Gaddafi turns screenwriter for $40m epic about Italian invasion
By Peter Popham in Rome
The Independent/UK
Published: 03 November 2007
The mercurial dictator of Libya has reinvented himself yet again. He
has been a pariah of the West; a sponsor of terrorism; the maverick
autocrat with his corps of female bodyguards; the man who comes to
Brussels for a summit, erects his tent and puts his camels out to graze
in the local park.
Thirty years ago with his little Green Book and his "Third Universal
Theory", he proposed himself as the Mao Zedong of the Middle East,
fashioning what he claimed to be a new ideology from the patriarchal
customs of his clan.
But today Libya is in a different place. The worst of its diplomatic
headaches are behind it ` Lockerbie dealt with, the nuclear plants
dismantled, the Bulgarian nurses ransomed ` and the world is keen to do
business. And now the ruler is trying on a new hat. Meet Muammar
al-Gaddafi: screenwriter.
A series of impressionistic sketches he has written evoking his country
as it was on the eve of invasion by Italy in September 1911 ` placid,
rustic, traditional ` and then as it roused itself to fight to expel
the foreigners, is to become the basis for a film costing at least $40m
(£19.1m) which begins shooting in Libya next year.
Aimed principally at a non-Arab audience, and entitled Dhulm ` Years of
Torment, it will tell the story of Libya’s traumatic experience at the
hands of Europe’s Johnny-come-lately imperialists.
To the other European powers, it was hard to take Italy seriously as a
colonial force. Its first adventure, against the supposedly easy target
of Ethiopia, ended in the worst defeat ever suffered by a European army
in Africa. Libya, just across the pond from Sicily, was thinly defended
by a small Turkish garrison, at a time when the Ottoman Empire was on
its knees. It was expected to be a pushover.
Instead, after quick early success, Italy found itself embroiled in an
insurgency that dragged on for the next 20 years. The Libyans became
the first people in the world to know the terror of air bombing, among
the first to be gassed from the skies, and were early guinea pigs for
the concentration-camp concept. Unable to break their spirit, Italy
resorted to driving them across the border into Egypt and Chad. Ramzi
Rassi, the Lebanese producer of the new film, says that by the time the
Italians fled home in 1943, one-third of the Libyan population had been
killed and one-third forced into exile.
In his treatment for the film, Gaddafi describes the beauty of his land
before the coming of the new Romans. "Tripoli … a string of white
buildings painted with the local lime … Behind it stretches the deep
blue sea, its light waves shimmering, and much clearer in the distance
the wide open horizon…"
Seen from the other side of the Mediterranean it all looked so
different. For Italy, unified for a bare half century, the invasion of
the Ottoman province of Tripolitana e Cirenaica was a chance to prove
its worth as a martial country. "The great proletarian nation has
stirred!" declared Giovanni Pascoli, the Italian poet, as the invasion
got under way.
Dhulm ("injustice" in Arabic), will tell the story of the invasion and
the long Libyan resistance through the eyes of those who experienced
it, based on real people. One of the main characters is an
extraordinary journalist called Francis McCullagh from Dungannon in Co
Tyrone, who really deserves a biopic all to himself. In October 1911,
his zest for action unsated, he crossed the Mediterranean with the
invading Italians. "He came over with the invasion force," says Mr
Rassi, "and later wrote a book about the invasion almost in the form of
a script. He is one of the characters in the film, as an eye-witness of
what happened."
Dhulm is not Col Gaddafi’s first venture into film. In 1980 his regime
paid $30m to make Omar Mukhtar: Lion of the Desert, an epic about Omar
the Bedouin schoolteacher who became the legendary leader of the Libyan
resistance, and fought on well into his seventies until he was captured
by the Italians and hanged in front of 20,000 of his Bedouin followers.
Lion had an improbably glittering cast, including Anthony Quinn as
Omar, Oliver Reed as the Italian commander who tries to track him down
and Rod Steiger as Mussolini. But Arabs were deeply unpopular at the
time of its release in 1983 thanks to Opec’s price rises and other
factors (including Gaddafi himself), and the film sank without trace.
Is the world readier now to hear Libya’s tale of woe? Mr Rassi says it
should be. "We see Armenians and Jews talking about genocide ` Libya
wants the truth about what happened there to be exposed, too. It’s not
just Gaddafi but the people as a whole: the degree of popular support
for the film project is huge. And the international politics are more
favourable to the idea of the film today than ever before."
Yet the first stumbling block is Italy, which shows little inclination
to confront what it did across the water. Mr Rassi and the director of
the film, the star Syrian TV film-maker Najdat Anzour, were in Rome
this week promoting Dhulm, but with the exception of one piece by an
Arab journalist, the film project has been ignored. Italian politicians
are willing to talk about reparations, including a Gaddafian proposal
that they build him a whopping autostrada, gratis ` but just don’t
mention the war. When Lion of the Desert was released, it was banned in
Italy on the grounds that it was "damaging to the honour of the Italian
army" and has still never been shown there.
But it is time Italy made the effort ` and the rest of us, too: not
merely to recognise the suffering inflicted, to understand better what
this country went through, and how the bitterness of a people subjected
to such treatment can fester for generations without a full accounting.
But also to understand and deal with the delirious joy that accompanied
the rape of Libya.
Begun on the cusp of the First World War, the Libyan invasion incubated
the bacillus of Fascism. And the horror of it was meat and drink to
Europe’s new utopians. Another journalist who crossed the Mediterranean
to report on the war was Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, poet and founder of
the Futurist movement. For him, the Italian forces behaved far too
well: he denounced their "stupid, colonial humanitarianism". He
believed more violence was required. "We want to glorify war," ran the
Futurist Manifesto, "the only source of hygiene in the world `
militarism, patriotism, the destructive act." For these Europeans,
Libya’s "liberation" was the apogee of modern civilisation.
Now of course we know different. "It was one of the ugliest forms of
colonialism," says Mr Rassi, "with a scale of brutality that is
unimaginable, covering the whole population. Yet very little is known
about it. It is easy to understand why."