Seek Leadership Positions, Kadafi Urges Libya Women

BEIRUT — Libyan leader Moammar Kadafi has urged his country’s women to strive for leadership positions now dominated by men.

The official Libyan news agency Jana, monitored in Beirut, quoted him as telling the Arab Libyan Women’s League on Tuesday, “It is ignorant and stupid to have a country led by one portion of its population.”

Since Kadafi came to power in 1969, he has encouraged women, long suppressed by a male-dominated society, to play a greater role in the North African Muslim state.

Kadafi said he is ready to form popular committees, courts, district attorney’s offices and security forces to be run exclusively by women until they are qualified to compete equally with men, according to the news agency.