Gaddafi tells the families he threw out, it's time to come back

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http://news.independent.co.uk/world/africa/story.jsp?story=570384

Colonel Muammar Gaddafi is lifting a ban on Italian former settlers returning to Libya. Twenty thousand Italians were dispossessed and thrown out of the North African country in 1970, a year after a coup d'état brought the colonel to power. They had lived and worked for decades in the country that had been an Italian possession since 1911. Many had been born there.

"I went out in 1939 and began cultivating a patch of Libyan desert," one of them, Albino Pernigotti, said yesterday. "I grew oranges and lemons and peaches, I kept 22 Dutch cows and I sold the milk and the yoghurt and the butter to Tripoli. Then at 11 am on 20 July 1970, a policeman stopped my car on the way to market and said, you've got to leave. You can't touch anything. It's not yours any more."

Giovanna Ortu, born in Libya in 1939 and head of the association of exiles, said: "For six years we've been told it would be possible, since the Italy-Libya agreement of 1998. In April 1999 Libya opened up to tourists, but we were specifically barred. I was very much against Mr Berlusconi's latest visit to Gaddafi. Successive governments of left and right have made oil more of a priority than our problems, and in the process we lost honour."

The group, the Italian Association for Repatriation to Libya, still wants Libya to pay €250m (£170m)for expropriated property, but that is not the principal issue. "None of us wants to go back to live," Ms Ortu said. "We no longer cherish hatred and we are ready to forget. But we want the right to return for holidays. It's a matter of honour."