However, the winter was rough for the inhabitants of Tripoli. Most of the public and private construction sites were at a standstill—motionless cranes stood outlined against the sky like mournful wading birds. Many of the economic sectors, completely in ruins, had let go of hordes of workers, who were now wandering through the streets, covered in filth, looking to hustle or for a bit of work as they awaited better days. The rebels were deferring the departure of their brigades, nostalgic for the more dangerous times that had bound them together, still intoxicated with the victory, ready for a fight with a rival militia, shaky about their future, unable to plan for the short term. Voices were being raised ever louder decrying the lack of transparency of the new power, the National Transitional Council, whose membership list had never been made public, and condemning the inefficiency of the temporary government. People talked of vague attempts at separatism in the east, intertribal conflicts in the south, and pockets of pro-Gaddafi resistance in the west. But in Tripoli, where bulldozers had razed the Bab al-Azizia compound to the ground with the intention of one day transforming it into a huge public park, time seemed to hang suspended. It was a city without any direction. And my interviewees were up against it.
When I would call on some of the people whose names had been given to me, the first reaction was close to panic: “How did you get my name? From whom? Why? I have nothing to do with that subject, you hear? Don’t ever quote me! You have no right to destroy my life!” Sometimes the panic would turn to anger and threats would follow, but usually these outbursts died down; explanation, moderation, reassurance, and the promise of secrecy were needed. But countless appointments I had gone to great effort to arrange were canceled, postponed, or put off indefinitely without any explanation. One commander who was supposed to drive me to a key witness suddenly stopped answering his cell phone. I was eventually told he’d been taken to a hospital in Tripoli, then to a different place in Tunis, where he died. It’s possible. How would one know? Another person I’d been in touch with suddenly was “away on a trip.” Another one “fell ill.” I couldn’t get used to it.
The tracks Soraya had steered me onto all turned out to be the right ones: abductions, incarcerations, rapes, the masquerade of bodyguards, and the permanent flow of women and young men to the bedroom of a sick and brutality-obsessed dictator. What remained to be better understood was how Gaddafi’s networks functioned, how over the course of so many years he was guaranteed a daily supply of fresh meat. Of course, he had accomplices everywhere, men who shared his tastes and knew it was the surest way to acquire his gratitude as well as various other advantages, including receiving women in return. And once the women themselves had passed through his bed, they understood that by skillfully placating the Guide, they could grow considerably richer: at least one became a woman minister, others female police agents, teachers, bankers, hairdressers; still others found work in hotels or in the luxury sector, in tourism or business.
But some intermediaries close to Gaddafi were especially efficient. Over the course of my interviews the names of two men in particular kept cropping up: Abdallah Mansour (former chief of interior intelligence, especially close to the Guide) and Ali al-Kilani, both of whom had an army background, were said to be poets and songwriters, had worked as artists’ agents and producers, and, first one and then the other, directed the General Office of Libyan Radio and Television, a powerful propaganda tool. Their relationships with people in show business gave them access to dozens of young and naïve people who dreamed of working in television and theater. Every casting session provided new prey, as did each interview in cafés and hotels, where the two men behaved like gentlemen before acting like boors.
They also had every conceivable and desirable contact with female singers, dancers, and actresses in the Mediterranean region and would find a thousand pretexts to invite them to the Guide’s home or to beautiful villas, where the women would organize meetings and huge parties. Gaddafi had noticed the young hostess of a children’s program on the Arab MBC station? Abdallah Mansour would contact her channel’s management and invite her to Libya to organize an event in “homage” to her incredible talent. A Lebanese journalist had attracted his attention? The two men would attempt to get her to come to Libya, even if they had to create the funding for a bogus production company for a phony artistic project to make her do so. Enormous sums (up to millions of euros) might be spent on wooing a woman like this, and a private jet put at her disposal. Mansour and Kilani had connections in many Arab countries—in Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon. There were countless commissions and substantial rewards if the Guide declared he was satisfied with their service.
On every visit to an African country Gaddafi relied on the services of his diplomats and a few local figures to arrange for him to meet with women’s associations and groups. This would guarantee sustaining his reputation as the hero of the women’s cause, since he could portray the entire visit as being of a political or religious character (as with the feast of Mouloud he celebrated in Timbuktu in 2006 and in Agades in 2007). It was above all an opportunity to make devoted “women friends” there, whom he provided with generous subsidies, in addition to necklaces and medallions with his image. It was their task to turn into attentive intermediaries, responsible for organizing his next welcoming committee—which he liked to be exultant, bursting with admiration, and resplendent; and not only at conferences, parties, festivals, and parades, but at baptisms and weddings, they would be expected to spot new young girls to be invited to Libya. Yes, indeed: “to be invited.” It was as simple as that. In the “brother countries” Gaddafi had the reputation of being rich, splendid, and generous. The suitcases full of banknotes brought to his suite were as famous—and as anticipated—as his anti-American diatribes and his eccentric garb.
Thus, everyone found it perfectly normal that he was generous with invitations to come see him in Libya. Wasn’t he selling Libya as a kind of “paradise for women”? One young Libyan woman educated in Niamey, Niger, told me that in the cafés and nightclubs of the capital cities of Mali or Niger, she frequently ran into groups of young girls excited about going to Libya the next day. “They weren’t hiding it, but were loudly proclaiming their luck. ‘Papa Muammar,’ they’d say, ‘wanted so much to please the girls that he invited them, all expenses paid, to spend their vacation in his country. Isn’t he the most thoughtful of all men?’”
These voyages of discovery were reported to me by Fatma. A friend from the Tuareg ethnic group had phoned her and she agreed to meet me without any conditions. After so many refusals, I was grateful to her. Slender, her head held high and her gait relaxed, she came smiling broadly into the foyer of the Corinthia, a luxury hotel, where the little gestures she made for all to see soon told me she knew the whole staff and was a regular there. An icy storm was sweeping through the city but she was draped in diaphanous veils and pretty shoes that bared her ankles. She was thirty-six years old and said she was a Mauritanian from Niger but had been in Libya for twenty months. Thanks to Muammar Gaddafi. How had that happened? She burst out laughing. “Oh, very simply!” A Nigerian woman friend married to a Tuareg who knew Mabrouka had suggested one day in 2003 that she come to visit Tripoli with four other girls. “It was a tempting offer: airplane, visits, four-star hotels, everything provided by the Libyan state! And spending money too! What would you have done in my place? You would have said yes right away, and happily so!” I was thrilled that she replied for me because my answer would not have been so enthusiastic.
She continued. The invitation was such a gift, and a few weeks later she landed at Tripoli Airport together with four delighted companions. Jalal (employed in the group of Gaddafi’s boys and fleetingly in love with Soraya) was waiting to escort them to the Al Mehari Hotel (a five-star hotel long under the direction of Nuri Mesmari). They were given an envelope with five hundred dinars so they could do some shopping before their program of tourism and visits began. Af
ter a few days the group was told to get dressed to visit “Papa.” A car from Bab al-Azizia came to pick them up at the hotel, followed by a car with Gaddafi guards, which Fatma explained “proved to us that we were important guests.” Mabrouka received them and brought them to a series of reception rooms. Then Gaddafi appeared in a “very simple” red jogging suit. He showed an interest in each one of them, inquiring after their names, families, tribes, languages, leisure activities. “You like Libya? Oh, how I wish that everyone would be so crazy about my country!”
Fatma remembered how “sweet” and how “funny” he was. At one point he even turned to Mabrouka and said: “It would be good to have Fatma work for us. I see she speaks Arabic, Tuareg, Songhai, French . . . That would be extremely valuable to us!” According to Fatma, Mabrouka seemed annoyed and jealous but she agreed. The small group went back to the hotel on a cloud. “That someone like he would be interested in us in such a personal way was really flattering.” Wasn’t it?
The “vacation” lasted two or three weeks. Jalal and the chauffeur were at their beck and call and more gifts came their way. Fatma confirmed she didn’t see Gaddafi again before her departure, but she soon returned to Tripoli. She was accompanied by other young women, one of whom was a little Malian bombshell, a flamboyant, spoiled jet-setter who’d been noticed previously by Nuri Mesmari, who once before had sent a private jet to bring her to Gaddafi. “Her skintight clothes and her low-cut tank tops caused us problems in the street but Gaddafi loved it! He was crazy about her and regularly called for her. I would wait, together with Mabrouka. As he came out of his bedroom Gaddafi would say, ‘Take good care of my guests,’ which meant: ‘Don’t forget the presents and the money.’” During their various stays, Jalal gave them Rado, Tissot, or other brands of watches, bracelets, and earrings, top Italian name pendants, and necklaces with a photo of the Guide framed in diamonds—and then, just before they’d catch their plane, an envelope containing varying sums of money, ranging from two thousand to twenty thousand dollars, “depending on the guests I had brought.”
Of course, Fatma omitted some crucial details concerning her role. She dodged some questions, laughing and feigning sincerity: “That’s how we are, we Mauritanians! We have a talent for PR and commerce!” This seemed to me to correspond quite nicely with the job of a matchmaker or courtesan. She also said, without offering any further details: “We Mauritanians don’t like being ordered around and choose our men ourselves rather than being chosen by them.” In any case, it seems she had brought the Guide streams of women from different countries—“the last time, seventeen who came from Nouakchott [the capital of Mauritania] for the feast of Mouloud”—and since everyone knew of her links with Bab al-Azizia, she also served as an intermediary with ministers, ambassadors, and contractors from African countries. “Mabrouka dealt with the wives and daughters of presidents who wanted to see Gaddafi. My terrain was much wider!”
But, she insisted, the Guide’s generosity toward women was boundless, recalling that the luxury hotels in Tripoli, the best of which was the Mehari, were forever occupied by these idle guests from far and wide, waiting for their appointments. It was equally clear that Fatma had become very close to the dictator. On various occasions she had accompanied him to Benghazi and Sirte as well as on his jaunts into the desert; she had attended the ceremonies of national holidays, rubbed elbows with Safia and daughters Aisha and Hana, the latter “always trailing behind her older sister.” Such good memories, she said.
And very good business.
The Bab al-Azizia drivers were in an ideal position to assist in the innumerable comings and goings of women. One of them, Hussein, who worked for the Department of Protocol, spoke to me of his endless commutes between the Mehari and the airport to transport young girls. They arrived from all over, he said: from other cities in Libya but also from Lebanon, Iraq, the Gulf states, Bosnia, Serbia, Belgium, Italy, France, and the Ukraine. As a rule, they were all about twenty years old, beautiful “even without makeup,” and long-haired. Someone from protocol was in charge of welcoming them, and then they were brought directly to the hotel, where they’d be for several hours or several days until—more often than not around one o’clock in the morning—Hussein came to pick them up and drive them to Bab al-Azizia. “I would wait quietly in the parking lot there. Around five the girl would knock on my window and I’d take her back to the hotel, always followed by a car with guards.”
Some of them would come out happy, others were distraught. Some left the next day, while others would be called back several nights in a row. They all arrived with minimal baggage, but the majority would depart with several suitcases. And in his rearview mirror Hussein would see wads of banknotes. “I swear it on the head of my son: one of them pulled out a hundred-dollar bill from her Samsonite suitcase—which was overflowing with cash—rolled it up, and snorted cocaine from it. One hundred dollars! More than a month’s salary for me!” Another one, a famous Lebanese singer who had spent the night with Gaddafi, was given instructions to withdraw a million euros from a bank in five-hundred-euro bills. “Completely disgusted at that point, I decided to quit my job. I thought Gaddafi had prestige. He was nothing but disgraceful.” One of Hussein’s colleagues, responsible for picking up the girls from the Corinthia Hotel, stated that on several occasions a Ukrainian nurse was sent to the hotel to publicly take blood from him to prove to the girls who’d been picked to go to Bab al-Azizia and were concerned about this odd procedure that it was done to everyone, without distinction.
Muammar Gaddafi’s well-known obsession with women sometimes aroused the ire of foreign politicians. A minister of foreign affairs from Senegal indignantly reported that he had firmly refused to leave the only woman among his coworkers behind in Tripoli, as the Guide had stipulated, while the rest of the delegation was leaving. Another minister had demanded an explanation—which was not provided—when he caught wind of an AIDS screening test systematically done on young Malian women invited to a hotel. Another visitor said he had intercepted photographs that emissaries of the Guide had circulated in order to find some girls he had seen during a visit to Niger. Someone else had initiated an investigation, one that was rapidly suppressed, when he learned that some girls who’d been “invited” by the Guide had had their passports confiscated and felt “sequestered” at the Mehari Hotel. One day, Nuri Mesmari’s frantic efforts to entice the Guide by always making more and more lovely women available to him actually caused a diplomatic scandal between Libya and Senegal.
On September 1, 2001, a parade of hundreds of fashion models from all over Africa were supposed to celebrate the thirty-second anniversary of Colonel Gaddafi’s coming to power. Of course, gifted with great sums of money, the Libyan embassies in various countries were expected to contribute women, activating all their contacts in the fashion world, as well as rounding up call girls. In Senegal, the task of recruiting girls had been entrusted to the twin daughters of a Senegalese actor, Nancy and Leila Campbell, who were already working for Gaddafi, and who were especially careless, since at the end of one casting call, which was held both in the street and with a celebrated stylist, they made an appointment for August 28 at the Dakar airport with roughly a hundred young women, who’d been invited to spend a week in Tripoli. Tall, slim, lavishly dressed, and full of hope, the women were there, lined up at seven in the morning, ready to board the plane. The chargé d’affaires of the Libyan Embassy made sure they were well received and a Boeing 727, chartered in Malta, was waiting for them on the tarmac.
But not long before takeoff, police and security personnel at Léopold Sédar Senghor Airport, intrigued by the special nature of the “cargo” and the lack of tickets and visas for the passengers, some of whom were minors, alerted the authorities and kept the plane from leaving. Unprepared for this, the Senegalese government reacted sharply and immediately condemned the Libyans’ plan as an attempt at “extracting” young Senegalese girls. The Senegalese minis
ter of foreign affairs, Cheikh Tidiane Gadio, was outraged and said the affair revealed Libyan diplomacy as “unacceptable and unfriendly,” adding that Senegal was not an “open-door state.” A few hours later, the Senegalese minister of the interior, General Mamadou Niang, declared in a communiqué that the girls Libya was trying to “extract” from the national territory were destined to become part of an international prostitution ring and that he was going to Interpol with this.
At that point, the newspapers went wild. “Attempt to extract young Senegalese women; the state questions Libya,” was a headline in the Sud Quotidien of August 30, 2001. Indeed, the Senegalese ambassador in Tripoli was called back to Dakar for consultation. A Libyan delegation was sent to Senegal to meet with the ministers of foreign affairs and of culture. The Senegalese president, Abdoulaye Wade, officially declared he felt “wounded.” In his fury he even called Gaddafi, and it took a myriad of promises and all the diplomacy one of his collaborators—who told me about this event—could muster to avoid a diplomatic breakdown and repair the damage.
Models were, of course, part of the dictator’s fantasy world. In a country where at least 95 percent of the women are veiled, he was forever organizing fashion shows during parties, festivals, and even political summits. Alphadi, the fashion designer from Niger known as the “Magician of the Desert” and thought of as the standard-bearer of African fashion, expressed his eternal gratitude to him. “Ah, I can truly say that Gaddafi supported me!” he told me. “He gave me lots of money, sent planes for me, subsidized my shows! He had such faith in Africa. And such a commitment to serving his country, and especially to fashion.” Sincere, really? “Completely! You should know how much he helped me launch the first International Festival of African Fashion [held in Niger in 1998], and subsequently known throughout the world. He sent ministers and fashion models from his own country. I could ask him for anything!” Anything. The joy Gaddafi felt in meeting top models was worth any number of subsidies and advantages to the creator from Niger.
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