Aicha didn’t want to talk about Gaddafi’s behavior with his bodyguards. That was top secret. She did her job, suggesting girls. What happened to them afterward was no concern of hers. She also refused to discuss Mabrouka, the only one behind the Guide who didn’t wear the uniform but whose importance in the organization of the female entourage was no secret. “I don’t want to be likened to that. My pitiful salary —832 dinars a month [about 500 euros]—proves I had nothing to do with the clique and the business of the bodyguards!” With an odd gesture, she suddenly pulled a little ring from her ear and handed it to me: “You see this? It isn’t even gold! Many of the bodyguards made a fortune. I, I have nothing!” Not even freedom.
What she was left with was honor, she said. The pride of having held high the banner of the Libyan woman warrior. She proclaimed her unbroken loyalty to her leader and his army during the last war. She had conscientiously obeyed orders and fought the insurrection—behaved like “a professional,” without a trace of regret. The head of the prison, a rebel who subsequently insisted on having me visit the sinister mausoleum of Zawiya dedicated to the martyrs of the revolution, had a very different view. He accused her of having tortured and killed prisoners herself. Although the majority of the female soldiers would be released, Aicha, who was captured on August 21, would be waiting a long time before her case came to court.
“The situation of the military women under Gaddafi was sad and pathetic,” Najwa al-Azrak, the vice minister of social affairs in charge of the dossier, would later tell me. “For the Guide the Military Academy was a ruse by which he gained access to women. And then, as he gradually found other ways to get them, he lost interest and the school deteriorated.” Nevertheless, during the civil war, in desperation the regime mobilized countless women soldiers who until then had been neglected and kept in barracks. Some were sent into combat with mercenaries, among whom there were women as well. During the siege of Tripoli, others were sent to the many checkpoints in the city to verify identities and search vehicles, or were put in the humiliating situation of having to direct the long waiting lines for gas, a whistle between their lips. Puppets of Gaddafi, symbols of his regime, they were hated by the rebels and by the Libyan population at large. Some of them deserted and, when caught or betrayed, paid with their lives or by being raped for their support of the revolution. There were also those who were taken as a group to places near the front to “satisfy the desire” of male battalions.
The fate of most of Gaddafi’s bodyguards threatens to remain unknown. Bodies found in the rubble of Bab al-Azizia seem to indicate that several of them were liquidated in August, in the regime’s very last hours. At the moment of the debacle and the Guide’s desperate flight, they were of no further use.
4
THE PREDATOR
Never could Dr. Faisal Krekshi have imagined what he was to discover when he and a handful of rebels took control of the University of Tripoli in late August 2011. Not that this calm, levelheaded, fifty-year-old professor and gynecologist, who had been trained in Italy and then at the Royal College of London, was ignorant of the corruption in the university system, of the networks of surveillance and denunciation put in place by the revolutionary committees, of the immense instrument of propaganda wielded by the various departments. He knew how fresh the memory of the public hangings of students in 1977 and 1984 still was among the Libyan people, and he was aware that no university career could be envisioned without pledging complete loyalty to the regime.
So, after a night of intense fighting on the campus, he wasn’t surprised to find an improvised prison inside some shipping containers, an office for the dreaded head of the security services, Abdallah Senoussi, as well as drawers jam-packed with information on dozens of students and professors, including a list of individuals to be executed. But what he found by accident, as he was searching the nooks and crannies of the university looking for possible snipers and forcing the doors of a secret apartment in the “green auditorium” where Muammar Gaddafi liked to give speeches, went far beyond his worst suspicions.
A vestibule adjoined a huge reception room furnished with brown leather armchairs. Then a hallway led up to a windowless wood-paneled bedroom. A double bed had been made, covered with a quilted blanket, surrounded by cheap floral patterned rugs and two small bedside tables with lamps that spread an orange light. Next to the bedroom was a bathroom with a shower, a toilet, a bidet, and a Jacuzzi with a gilded faucet. It was strange to find what looked like a bachelor pad in a building reserved for study and for the teaching of the Green Book. But the next room completely baffled visitors and chilled me to the bones when I had the chance to explore the place myself. Across from the bedroom a door opened out onto a perfectly equipped gynecological examination room, including a bed with stirrups, a projector, X-ray equipment, medical instruments, and laminated directions in English.
Although otherwise completely restrained, Dr. Krekshi couldn’t hide his disgust. “How could one not be shocked and overcome,” asked the well-known specialist who had been named as rector of the university after the revolution. “Nothing, absolutely nothing, could possibly justify the presence of such a setup. If any emergency was ever to be expected, the center of obstetrics and gynecology was less than a hundred meters away. So why this? What illegal and perverse practices had been hidden from view here? There are two possibilities I can think of: interrupting pregnancies and reconstructing hymens, both of which are forbidden in Libya. And without uttering the word ‘rape,’ I feel compelled to think of some very disturbing sexual behavior.”
He spoke in a serious voice, weighing every word, mindful of the horror of his discovery. He told me that he had been the official gynecologist of Gaddafi’s daughters Aisha and Hana. “It puts me in a strange position,” he acknowledged with an apologetic smile. “The Gaddafi family respected my expertise, and I asked for nothing more. Occasionally, the daughters would express their father’s amazement at me. ‘He’s not demanding a car? A house?’ No, I wanted nothing. Nothing!” He was familiar with Muammar Gaddafi’s appetite for young girls. He had heard about what he called “the magic touch,” that hand he would place on the head of his prey as a signal to his bodyguards. And he, who taught family planning and each year devoted an entire course to the notion of “taboo,” was well aware that Gaddafi’s sexual mores fell under the greatest of all taboos. No one would have risked mentioning the subject, alerting the female students, or organizing a security cordon. They preferred not to know anything.
As for Gaddafi’s victims, they could only keep silent and inconspicuously leave the university. This meant it was impossible to estimate the numbers of those invited to Bab al-Azizia and those taken to the presidential suite concealed beneath the amphitheater. The day of his ghastly discovery, Dr. Krekshi told me he’d found “eight or nine” DVDs in the apartment with videos of sexual attacks perpetrated by the Guide. But he admitted he had destroyed them immediately. I was dumbfounded. Destroyed? Were they not crucial forms of evidence? “Think of the circumstances. The war was still on. I couldn’t guarantee that these videos would never fall into irresponsible or dangerous hands, that they wouldn’t facilitate coercion or blackmail. My first concern was to protect the girls.” A strange reaction. It was a heavy responsibility, but shouldn’t it be up to a court of justice to make such a decision?
The revelation that Gaddafi had a secret apartment right in the middle of the university created shock waves on campus. But this didn’t mean that people’s tongues were loosened. They reviled the dictator and, proclaiming their loathing, gleefully trampled on his posters, which were now used as doormats in front of the classrooms. Yet the veiled female students kept walking and ignored me when I tried to find out more, and one young man I’d asked to conduct a poll on the subject sent me a text message: “I’m calling it off. It’s taboo.” Really! There had to be witnesses, people who’d noticed suspicious goings-on or had heard talk of young girls
being harassed! Was there really nobody who was willing to criticize the system?
The young editor in chief of the weekly Libya Al Jadida seemed to be the only one willing to break the silence. “I had a friend, a girl from a farmer’s family in the region of Azizia, who came to study medicine in Tripoli,” he told me. “During one of his visits to the university Gaddafi put his hand on her head and his bodyguards arrived at her house the next day to tell her that the Guide had chosen her to be a revolutionary guard. The family refused, so her brother was threatened, and after that she agreed to meet with the Guide, was raped and held captive for a week, then was let go with a packet of money. Her parents were too humiliated to take her back. Returning to the university was inconceivable for her. She was lost. Today she officially works in the automobile business, but I know for a fact that she lives by selling her body.”
With her light complexion, long curly hair down to her shoulders, and haughty demeanor, Nisreen isn’t surprised. Raised in Libya in a middle-class family, with one European parent, she knew it would be impossible for her to survive in the oppressive, hypocritical atmosphere of the Gaddafi regime and that she would be better off studying abroad. “Nothing could be further from our minds than the possibility of rape,” she told me one evening, “even though the escapades of the Guide’s sons and their gang were known by everyone. But sooner or later every girl was confronted with sexual exploitation. Women sent by Bab al-Azizia would crisscross the campus, install themselves in restrooms where girls were quietly doing their makeup, join their conversations, and quite quickly make propositions, including those of a financial nature.”
And it wasn’t only the dark shadow of Bab al-Azizia. The whole university was drenched in an atmosphere of sexual blackmail. “You can’t count the girls who failed their exams because they refused their professor’s advances. Or those who were aghast at their grades and then found they were being offered some very private courses. I heard of girls who gave themselves to the professor of their fiancé so that he would get his diploma, an indispensable precondition of their marriage. I’ve seen boys ask their girlfriend to do this and then, sometimes, break up with her afterward. Sex was a means of exchange, a means of promotion, and an instrument of power. The Guide’s mores turned out to be contagious. His mafia operated in the same way. The system was corrupt down to the bone.”
Alarmed by the organization he uncovered as he took over the university’s reins, Dr. Krekshi confirmed that this went on. It was an utterly broken system, with networks and spies in each department and administrative office, and coordinated by the institution’s secretariat in collaboration with Bab al-Azizia. The objective? To select the prettiest female students, under any pretext, and lead them first into the Guide’s net, then into that of his clique. Good grades, diplomas, prestigious assignments, study grants—everything was in their grasp as long as they remained meek and docile. The gifts could, of course, go beyond the scholarly and might include things like iPhones, iPads, cars, and jewelry. The bids could run very high for the most desirable girls who, generally speaking, didn’t come from poor backgrounds.
“It’s the law of silence: no one will ever testify to rape,” the doctor told me. However, he did allude to several stories that are illustrative of the practices in place—for instance, that of a female student registered at the medical school who found herself in the paramedical curriculum. “Given her excellent grades, it was incomprehensible. She asked for an explanation from the university secretary, who promised her the error would be corrected on the condition that she go to Regatta, the leisure center on the coast where the regime’s dignitaries, and especially their sons, gave themselves over to all sorts of vice. The whole of Tripoli knew about Regatta. It was an area without any laws, where everything was legal. The girl refused and for two years kept getting zeros on every exam. Can you imagine the pressure? Finally, I myself wrote a letter to get her transferred back into the medical school. In my new role I’ve passed on five more testimonies by brave young women that prove the abject corruption of the system.”
The apartment hidden on the ground floor of the Green Book Academy will keep its secrets forever. Apparently, there are other niches the Guide frequented that were set up especially for him, because he always needed sex partners, male and female, preferably young virgins. Khadija, the student who was raped and stayed at Bab al-Azizia for several years, forced to trap different men in the regime, assured me that Gaddafi wanted at least four a day. That number was confirmed in the British press by Faisal, an attractive young man also spotted by the Guide at the university. He was forced to interrupt his law studies in order to enter Gaddafi’s private service immediately. “The girls would go into his bedroom, he’d do his business, and he’d come out as if he’d merely wiped his nose.” Thirty years old today, the young man emphasized Gaddafi’s violence and his enormous consumption of Viagra, and confirmed that countless women “would go straight from his room to the hospital,” victims of internal injuries. That is Soraya’s testimony, and is confirmed by several others I spoke with. Not only was Gaddafi insatiable but he was sadistic and extremely brutal as well.
So, for him, schools and universities were perpetually restocked, natural fishponds. It was at the University of Benghazi that the Colonel also spotted Houda Ben Amer, the mother of his adopted daughter Hana. She was originally from Benghazi and had gained national notoriety when, during a public hanging of a young pacifist opponent, she came out of the crowd of spectators, all worked up and excited, and pulled at the legs of the young man with all her might to hasten his death. That cruelty gave her the nickname “Houda the executioner,” for the scene had been aired on national television. But Gaddafi had noticed her long before that. In 1976, proclaiming her attachment to the regime, she opposed the April student demonstrations and supported the repression, denouncing and hunting down any opponents and leading “purification” campaigns at the head of revolutionary committees. A fellow student remembers, “We’d never seen a girl so aggressive, so ambitious, and with such nerve. She would take the floor to make scathing speeches, participate in meetings until deep into the night, and relay Gaddafi’s messages while threatening any dissidents with more executions.”
After the hangings of 1977, with the support of the Colonel, and speaking on his behalf, she continued to increase her power. Early on, she all but took control of the university, ousting professors and students she considered too far removed from the regime’s orthodoxy. Then she vanished from Benghazi for a while, going to live with the Guide and joining his personal guard, and returned more influential than ever before, intimately linked to Gaddafi, who decided to marry her off (he himself was her witness) and appointed her to important functions: mayor of Benghazi, president of the Arab Parliament, president of the National Audit Office, minister. She became one of Libya’s wealthiest women and was widely hated by the Libyan people. Her house in Benghazi was burned by the rebels during the first few hours of the insurrection, and she is today in prison in Tripoli, where she admitted to her jailers that she had been forced to abandon her little daughter—the result of her liaison with Gaddafi. The girl was born on November 11, 1985, if I can believe the photocopy of a 2007 passport I obtained, and was later adopted from an orphanage in Tripoli by Gaddafi’s wife, Safia.
Every place where women regularly spent time was a potential source of women for the Guide, including prisons, where one of his bodyguards was at one point seen taking photographs of attractive detainees. Hairdressing salons and beauty parlors were a favorite locale and were diligently visited by Gaddafi’s scouts. Wedding celebrations were another. He loved going to festivities where women were dressed in their most beautiful finery. If he couldn’t get there himself, he would send his representatives and spend an insane amount of time looking over the photos and videos they’d take. A photographer from central Tripoli confirmed this, saying that he would always find a thousand pretexts not to submit any of the c
opies of wedding photos and videos he was asked for to Bab al-Azizia. Young girls confirmed that they had avoided certain parties at large hotels in Tripoli, afraid to be filmed and singled out for the Guide or his clique later on. Some parents lived in the same fear, forbidding their daughters—already deprived of social encounters—to go to parties or parades, especially if they were taking place anywhere near Bab al-Azizia. The Guide’s residence, although protected like a fortress, would endlessly receive school groups and young activists. It was a godsend for Gaddafi.
His employees—drivers, guards, soldiers—were often called on to bring him photos and videos of their weddings. At first, some of them were quite touched by the Guide’s interest, but they all became disillusioned. If a guest, a sister, a cousin had the misfortune of pleasing Gaddafi, the employee was instructed to arrange for a meeting. But if it was the young bride who caught the master’s eye, the employee would find out only after the fact, when it was too late. The Colonel would manage to get him away from his home under the pretext of some mission, and then take advantage of his absence to summon the wife or pay her a visit, one that would lead to rape if the woman resisted. I cannot say how many terrible stories I was told about guards who, after their young wives confessed to them, were made crazy with rage, spite, jealousy and then, known to be seeking revenge against the Guide, were murdered on his orders. Several were hanged, others were cut up in pieces. Two of them had their limbs tied to cars that would drive in opposite directions. The scene was filmed and shown to newly hired guards so they would understand what price they’d pay if they betrayed the master of Bab al-Azizia.
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