Qaddafi says he wants peace, but he's not going

The president of the World Chess Federation, who spent a couple hours over the weekend chatting and playing the ancient game with Muammar Qaddafi in Tripoli, says the Libyan leader is ready to negotiate with rebels and can't understand why NATO is bombing him.

Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, a Russian politician, businessman and president of FIDE since 1995, has met several times previously with Qaddafi, and tells CBS News the Libyan autocrat personally invited him for a private meeting during a visit to Tripoli on chess-related business.

Ilyumzhinov says he and Qaddafi discussed the current political crisis which has gripped the nation since a rebel movement based in the eastern city of Benghazi -- inspired by the tidal wave of pro-democratic reform/revolution sweeping the Arab world -- took up arms in an effort to force the long-time leader from power.

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In spite of myriad political and military defections from Qaddafi's ranks, an initial bombing campaign by U.S. military forces and ongoing air support from NATO warplanes and helicopters, the rebels have been unable to push past loyalist forces into Qaddafi's strongholds in the west, or the capital city of Tripoli.

Militarily, the situation remains a stalemate. With four weeks of expensive military support starting to take its toll on the political glue holding the NATO member states together, and the rebels insisting they need more vociferous support, not less, that stalemate seems unlikely to break in the rebels' favor.

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Politically, Qaddafi tells Ilyumzhinov he's confused as to why NATO is bombing his family and his forces.

The Russian tells CBS News that Qaddafi expressed a desire to cooperate with Western countries, noting that in 2003 he very publicly announced that Libya had ended its chemical and nuclear weapons programs and stopped producing missiles. Now, Qaddafi told Ilyumzhinov, he's perplexed as to why NATO is bombing his country and he can't understand why they want to kill him as, in his words, he holds no official office, such as president or prime minister.

According to Ilyumzhinov, Qaddafi is happy to launch negotiations with the rebel movement, and stressed that Libya's conflict is an "internal problem." Ilyumzhinov didn't know if Qaddafi has had contact with the rebels as of yet.

Ilyumzhinov said Qaddafi had asked him to announce his position that he's ready immediately to start negotiations.

The Libyan leader claims he doesn't want a war and that a full-blown conflict should be avoidable. He also reiterated his insistence that he should be allowed to live and die in the country he's always called home.

That will be the sticking point.

Qaddafi may not hold an official position of leadership in the Libyan government, as he stated, but that's due to the fact that for about four decades, he has been the Libyan government. There has been no system in place to check his power, democratic or otherwise, and he has always been quick to quash any opposition.

He's accused of ordering his own warplanes to bomb residential areas in towns held by the rebels before NATO locked down his airspace. The top prosecutor at the International Criminal Court has recently said there's strong evidence that Qaddafi's forces are using mass-rape as a psychological weapon to intimidate opponents. The rebels, who have increasingly been recognized as the "legitimate" power in Libya by Western nations, say the first condition of any reconciliation must be Qaddafi's departure from power.

Qaddafi has repeatedly refused offers of safe asylum in other nations.

For context on the meeting between the two men in Tripoli on Sunday, it is important to note that Ilyumzhinov was not there as a representative of the Russian government. It is also useful to note that Ilyumzhinov is something of an eccentric himself.

After interviewing the Russian in 2010, a writer for The Independent described Ilyumzhinov as, "no normal politician."

"He counts among his friends the American actor Chuck Norris and the late Saddam Hussein, has made chess lessons mandatory for all schoolchildren during his two decades in power in Kalmykia (Russian republic), and has built the largest Buddhist temple in Europe. Oh, and he also believes that chess was brought to Earth by aliens, and that if not enough people take up the game, the aliens might destroy our planet."

"I'm not ill. I'm psychologically normal," he told The Independent. "I didn't hide it [the contact with aliens] even though I knew that people would laugh at me and say I was crazy. Maybe it was a form of self-sacrifice."

Ilyumzhinov tells CBS News he was invited by Qaddafi to return to Libya, and he says he may be back in the country, on more chess-related business, in July.

Many in the West, and certainly the rebel movement in Benghazi, would very much like Mr. Qaddafi to see the wisdom of his friend's "self-sacrifice," follow the example and leave his unofficial position of power in Libya before then. From what Qaddafi told Ilyumzhinov, that seems unlikely.

As CBS News correspondent Allen Pizzey wrote recently, "Qaddafi seems to hear only his own song."

It's difficult to read much into the Libyan leader's call for negotiations, as both the rebels and their Western backers have made it clear he's not someone they care to talk to.

Unless his money runs out, aliens may be more likely to convince Qaddafi his time is up than a halfhearted NATO military campaign and some stern talk from Washington.