Colonel Gaddafi pitches up in Paris

It's payback time in Paris as Nicolas Sarkozy hosts a five-day official visit by the Libyan leader Colonel Gaddafi - a trip the French president promised him in July as a reward for his help in securing the release of Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor who had been convicted of deliberately infecting children with the HIV virus.

The trouble is, Sarkozy is about the only person in Paris who wants him there. At least two members of Sarkozy's cabinet have publicly expressed their disgust at Gaddafi's arrival - especially on World Human Rights Day.

"Colonel Gaddafi must understand that our country is not a doormat on which a leader, terrorist or not, can come to wipe the blood of his crimes off his feet," Rama Yade, France's Human Rights Minister, told Le Parisien. "People disappear [in Libya], and no one knows what has become of them. The press is not free. Prisoners are tortured."

Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner, a long-time human rights activist, said he would not attend last night's welcoming dinner at the Elysee Palace. "By happy coincidence," he explained, he had another commitment.

Gaddafi has bemused Parisians by pitching his Bedouin-style tent in the gardens of the Hotel Marigny, the elegant townhouse near the Elysee where foreign dignitaries are put up. "I don't think he sleeps in the tent," said an Elysee spokesman, "but conforming to the tradition of the desert that he follows to the letter, Colonel Gaddafi always travels with a tent that he pitches as soon as he can."

The Libyan leader will be disappointed to learn that the glamorous Frenchwoman who visited him in his tent in Libya back in July and apparently charmed him into ordering the release of the medical workers - Cecilia Sarkozy - is no longer on the scene. ·