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THE INSIDE VIEW

Any deal made between the Mediterranean’s two most disingenuous leaders – Libya’s Moammar el Gadaffi and Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi – requires careful analysis – even more so when it involves a US$5 billion payment in compensation for Italy’s colonial crimes. Sadly for Africa’s reparations campaigners, the Italy- Libya deal does not signal a new lease of life for their cause after the death a decade ago of its financier, Nigeria’s Moshood Abiola.
Berlusconi told Libyan journalists at Benghazi Airport that the $5 bn. compensation was a ‘material and emotional recognition of the mistakes’ that Italy had made during colonialism, but the deal has much more to do with Italy’s concern about oil and immigrants.
El Gadaffi entertained Berlusconi to lunch in a tent in Benghazi where they discussed the agreement on 30 August. Berlusconi said he would pay $200 million for infrastructure projects over the next 25 years, including a coastal highway across Libya from Tunisia to Egypt to be built by Italian contractors. At the prompting of Paolo Scaroni, the head of Italy’s ENI energy company, Berlusconi is wooing both Russia, which is running two gas pipelines from North Africa through southern Europe, and Libya, which also drives a hard bargain for its oil and gas.
Berlusconi wants Gadaffi to crack down on African migrants and Italy is to pay for $500 mn. of electronic monitors along Libya’s coast as part of the compensation package.