Gaddafi's Harem

by Cojean, Annick

  The road to Sirte was long, straight, and terribly monotonous. It cut through huge desertlike expanses where herds of sheep and a few intermittent grayish camels stood out against a metallic sky. Every now and again some rain would fall, washing the windshield. Then the wind would pick up, raising whirlwinds of sand, which made driving quite treacherous. Silhouettes of Bedouins standing by the side of the road, one hand holding the protective scarf over their faces, would suddenly materialize through the sand, and we worried that animals could emerge out of the dust at any moment. At the checkpoints, hooded rebels with sunglasses to shield their eyes from the sand motioned for people to pass with a simple gesture of their Kalashnikov, not concerned with checking people’s papers. It was terrible weather for a visit—people say that the desert wind makes people crazy. Thankfully the sun eventually began to break through and Sirte, or rather its skele­ton, appeared.

  I saw lines of empty, devastated, looted homes, shells of buildings, their walls blackened, with bullet holes from the rockets and mortars. A few houses and other structures in ruins. There, the battles had been desperate and fierce. A little farther on the fighting had been less serious. Although it was rare to see undamaged buildings, a few shops here and there along the wide palm-lined avenues were open. “Life picked up quickly,” one merchant told me. “Some people fled, of course, and they won’t be seen again. But now seventy percent of the seventy thousand inhabitants have come back. And they are adapting and rebuilding. They might as well pile up with ten other people in the only room of their home that’s closed to the outside. What else can you do?”

  The section of Dubai Street where Soraya’s family apartment stood was relatively well preserved. The three- and four-story white buildings, lined up and identical, showed few scars. Porches had been repainted in green (Gaddafi’s color had been banned throughout the country, but perhaps they needed to use up some old supplies of paint) and under the arcades some of the clothing stores, drugstores, and cosmetics shops were open. The hair salon was on a side street, pierced with bullet holes; the metal roller window was drawn, which could have been misleading. But a neighbor showed me that it served to protect the customers from the looks of passersby, since the window was broken and couldn’t be replaced. Inside, an employee was applying golden streaks to the hair of a young sophisticated-looking patron; another one came up to me with a smile, explaining that the appointment book was filled up for the rest of the day. Three women in skintight jeans, veils over their hair, were waiting and staring at me. I was told that the owner wasn’t here at this time. I glanced around, trying to catch some detail that would remind me of Soraya, but there were no photographs or any other decorations on the black and pink walls. Just oval mirrors in which I would have liked to have seen her reflection.

  Impatient, I charged over to Soraya’s school. “The School of the Revolution.” It was an immense building, sand-colored and white, which seemed to have survived the bombing intact or else had been well restored. It was a little past one o’clock and dozens of children—girls and boys—were jostling each other in the hallways. Vast freshly painted staircases echoed with their voices. Outside, other students were scattered in an interior courtyard paved with pink slabs that led to a gymnasium and an athletic field. The girls were wearing the very uniform that Soraya had described—black pants and tunic, a white scarf covering their hair—but their young age took me by surprise. Soraya had described a school that accepted only the three years of the lycée, which means students between fifteen and seventeen. Was I in the right place?

  A man with an emaciated face and a thick mustache reassured me. NATO had bombed two schools in Sirte where ammunition had been stored, which were completely destroyed. Thus they had to organize it so that the students could be on rotating schedules to take maximum advantage of the buildings that were left standing. The buildings housed one school in the morning, another in the afternoon. A staff member called the principal of the girls’ lycée on his cell phone; he had already left, as his school met in the morning. He arrived a few minutes later. Tall, athletic, his face framed by a heavy beard. Aloof and anxious. We settled down in an empty classroom and he explained the flood of difficulties he’d had to face so that his 913 students could come back on January 15, two weeks later than the rest of Libya. Quite a feat, given the fact that the fighting here had lasted a lot longer than elsewhere. The parents had been mobilized, and everyone had pitched in to clear away the rubble, reconstruct doors, windows, and bathrooms, and repaint the whole building. All the ­equipment—microscopes, televisions, computers—had been stolen; the school’s offices, libraries, and laboratories had been totally looted.

  For lack of any help from the state the families had pooled together. Sirte was hurting, drained, but that was no reason for the children’s education to suffer. Everything was already hard enough. “No one has any idea how traumatized our students are! Some families lost as many as five of their family members during the final battles. Occasionally some of the girls suddenly become hysterical in class or black out. One word, one image can unleash waterfalls of tears. Our one and only social worker is no longer enough—we now need psychiatrists.”

  The school didn’t have enough teachers. Some of the female instructors had lost their husbands in the battle of Sirte and weren’t able—or didn’t want—to come back to teach. A section of the staff had vanished. Dead? “No, they just left,” the principal said soberly. Like the former principal. “He left Libya. We’ve had no word from him.” He was most likely too much of a Gaddafi supporter to hope to survive his hero without any problems. So this man, Mohammed Ali Moufta, had been nominated to succeed him. He had been teaching at the school for nineteen years and felt he was up to assuming his new responsibilities. All the more so, he assured me, because, contrary to the rumor, there would be no “shake-up” in the educational curriculum.

  I was startled. Hadn’t the new minister of education just confirmed the urgency of a pedagogical upheaval, the necessary overhaul of every program, and the creation of a team of experts responsible for rewriting the school manuals in their entirety? Some of the rebels had, in my presence, mentioned some of the educational aberrations Gaddafi had conceived. For example, the geography courses introduced the Arab world as an indivisible entity and maps showed only the names of cities, without ever drawing the borders of the individual countries. The study of the Green Book used to take up several hours a week and be spread out over many years. The teaching of Western languages such as English and French had been banned in the early eighties in favor of sub-Saharan languages such as Swahili and Hausa. As for Libyan history, it quite simply began with the Guide—the kingdom of the Sanussi before 1969 wasn’t even mentioned. “Our school is primarily one of science,” the principal said drily, “so we aren’t terribly concerned with the changes, especially since we are already experimenting with a teaching method from Singapore. As for courses in political culture, we simply did away with them.”

  That is when I asked my question, the one that had obsessed me since my arrival within the walls of this school. April 2004. Colonel Gaddafi’s visit. The presentation of bouquets and gifts by a few pretty female students. And the abduction of one of them, spotted by Gaddafi, a girl who would become his sexual slave. Had he heard the story? Flames lit up in his charcoal black eyes. I had barely finished my sentence when he yelled: “That’s untrue! Outrageous! Idiotic!” Excuse me? “Your story makes no sense! Colonel Gaddafi never visited any schools!” He was aghast, beside himself. I continued in a calm voice: “I have met with the girl. Her testimony is serious. She has given me all the details.” “It’s false, I tell you! Completely false!” It was becoming frightening to hear how he raised his voice. I went on: all of Libya was accustomed to seeing the Guide visit schools and universities, even in the middle of the revolution; newspapers published photographs, the TV showed films of him . . . “Not in Sirte! That was HIS city! We’ve been blamed enough for t
hat already. He never came to any school in Sirte! I guarantee it!” At that point I would have liked it so much if Soraya had been with me, so she could have crushed him with the details of her testimony. Three days later, when I reported the whole scene to her, and showed her pictures of the school, she was overcome, before exploding in a rage.

  I persisted. The Guide had children of cousins and other members of his tribe in this school. Being familiar with his interest in education, whose codes he dictated, it wasn’t all that absurd that he would pay a friendly visit, was it? Mohammed Ali Moufta didn’t yield. “Never! That’s just malicious gossip! It may have occurred that he addressed the students via a video that we projected on a big screen. But that’s all!” Insisting was pointless; I wouldn’t get any further. And suddenly it seemed dangerous to give Soraya’s name—which, strangely, he hadn’t asked for—as it might have exposed her family to some retaliation. Sirte had plainly not turned the page.

  I was about to leave the place when I suddenly noticed a bunch of very young female teachers in a small room that opened out onto the wide landing of the second floor. They were coming and going, undoubtedly between two classes, to have some tea, put down a bag, and laugh with their colleagues. I wormed my way in. They soon huddled around me, offered me a chair and some fruit juice, and within seconds after they closed the door the cubbyhole, full of revolutionary insignia, turned into an aviary. They were all talking at once, trying to outdo each other with stories, memories, and indignation. One would begin a tale, would be interrupted by another who’d chime in, and a third one would complete it, crying: “Wait! I’ve got something much worse!” to catch our attention. I was having a very hard time getting it all down. It was as if a floodgate had opened. You couldn’t stop them.

  Girls being abducted? “All of Sirte knew it!” Sirte, which loved Gaddafi? One pretty young woman, her eyes encircled in kohl liner beneath a flawless set of eyebrows, tried to explain to me: “He had a hold over the people of his city, his tribe, his family; the school was raising us to worship him; but everyone knew that morally he was a bastard. And whoever says he didn’t know it is lying!” Her five colleagues loudly backed her up, “sickened” by what the principal had said to me. “His predecessor fled after having been part of the last group of Gaddafi supporters. Sadly, the new one is of the same ilk!”

  “Ours was the same too,” one of the teachers from the school that used the building in the afternoon explained, “before we applied officially to the ministry, saying that he kept criticizing the Western intervention in Libya and poisoning young brains.” One of the women avowed she had been a student in Soraya’s lycée and had seen Gaddafi as he “paraded” in the gymnasium. Through the window, she pointed out the building across the courtyard. She didn’t remember Soraya, but she was categorical: the Guide had most certainly been in this place. Her neighbor, with a laughing face enveloped in a red veil, had heard him as well, two years earlier, as he gave an interminable speech at the University of Sirte. “When he arrived, the whole area was blocked, courses were interrupted, and it was as if time was suspended.”

  He would take every opportunity, they assured me, to meet young girls. He used to invite himself to weddings at the last moment. “Most of the hosts were flattered,” one of them said. “But my uncles, even though they were part of his family, immediately prevented me from showing my face.” He would regularly invite students to come to the Katiba al-Saadi, where he had his residence, for a festival of songs. “I went there two days in a row with school, but then my parents wouldn’t let me go back. ‘It’s the most dangerous place of all,’ said my brother. If the order doesn’t come from him directly, it will come from his clique, his officers, his guards, from any military person at all. His morals are contagious!” Gaddafi would even pretend to be sick so students would come to comfort him. “I was sixteen, at the avant-garde Lycée de la Pensée, when a teacher announced that Papa Muammar was sick. They chartered a bus to take us to the barracks, where he received us in the tent. He was wearing a white djellaba and a small beige cotton cap, and he hugged us one after another. We were very intimidated, but he didn’t look sick at all!” Another one remembered being taken to the same katiba by her school to greet Colonel Chadli Bendjedid, the president of Algeria. “Gaddafi constantly needed to be surrounded by young girls. We served as propaganda for him while feeding his obsession.”

  One of the teachers finally told me how one day a clan from Misrata organized a grand party of official allegiance to the Guide. Perpetually concerned about the support of the various tribes, Gaddafi loved that kind of demonstration. There he noticed a young girl, a friend of the speaker. The next day, guards came for her at the school. The principal refused: this was not the time, she was taking an exam. But that very same evening she was abducted during a wedding celebration she was attending. She disappeared for three days, during which she was raped by Gaddafi. Barely back home, she was married off to one of his bodyguards. “It was her father, a teacher, who told me this himself, begging me to be careful.”

  The bell for their classes had already rung and the teachers suddenly dashed off, asking that I not publish their names. Nothing in Sirte is simple. So many inhabitants are brooding over the decline of their city—bitter, filled with hate, and ­pessimistic—convinced that the new power will make them pay for a long time to come for this visceral connection with the man who once was the Guide.

  Following in Soraya’s footsteps wasn’t exactly comfortable; I was afraid of attracting attention to her or her family, awakening the wrath of her brothers, compromising her future in Libya. Her personal story had to remain secret, more than ever before. The only one who proved to be warm and welcoming to Soraya’s attempts to flee, to live again, and to escape from her family wrangles was Hayat, her Tunisian cousin and her only loyal confidante now. Unfortunately, meeting any of the girls who had lived with her at Bab al-Azizia was out of the question for me. The first Amal is married and begs to be forgotten. The second, Amal G., is still using sex and alcohol, yearning for her old master, and loathing the thought that Soraya might betray him. One of Bab al-Azizia’s drivers and two women who worked in the Department of Protocol recalled only, when we spoke, that they had come across Soraya fleetingly. That was all. There were so few people with access to his sordid basement.

  In Paris, Soraya’s Tunisian friend Adel gave me some clues to better understand the failure of her stay in France. I met him in a café at the Porte d’Orléans. Stocky, his hair combed back, and with a very gentle face, he spoke to me about Soraya with tenderness and nostalgia. “She arrived broken, uneducated, without the slightest experience in work, schedules, discipline, of life in society. Like a little girl who has totally forgotten what the world is like. Or like a fledgling bird trying to take flight but constantly crashing into the windowpane.” He tried to help her as best he could—taking her in when it became obvious that she couldn’t stay at Warda’s any longer; doing his utmost to find her work, including a brief period at a hairdresser’s, cut short because Soraya didn’t speak French; seeing a lawyer so that she could obtain papers; keeping her clothed and fed for several months. “It was terrible to watch her struggle and always fail. Deluded by false promises, abused by men who only wanted to take advantage of her.”

  Of course, her big mistake was to not start learning French right away. Her early encounters are to blame. She ran into Warda and a few others at La Marquise, the restaurant that specializes in Lebanese food where I went one night and that between midnight and dawn changes into an oriental nightclub. It was so much easier to live in the Arab-speaking world. But that prohibited any integration into French society, any possibility of making connections, of being trained, or of finding employment. True, Soraya didn’t try all that hard, incapable as she was of going to bed before four in the morning or getting up before eleven, rebelling against any form of discipline and any orders, no matter who gave them. As if, after Gaddafi, no one
could boast of having any right or authority over her ever again.

  Having prematurely lost his father in Gabès, Adel, the oldest of three boys, learned early on to play the paterfamilias. He dropped his studies to help his family, then immigrated to France, where he started up a small construction and renovation company in Paris, working extremely hard to build his business. He had welcomed Soraya as if she were “the new baby in the family.” She was vulnerable and he needed to take care of her. He was, of course, also a little bit in love with her. Who wouldn’t be after watching Soraya dance at La Marquise, swirling her mass of ebony hair and laughing wildly? Too free, too radiant, she irritated the other girls but broke every popularity record among the staff. During the day she’d smoke, talk on the phone, and watch TV. Sometimes she’d cry, racked by memories, questions, apprehensions. It seems that she could tell Adel anything, which included speaking about Gaddafi with what he called “a strange mixture of hatred, rage, and respect.” Soraya would balk at this last word, but it is not really surprising that a kind of deference would be mixed in with her rejection of and resentment against the one who was in control of her life and death at such an impressionable age.

  “I know she wanted me to devote more time to her,” Adel said regretfully, “go out with her during the day and adapt to her nightly rhythm, without any constraint. But I couldn’t—I was exhausted! Life in France isn’t easy to manage as an immigrant. It requires willpower and a lot of hard work. She didn’t understand; she wasn’t ready for it.” Their living together had to come to an end.