in the sun . . .”

A number of acts of violence, some of them directed against American forces stationed in the Federal Republic, have caused apprehension recently lest a new wave of terrorism, in the name of pacifism and neutralism, break over West Germany. The press is openly asking whether the Red Army Faction, the successor to the notorious Baader-Meinhof gang, is not about to come to life again. An office of the Social Democratic Party was burned to the ground here after having been covered with slogans accusing Chancellor Helmut Schmidt of “complicity” with “American militarism.” The walls of the city bear freshly painted graffiti of a similar strain: “Concentration camps in 1931, Euromissiles in 1981”; “Down with U.S. Militarism”; “The Red Army Faction lives”; and “Follow the example of Ramstein”—a reference to the bombing of U.S. Air Force headquarters. Further violence of this sort would confirm in police eyes the recrudescence of extreme Left terrorism directed chiefly against Germany’s “Western alliances” at a time when East German Communist authorities are waging a particularly virulent propaganda campaign against Euromissiles and the decision to manufacture the neutron bomb.