Adel didn’t drop her when she got a job, first in one bar and then another. He would visit her in her attic room and bring her groceries. “It was easy to see she wasn’t doing well.” When she called him to let him know she was flying back to Libya, he couldn’t believe it. “You’re not really going to do that! You can’t!” She called him a few hours later from Tripoli.
“Soraya! You’ve made a very big mistake.”
“I had no choice!”
“Well, you’ll have to accept the consequences.”
2
“LIBYA,” KHADIJA,
LEILA . . . AND
SO MANY MORE
I would like to be able to tell other stories besides Soraya’s. To mention other tragedies lived through by young women who had the misfortune of crossing the path of the “Guide” one day and seeing their lives abruptly and dramatically change. To prove that this was a system that involved countless accomplices and continued for a very long time. But the women are not easy to find.
Many fled Libya when Tripoli was liberated, worried that they would be seen as collaborators with Gaddafi. After all, had they not lived at Bab al-Azizia? Hadn’t they also often worn his uniform and enjoyed enormous advantages reserved only for the dictator’s clique? Clearly, appearances were against them, and most of them didn’t want to run the risk of explaining to the rebels that they never had a choice in what they’d done. So what mercy could they expect—the girls who were known by the Libyans as Gaddafi’s “whores,” who many thought deserved only to be in prison. Having broken ties with their families a long time ago, many of them are now trying to survive in Tunisia, Egypt, or Beirut, often practicing the only profession they ever learned from the Guide that can bring in any money.
Others had already left for the Libyan countryside before the revolution, frequently getting married, on Gaddafi’s orders, to one of his male guards when the Guide himself had grown tired of them; sometimes, though more rarely, they married one of Gaddafi’s cousins, to whom they never said anything of what had been done to them, having undergone an operation abroad to reconstruct their hymens. Sometimes they stayed single, a very difficult status in Libya and the source of much suspicion. As sexual relations outside of marriage are forbidden by law, these women risk imprisonment were they to be known to have—or suspected of having—a lover. After imprisonment, women convicted of this crime would be placed in an institute for young offenders under the authority of the state, a place they cannot leave unless their family takes them in or a husband presents himself. Who, then, would dare take the risk of publicly admitting to a sexual relationship with Gaddafi, even if it was forced upon them? It would be tantamount to suicide.
Not to mention the danger of retaliation—by the men in their family, for being dishonored; by rebels and relatives of “martyrs” of the revolution, thirsting for revenge; by Gaddafi supporters by whose side they could have remained at Bab al-Azizia and who, with good reason, dread their testimonies.
In April 2011, one woman came forward, just one, right in the middle of the fighting. Solemnly and of her own accord, the former Gaddafi bodyguard, fifty-two years old, appeared on television in Benghazi. Wearing large sunglasses and wrapped in the revolutionary flag, she expressed the misfortune of those women who, like herself, had made the mistake of joining the revolutionary troops in the seventies, believing in the Guide’s sincerity, and who had then been raped and disparaged by him for years on end. More than speaking, she was yelling at the camera full-screen, begging the pro-Gaddafi people to finally open their eyes and calling on the Libyans, the Arabs, and the entire world to avenge the many women who had been violated. This television appearance had stunned the public. For the first time, someone was showing a glimpse of the reality of the life of the “Amazons.” Someone had uttered the word “rape” and pointed the finger directly at the dictator himself. “No more pretending now!” she told the regime. “Enough hypocrisy! Wake up, people of Libya!” And then she disappeared.
I wasn’t able to contact her until April 2012, a year later. She was still as combative as she’d seemed on the video, and told me a little about her ruined life. The death threats she had received after her television appearance had forced her to flee to Egypt, where she had communicated all the information she had to the Libyan insurgents and to NATO. Someone had made an attempt on her life, but it seemed that nothing could stop her anymore. She had asked to go to the front, had taken up arms in Sirte, and was involved in combat until the very last battle. “That’s where I felt most protected.”
Fighting didn’t make her a heroine. Far from it. The scandal of her televised admissions had provoked an earthquake inside her family; her brothers, tainted with shame and dishonor, had been forced to sell their house and move. She herself was the target of death threats. She had just received another message: “Your name is on the blacklist. We will murder you soon. Allah, Muammar, Libya.”
A handful of other terrified women also agreed to confide in me. Some of them I met personally, mostly very briefly. Others, confessing they were incapable of meeting a foreigner eye to eye to reveal their story—a story they had never told before, even to those they were close to—agreed to tell it to a Libyan woman who supported my project, giving her explicit permission to tell it to me. They were convinced of the importance of such a project, but spoke only on the condition that their names would never be mentioned and that I would not provide a single detail that might identify them. “I would kill myself instantly,” one woman said, “if I knew that my husband or children could find out about my past one day.” I know this woman was not speaking idly.
Here, then, are their stories, as they were told to me, without any connection between them or any transition. This is the raw material that, sadly, no court of justice will ever hear.
LIBYA
The woman who had appeared on television suggests that I call her “Libya” in this book. Of course, that’s not her real name. But revealing it would be a death sentence for her, and by using this name she means to express the hope she places in a country finally freed from Gaddafi’s yoke. She spent roughly thirty years with the dictator. “A lifetime!” she says soberly. “My life. Ruined.” She was at the lycée in Benghazi when some young soldiers only slightly older than she recruited her to join a revolutionary committee. This was in the late seventies, when Colonel Gaddafi’s Green Book had just been published. He’d insisted in its third part on the role and rights of women in Libyan society, calling upon them in the book and in speeches and other propaganda to “liberate themselves from their chains.” They must all, he said, serve the revolution and become the finest allies of its leader.
Being drafted into a revolutionary committee was presented as a privilege, a ticket into the country’s elite, and so Libya was flattered, even though her parents were somewhat concerned. In any case, they didn’t really have any choice: “Refusing would have put them straight in prison.” There were many meetings, lofty speeches. Gaddafi occasionally appeared and boosted the morale of the girls, who were prepared to do anything to serve the man who addressed them like a prophet. The tenth anniversary of his revolution was approaching and he wanted to make it a grand event, to be attended in Benghazi by many heads of state. The women in arms would show themselves to be the spearheads of the finest revolution ever.
Libya dropped out of school, became deeply involved in the committee, trained to march in step, and learned how to launch rockets. Gaddafi was right, she thought, to target the women and teach them how to break taboos, even if it meant angering their parents. To hell with the straitjackets of tradition! Freedom was at stake! She was thrilled to be living with her friends at the training center and not at home with her family anymore. On the evening of September 1, 1979, when a great parade was aired on every television channel, they were alerted to the fact that the Colonel wished to greet them in person. And so about ten delighted girls went to his res
idence, where he was bewitching and charming, before withdrawing to his apartment. The women activists with Gaddafi’s small group then asked one of the girls, fifteen years old, to join him there. They dressed her in traditional costume and gave her a thousand recommendations on how to flatter him and glorify his revolution. The girl joyfully entered his apartment. She came out drained, blood between her thighs. The group of young activists was in a state of shock.
Life went on as before. Libya returned to her family but was less diligent in school and—more and more nervous—attended committee meetings, prodded by very active militant women at the university, who had all passed through the bed of the Guide. As the months went by, her young friends were called in one by one to join Gaddafi in Tripoli, Sirte, or Misrata. A car came to pick them up right where they were, sometimes even a plane. And what they told Libya upon their return drove her to despair. But what could she say? How could she flee?
Her turn came six months after the September 1 festivities, when Gaddafi visited Benghazi. One night, some of the activist women came to collect her and brought her to his residence, undressed her completely, and pushed her into his room despite her tears and supplications: “My mother will kill me! Please, have mercy!” He was waiting for her in a silk robe, raped her without saying a word, then chased her out with a few smacks on her behind. “Perfect, little girl!” She said nothing to her parents, not a word of protestation to the revolutionary committee, where there were threats every day of throwing into a hole the “saboteurs” who dared criticize the Guide, “friend, protector, and liberator of all women.” But she withdrew, grew despondent, worrying her parents, who, thinking she was depressed or in love, decided to marry her off without consulting her. One day, on her way home from school, she discovered that a reception was being organized at her house. There was a crowd of guests, an imam was present, and a marriage contract was put under her nose. “Here. This is where you have to sign.”
Finding out that same night that she was no longer a virgin, her outraged husband demanded a divorce. He could have sent her away immediately but showed himself to be “compassionate” and waited two weeks. She felt ashamed, not daring to be seen by anyone, panic-stricken at the thought of going home to her parents.
So she phoned . . . Bab al-Azizia. In encouraging the activists to break with their “reactionary” families, had Gaddafi not always reassured them with the fact that he would be there for them? “Take a plane to Tripoli right away!” she was told. A few women were waiting for her at the airport and introduced her to Bab al-Azizia—that vast “harem,” as Libya described it. A band of women, living together in double or single rooms, at the mercy of the Guide and his moods, his fantasies, his slightest demands. The majority of these women had been brought to him through the famous revolutionary committees, had been raped, and had no way out other than entering into his service to avoid tainting their families. At least they were fed, housed, and clothed (in the uniforms of guards). At least they had something resembling status (guardians of the revolution). Where they lived, nothing was forbidden: alcohol, cigarettes, and hashish were consumed in great abundance, something Gaddafi himself encouraged. The schedule of the days and nights was unchanging: “We eat, we sleep, we fuck.”
Except when the Guide moved to Sirte or another city and the entire household had to follow. Or when he went abroad, trips on which Libya, to her regret, was never invited. “He was afraid I’d use the chance to escape.” Some of the women did, indeed, do just that, were found in Turkey, and were brought back to their country, their heads shaven, accused of treason, and shown on television as brothel prostitutes, whereupon they were executed. The house had daily comings and goings of girls who spent one night and then left again, some voluntarily, others by force. “Gaddafi would urge us to bring him our sisters, our cousins, and even our daughters.”
One day in 1994, Libya couldn’t stop herself from warning one mother against Gaddafi’s intentions concerning her two beautiful young daughters. Incredulous and shocked, the mother opened her heart to the Guide about this, who went mad with rage: Libya had violated the omertà, the conspiracy of silence. The penalty for this violation might be her life, so she fled. She took a military plane to Tobruk, then a car to Egypt, where she was arrested because she had no visa. Libyan opponents managed to get her to Iraq, where she spent two weeks, living in fear of the Baa’th Party, then quickly moved on to Greece. Gaddafi’s network found her there and, once back in Libya, she was imprisoned for a year and a half in a jail in the basement of a farm before being sent back to . . . Bab al-Azizia, until the beginning of the 2011 revolution. “An old slave woman side by side with the youngest of them,” she says. Definitively trapped.
KHADIJA
Khadija is a solemn, disillusioned young woman who, after having been threatened and attacked several times, is aware that her experience and her knowledge of the Gaddafi system puts her in great danger even today, after the fall of his regime. The first time I saw her, early one January morning in 2012, her white tracksuit was covered in blood. As a “warning,” some unknown men had abducted and raped her during the night. With attractively curled lips and a slightly hooked nose, she was chain-smoking, biting her nails, and speaking with detachment, if not a certain cynicism. At twenty-seven she admitted to having no illusions whatsoever about anything that the new Libya might have to offer her. She was simply trying to survive somewhere in Tripoli. Her destiny had derailed the day she met Gaddafi, and his death did not allow her to hope for redemption.
In the early years of 2000, Khadija was a first-year law student at the University of Tripoli when an altercation with a school principal caused her to be expelled. Highly upset and at loose ends, she went to the hairdresser and in the salon’s protective space recounted her unfortunate experience. One of the customers listened attentively and compassionately. “What’s happening to you is just too unfair. But I know someone who can work this out for you: the Guide.” Khadija was astounded. Would that be possible? It was true that the master of Libya was all-powerful . . .
The woman drove her immediately to Bab al-Azizia, where a man, Saada Al Fallah, took her for a blood test right away, done by “a nurse from an Eastern country,” who asked her to come back the next day. “It was odd, but I told myself that for a head of state one cannot be too careful.” The following day, Brega, a uniformed bodyguard, took her directly to the Guide’s bedroom. Several people were there pressing around him to show him photographs taken at the national holiday celebration. But they had barely left when he made insistent advances—which she refused—and then raped her without saying a word.
When she left the room in a state of shock, Saada Al Fallah showed no surprise at all and had no kind gesture for her. He handed her an envelope with one thousand dinars and said: “You’re lucky to have been chosen. We intend for you to work for us.” She wanted to have nothing to do with that and thought only of getting out of Bab al-Azizia. She even left Tripoli to go to her sister’s in the south of Libya, worrying that someone might find her at her parents’ house and relinquishing her hopes of going back to law school. But the family would soon be overwhelmed by other things. Khadija’s brother, a student on Malta, was arrested for possession of narcotics when he returned to Libya. Drugs had apparently been slipped into his luggage and he might be getting the death sentence. The woman she had met at the hairdresser phoned Khadija and said: “You need to see Muammar. He is the only one who can save your brother’s life.”
Khadija realized this was blackmail. But she also knew that the regime wasn’t concerned about any one life in particular. She returned to Tripoli and agreed to meet with Saada Al Fallah. “We can commute your brother’s death sentence to fifteen years in prison—it’s entirely within your power.” In exchange Khadija would have to live at Bab al-Azizia, join the group of Gaddafi’s (bogus) personal bodyguards, and give in to his wishes. Deathly afraid, she did, moving into the same basemen
t where Soraya would later live, and joining a group of girls that, by her estimation, permanently numbered about thirty. Like Soraya, she was called at any hour of the day or night, watched the “deliveries” of young virgin girls who had no earthly idea of what they would have to endure, the brief visits of young men, and the endless little schemes of other women to acquire houses, cars, and money.
But very soon she would be given another mission: seducing a number of the regime’s dignitaries, men who were reputed to be closest to the Guide, in order to trap them. They moved her into an apartment that she described as luxurious—“five-star quality”—within the compound of Bab al-Azizia, fully equipped with cameras. This is where she was to lure the individuals they pointed out to her, and sent in her direction, each time suggesting a ruse to use for coming on to them. It was her task to compromise them as seriously as possible by making them drink alcohol and sleep with her. The films would provide a means of blackmail, made available to the Guide. The names and information Khadija supplied, in great detail, were staggering and ran from the chief of the Libyan Information Department to this or that minister, colonel, general, or close cousin of Gaddafi’s. The young woman affirmed she was also sent to Ghana and put up at the Golden Tulip Hotel with the mission to seduce the ambassador as well as the embassy’s accountant.
As he usually did with most of his “daughters” (Khadija had the famous identity card), Gaddafi one day authoritatively assigned her a husband, chosen from among his guards. Khadija had no choice but to accept, though at least she would move back into the community of married women, which would make her more respectable in the eyes of Libyan society and of her family. She was hoping for a new life, wanted the illusion of a real marriage, and since she had a bit of money she went to a Tunisian clinic to have her hymen reconstructed. On the day of her wedding, as the guests hurried to her mother’s house and her hands were being covered with henna, the telephone rang. It was Bab al-Azizia. The Guide demanded that she come to him immediately. She protested: “It is my wedding day!” They threatened her and so she went, but with a heavy heart. “He forced himself on me once again. He had to ruin that moment. He had to show he was still in control.” Marriage changed nothing in their dynamic.
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