“But, for God’s sake, Mr. Alphadi, didn’t you know the Guide was a predator?”
“There were rumors to that effect about him and his entourage. Libyans are great skirt chasers. I was aware of the risks. But I wasn’t involved in prostitution. And before a show in Sirte, for instance, I gathered my girls and told them: ‘Watch out, stay together in a group, and count your numbers. Don’t go out alone!’ Thank God, I always brought them all back home with me.”
However, nothing, certainly not fine principles, could put the brakes on the dictator’s insatiable appetite. In November 2009, his ever-resourceful chief of protocol contacted Hostessweb, an Italian agency of hostesses (with the protocol man’s sister as intermediary). Outside a conference of the FAO (the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations) on world hunger in Rome, the chief said, Gaddafi wanted to address a female audience. Alerted at the very last minute, the agency let it be known via SMS and the Internet that it was looking for attractive young women, at least five-feet-eight, well dressed, and in high heels but not miniskirts or plunging necklines. Two hundred women showed up for the appointment at a fine hotel, thinking they’d be playing bit parts at a meeting and then a cocktail hour, since they were being paid only about sixty euros for the evening. None of them could have guessed at that point that the buses would take them to the residence of the Libyan ambassador, where, to their utter surprise, Muammar Gaddafi, in a white limousine, joined them to give them a long speech . . . on Islam, the religion “that is not against women.” It was a rambling speech by which he expected to motivate conversion and rectify some untruths: “You believe that Jesus was crucified but that isn’t true—God brought him to heaven. They crucified someone who resembled him.” The young women left with the Koran and the Green Book in hand.
The Italian press and some politicians were upset by this event and questioned the dictator’s actual intentions. But Alessandro Londero, Hostessweb’s director, was ready to defend the Guide. None of the girls had spent the night at his residence; Londero had counted and recounted them. It simply concerned an “evening of a passionate discussion on religion and Libyan culture.” A discussion? “But of course,” Londero insisted when I reached him by phone in Rome. “The Guide sensed that there was incomprehension and a lack of knowledge about his country. So there was just one thing he wished for: to bring the cultures closer together and establish a dialogue between the young people of Libya and the West. He asked the audience for their questions and answered them patiently and in an edifying manner. I can assure you that it was a unique experience for all those young girls!” Islam? “Oh, he was clever! He didn’t expect, of course, that his call to a conversion to Islam would draw a crowd of people ready to convert. But he knew that the media impact would be enormous.”
In fact, the experiment was repeated, and over no fewer than four evenings more than a thousand pretty girls—the director insisted on telling me there were also a few boys and some “normal” girls in attendance—served as the dictator’s docile audience. A very small number said they were ready to embrace Islam and provided their telephone numbers, which were quickly noted down by a staff member at the ready. But the Guide didn’t stop at that. Solid connections were made with the modeling agency, which was then allowed to organize a dozen or so trips to Libya for groups ranging from twelve to twenty-four people—all expenses paid, the stays intended to “deepen their ties to Libyan culture and lifestyle.” It was a marvelous vacation, one of the girls, an Anglo-Italian actress, later told me. She was thrilled to have shared the Guide’s breakfast (camel’s milk and dates) during a jaunt into the desert, and became convinced that “women are treated better in Libya than anywhere else.”
Some of the girls were swayed to such a degree that they would later participate in demonstrations in Rome against the NATO strikes, and that a small group of them, led by Londero, would go to Tripoli in August 2011, at the agency director’s own expense, to demonstrate their support while braving the bombs. It was a sojourn from which Alessandro Londero returned in a state of shock, bringing with him a letter of appeal for help from Gaddafi to Berlusconi, written on August 5, just before his hasty departure from Bab al-Azizia, a letter that Abdallah Mansour had entrusted to Londero. Thus the director of a fashion modeling agency became the final messenger of a dictator on the run. Just a short line in the book of history, no doubt.
8
MABROUKA
Since my first meeting with Soraya in the fall of 2011, I had been obsessed by one name: Mabrouka. I wasn’t familiar with its sound, even though I knew that in Arabic “Mabrouk” stands for “blessed” or “fortunate” and is often used to celebrate an event and start off a series of congratulatory wishes. But Soraya’s “Mabrouka” had nothing cheerful to offer. Soraya’s solemn voice uttered her name with such harshness, her eyes still haunted by memories she knew were impossible to share, that I associated it with the darkest of colors and a sense of evil incarnate. Who could she be, this woman who was prepared to commit any crime to satisfy her master, a complete madman? What sort of a relationship did she have with him? Was she doing her job under duress or was she fascinated, in his thrall? Was she motivated by ambition and a thirst for wealth and power, or were there maybe more complex and darker impulses in her zeal to anticipate the dictator’s desires, fantasies, and perversions? Was she covering up personal humiliations and a secret wound? Was she taking revenge? What had her life been like before Bab al-Azizia?
Soraya knew nothing, or too little, to help me with this question. Mabrouka had been her abductor, her jailer, her torturer. She had wrecked her life, knowingly and irreversibly, and in five years had never shown the slightest sign of humanity or compassion. She was clearly not ignorant of the rapes, in fact facilitated them. She knew of the insults, the abuses, the savagery; she was a witness to, and a participant in, them. She was, as a Gaddafi collaborator told me later, “the mother madam in all her horror.” And no one had any doubt that on occasion she was also Gaddafi’s mistress. But one had to live within the proximity of the Guide to know this. For outside Bab al-Azizia, Mabrouka put on airs, passed herself off as one of the closest of the Colonel’s advisers, fooling quite a few diplomats.
It took me a while to find her in the official photographs. She often stood in the Guide’s shadow when he’d set foot on the red carpet rolled out for him on the runway of some foreign airport. She left the place of honor to the luscious Amazons but would monitor the scene with her rapacious eye, staying slightly in the background behind a sober black veil. She wore her brown hair tied back, her features were unremarkable, she never wore any makeup, she had a stern mouth, and she seemed drab and dull to me. But one European ambassador told me that she wasn’t—badly dressed, “badly put together,” yes; without any ostensible sign of coquetry or luxury; and “never in a mode of seduction.” But he thought that she must have been beautiful when she was younger and that some of that beauty was still left. He figured she was about fifty years old.
Many heads of state, ministers, and diplomats had come across her during an official trip, an African summit, or an international conference. European and French people—Cécilia Sarkozy among them—had been in contact with her during the long negotiations over the liberation of some Bulgarian nurses, whom the Libyans had wrongly accused of vaccinating children with the AIDS virus. She was presented as the person in charge of protocol but everyone knew of her closeness, not to say intimacy, with Gaddafi. Obviously, she had his ear, and so they used her to get messages to him. Besides, she did everything to show that her power surpassed the perimeters of protocol, that she was “the woman who had the Guide’s trust,” that she could intercede in nominating ambassadors or other public officials, and that her role was increasingly a political one. Indeed, she occasionally phoned the diplomatic cell at the Elysée Palace to ask for a clarification of French policy in, say, Mali or Niger. She was also thought to be influential with the Tuar
egs, whose leaders in Libya she knew, as well as those in neighboring countries such as Algeria, Mali, Niger, and Mauritania. No need, then, to state that they treated her with respect, even if a note from the French secret service, which had followed her during her Parisian trips, presented her as a “procurer” and one ambassador told me coldly: “She came to do her shopping.” Shopping? “She was collecting girls to be sent to the Guide.” Yes, indeed. She’d go to luxury hotels in the Champs-Elysées area—taking a suite at Fouquet’s—and with phenomenal self-assurance would use every contact she had. At a reception one day she ran into Caroline Sarkozy, the president’s half sister. Later that day, Mabrouka burst into her office, together with her interpreter and the driver at the Libyan Embassy, to ask her to sign a copy of her book on interior design to the Guide thusly: “To our brother Guide. I hope that you will enjoy this book on the beautiful homes of Paris.” (The rebels found this book in August 2011 when they penetrated the luxurious Tripoli villa compound of Aisha.) Of course, Mabrouka’s idea was to attract this lovely woman to the capital of Libya one day. If she knew that this or that princess from an Arab court—Saudi Arabia, Qatar—was in Paris, she would immediately make an appointment with her at the Ritz Hotel or the Four Seasons. Once she met the French minister of justice, Rachida Dati, who had North African roots, and asked to see her again at Fouquet’s. She would draw up a list of female ministers and other influential women, primarily of Muslim background, and go from one appointment to the next. She’d phone Salma and say: “Ask brother Guide to make some money available for Princess X.” Or: “Send me a case of pendants for the wives of some ambassadors.” She’d make a short visit to Sephora to purchase perfumes the harem had ordered and would call Salma again to find out what the Guide needed. Powder, foundation, MAC Concealer? “It’s for a middle-aged man,” she’d specify to the salesman. “A gentleman like yourself.” The young man couldn’t have imagined in a million years that the beneficiary of these creams was Gaddafi, which made her interpreter laugh.
She also would take the time to hang around in certain luxury stores, fancy restaurants, or cafés in order to find pretty women and start a conversation. Her preference was for young girls from the Maghreb or the Gulf states whom she could address in Arabic. For the others she used the services of a translator, who was extremely smooth in his approach. “Do you know Libya? Oh, that’s a country you should discover! Would you like to visit it? I can invite you there. I can even arrange a meeting for you with our Guide!” She would have her photograph taken with her potential prey, whose address she’d take down. She was on a constant hunt, with unlimited means. I was told another story of a young Moroccan woman whom Mabrouka had approached in a hotel, begging her to accept an invitation to Libya. After demanding that her cousin travel with her, the woman returned to France with fifty thousand dollars.
One night in Tripoli, a Tuareg chief who had known Mabrouka in her youth agreed to provide me with a few indispensable clues to her character. We were in a restaurant near the Old City and I planned to treat myself to a couscous with camel’s meat. The chief was a man with the manners and healthy appearance of an aristocrat, equally comfortable in well-tailored jeans and cashmere jacket as in a white gandoura—a long, loose gown—and head covering. Even before I got out my notebook he took my arm and, staring at me, declared in a calm and serious voice: “She is a she-devil.” He kept quiet for a time, as if to underline the impact of his words, and then went on: “She is the embodiment of evil and frighteningly skillful. There’s nothing she wouldn’t undertake to reach her goal: lies, schemes, betrayal, corruption, black magic. She is totally fearless, moves like a snake, and could ‘put the wind in a bag and sell it to people.’”
Her father—of the Sherif family—came from Tuareg nobility but had married beneath his station after falling in love with a woman of a lower class who lived in the town of Ghat, in southern Libya, close to the Algerian border and not far from Niger. The couple had two daughters, Mabrouka and her older sister, whom they gave to slaves to be raised. This is a tradition, the chief explained to me, to ward off fate and “counteract the evil spirit” when parents have previously lost young children.
At a very young age Mabrouka was promised to an aristocratic Tuareg of Gaddafi’s tribe. Already married to one of the Guide’s cousins, this Massoud Abdel Hafiz suddenly married her. He was commander of the military region of Sebha, and for a brief moment Mabrouka was able to take advantage of the many privileges granted to those close to Gaddafi, and thus became fond of traveling in opulent style. But this high-ranking officer soon divorced her and she went back to live in Ghat, her birthplace. In contrast to most Tuareg women, she didn’t wear traditional clothing and dressed Western style—“but without any taste,” the chief added. She was said to have had a romance with a bank owner, and then she vanished, “gone up to Tripoli.” He didn’t know the precise circumstances of this narrow escape.
I would find out how Mabrouka had made it to Tripoli from someone in the Department of Protocol. Mabrouka had been hired there in 1999, on the occasion of a conference of African leaders, to which Gaddafi wanted to give a historic scope and luster, and where the famous “Sirte Declaration” was signed on September 9, 1999 (9-9-99), setting the objective of the Organization of African Unity. About thirty heads of state participated, which meant almost as many wives who needed to be received at the airport, accompanied to the places they went (hairdresser, shops, conferences), and provided with interpreters. Overwhelmed by the task, the Department of Protocol was obliged to quickly recruit women who could speak all kinds of African languages and dialects.
Knowing Tuareg and Haussa (a language spoken in Niger and Nigeria), Mabrouka came in through this crack in the door and thus penetrated the circle of power. “However, she didn’t seem like anything special!” the person who had recruited her recalled. “She looked like a backward peasant girl, without any flirtatiousness or sophistication, probably very poor. In any event, that’s what I thought. But she had such eagerness in her eyes!” A quick apprenticeship brought the newly hired together for advice and instruction on their role, their language, and their appearance (a modern suit was recommended). On the first day of the conference Mabrouka made her entrance at Bab al-Azizia, accompanying the delegation from Guinea that had come to greet Gaddafi. And that was it. That same evening she told her supervisor: “You have to find someone to replace me. Starting today, I work directly for the brother Guide.” She had made it.
Later on, the family that had received her when she arrived in Tripoli reported how ardently she’d tried to find work and, above all, how stubbornly she’d insisted on meeting Gaddafi. “It would just take one time, she’d say. One time only! And he will want me in his service!” They all explained her success as coming from her intensive practice of black magic. Throughout her many years of service to Gaddafi, she met with the greatest sorcerers of Africa in their various countries, and had them invited to Tripoli.
So, gradually she became the sovereign lady of a kind of harem housed in the basement of the Guide’s residence, where young girls were brought together as captives, where they ended up staying for years, trapped and incapable of being reintegrated into Libyan society. But she was also the authorized source of the kind of big game Gaddafi was looking for (I was told about her way of appreciating the musculature of very young men in Africa before sending them off to Gaddafi). And lastly, she was the director of the “special service,” those girls in uniform who supposedly made up the personal, flamboyant guard of the dictator. Woe to anyone who attracted her attention or accidentally mentioned a niece, a female cousin, a neighbor, or to anyone who came to Bab al-Azizia to ask for a favor (lodging, work, health care). Mabrouka was always waiting for an opportunity to throw out her nets.
“That woman was a disgrace to the Tuareg nation,” one of its chiefs told me. “We all knew what that ‘special service’ signified. Did she benefit from her situation to
target our women? She is capable of anything. But a Tuareg woman would rather kill herself than admit to having experienced anything of that nature.”
I tried, of course, to find out where Mabrouka was. Early in the winter of 2011 they told me she had fled, as had the majority of those close to Gaddafi, and that she was in Algeria. Someone thought he’d seen her in Tunisia. Then I learned that she had mobilized a large number of people, notably among the Tuaregs, to try to convince the Algerian authorities to grant her political asylum. This request was refused. Early in March 2012, I learned that she had “negotiated” her return to Libyan soil and since then had been under house arrest in Ghat, living with her mother. In spite of my persistence, meeting her proved to be impossible. But to my great surprise, Ottman Mekta, the impressive rebel leader of Zintan who had interrogated her for three long days, showed her some leniency: “She expressed many regrets and even asked to be pardoned,” he told me. “She stated she wasn’t acting from her own free will and that, at the time, nobody was free! I saw that she was extremely attached to her elderly mother and I had the impression she was basically a good person who had been burdened with far too great a role.”
A good person . . . I couldn’t believe my ears. Was it possible she’d managed to change the opinion of her jailers? Should I share Soraya’s testimony with them?
9
A MILITARY WEAPON
Writing an article that no one really wants to read is a frequent occurrence. After all, that is what the work of journalists consists of: working on upsetting topics, coming out with upsetting information, bringing out truths that cause anger. “Our profession is not meant to please, nor to do harm; it is meant to put one’s finger on the problem,” as Albert Londres, the tutelary figure of great Francophone reporters, wrote. Still, I didn’t think I was writing a book that nobody in Libya would want anything to do with.
Gaddafi's Harem Page 20