Gaddafi's Harem

by Cojean, Annick

  In the course of my investigation my few Libyan friends, supporters of this project, were insulted and threatened. And in the highest circles of the State they spoke of an “affront.” If the rape of a young girl brings dishonor upon her entire family, particularly on its men, then the rape of thousands of women perpetrated by the country’s former dictator could bring only dishonor on the whole nation. It was an idea that was much too painful. An untenable hypothesis. Had anyone ever heard of a country where disgrace struck every man, all of whom were guilty of not knowing how to protect their wives, daughters, sisters from a predator-tyrant? Come now! Better to hide it all under the Berber rug and behind the “taboo” banner in the name of preserving the victims’ privacy. Or deny it. Label it a “nonsubject” and talk about something else. It’s as simple as that. The great majority of the Guide’s victims will never reveal who they are. And with good reason! As for “Gaddafi’s daughters,” his bodyguards, his “special service,” his harem—most of whom have now fled—it’s enough to describe them as loose women, as whores who basked in opulence, travel, the luxury the dictator offered them, women who as a rule have been renounced by their families. To turn them into partners of the Guide—accomplices, devoid of any morals—rather than his victims.

  Denial seems to be the operating principle of Libya’s current masters and offers them the advantage of their never having to deal with the nasty little secret and the great cowardice of a handful of men, formerly the dictator’s indulgent valets and now zealous revolutionaries on the side of the new power. They dream of silence. Of keeping the rapes under cover. Of forgetting the women: Soraya, “Libya,” Khadija, Leila, Houda, and all the others who know too much. There are so many “valiant,” “heroic,” “exemplary” war victims who expect and deserve gratitude and comfort from the new Libyan state. “Real” victims. Needless to say, they are men.

  Let’s be fair: there are some exceptions, one of whom is Mohammed al-Alagi. Meeting with him one day when all of Libya seemed hostile to me, immured in silence, boosted my energy. It was a Sunday evening in March in a café in the center of Tripoli. A taxi dropped me off after a delightful ride during which the driver had commented humorously on the caricatures of Gaddafi painted on the walls here, there, and everywhere. It was always a grotesque Gaddafi, alternately lecherous and bloodthirsty, with a disheveled clump of hair, and often disguised as a woman. “You know why?” the young man, a former rebel, asked me as I was laughing at a drawing of the dictator in a little green negligee, with a pearl necklace, false eyelashes, and scarlet red lips. “He was gay! He used to ask young guards dressed as women to dance for him.” His bold language had astounded me much more than the information itself, which I’d already heard from Soraya and from a former guard at Bab al-Azizia whose young, mortified colleague had been forced to submit to this kind of session.

  Mohammed al-Alagi was waiting for me with a glass of mint tea in the company of a lawyer friend. A former interim minister of justice, he is now the president of Libya’s Supreme Council of Public Liberty and Human Rights, had for years been president of the Tripoli Bar Association, and had long ago won the respect of his colleagues and of foreign NGO observers with whom he communicated. Small in stature, he was wearing an English gentleman’s cap above a round, sweet face with a little mustache and bright, expressive eyes. He, at least, wasn’t speaking in political jargon. What a contrast after so many interviews with navel-gazing personalities, all intoxicated with their new power. “Gaddafi raped,” he said. “Committed rape himself on a grand scale and ordered others to rape. Men, women. He was a sexual monster, perverse and enormously violent. I got wind of evidence of this very early on. Women lawyers, who had been raped themselves, confided in me as a friend and as a man of the law. I shared their pain but was unable to do anything. They didn’t dare go to the attorney general: bringing charges would mean a death sentence. Did you see the videos online of the atrocious lynching of a few officers who had dared protest the Guide’s rape of their wife? That guy was a barbarian!”

  He shook his head, hunched down, both hands around his cup of boiling-hot tea. “Even during the final days of his life, hunted and helpless, he couldn’t control himself. He sexually assaulted seventeen-year-old boys before the eyes of his faithful guards. No matter where, and with great brutality, too! He was cunning as a fox. And we have witnesses who confirm what he did. And I refuse to say, as some people do, that all this falls under the realm of his private life. It wasn’t ­lovemaking—he was committing crimes. And for me rape is the most serious of all crimes.”

  I told him about Soraya—of the basement where she lived, her previous suffering, and her current agony. It was good to bring it to a compassionate ear. During the investigation I’d thought about her constantly. Mohammed al-Alagi listened, shaking his head. He didn’t doubt the truth of what I was telling him for a moment. He found it very valuable that she had the strength to testify. “I wish we could render justice to every one of Gaddafi’s victims,” he said. “That would be the least we could do. It ought to be a goal for the new regime. I want investigations, public hearings, convictions, and compensation. In order to move forward, unite society, build a state, the Libyan people need to know what went on for forty-two years—hangings, torture, incarceration, mass murder, sexual crimes of all sorts. No one has any idea how much we’ve suffered. It’s not a matter of revenge, or even of punishment. More of catharsis.”

  Of course, such a project would be complicated, and he didn’t deny that. They were lacking in funds, structures, coordination. The government didn’t know the exact number of places of detention; most of the prisons were in the hands of armed militia; and the legal system was far from being stabilized. But they needed to demand transparency—a beam of light should shine on every single crime.

  It was getting very late. Al-Alagi had to leave. Speaking about Soraya, I used the word “slave” and he lost his composure. “Gaddafi thought we were all slaves! He vomited up all his past suffering over his people, destroying our culture, brushing our history aside, forcing the emptiness of the desert on Tripoli. Some Westerners swooned over his so-called culture, when really he felt nothing but contempt for knowledge and scholarship. He had to be the center of the world! Yes, he ruined Libyan society, turning his people into both victims and accomplices, and transforming his ministers into puppets and zombies. Yes, in Libya sex was an instrument of power: ‘You’ll shut up, you’ll obey me, or I’ll rape you, your wife, or your children.’ And that’s what he did, condemning everyone to silence. Rape was a political weapon before he made it into a military weapon.”

  There was such a contrast between this man and the political figures I had been able to meet. And unlike the majority of my interviewees, he wasn’t afraid of being quoted by name. So we tackled the minefield of the rapes perpetrated by Gaddafi’s troops during the revolution, which had taken place by the hundreds, in every town that was occupied by the dictator’s militia and mercenaries. In the prisons, too. Gang rapes, committed by men who were drunk and usually on drugs, which were filmed with cell phones.

  Very early on, the International Criminal Court, which had issued a warrant for the dictator’s arrest in June 2011, had condemned this systematic policy of rape, but proof had been very difficult to collect and the victims couldn’t be found. The women weren’t talking. Physicians, psychologists, lawyers, and women’s associations that wanted to come to their aid had the greatest possible trouble reaching them. So they went underground, withdrawing into their shame and sorrow. Some preferred to flee on their own terms. Others were thrown out by their families. Some were married to rebels who were willing to save the honor of these “war victims.” A small number were killed by their enraged brothers. Finally, during the winter months, there were those who gave birth in great secret and immense distress.

  Thanks to a network of devoted, efficient, and extremely discreet women, I was able to meet a few of these deeply
traumatized women and, at the hospital, to attend some of the adoptions of babies who were the result of these rapes. These were unforgettable moments, during which the child changes hands—and its destiny—in a few seconds, and the mother, often an adolescent, is relieved but forever tormented. I also interviewed rapists in a prison in Misrata. Two pathetic guys, one twenty-two and the other twenty-nine years old, enlistees in Gaddafi’s army, trembling and looking shifty as they described their crimes in detail. It was an order, they said. They were given “pills that make you crazy,” and brandy and hashish, too. And their leaders would threaten them with their weapon. “Sometimes the whole family was raped. Eight- or nine-year old girls, young women of twenty, their mother, sometimes in front of a grandfather. They’d shriek, and we’d hit them hard. I can still hear their screams. I can’t tell you how much they suffered. But the head of the brigade insisted: rape them, beat them up, and film it! We’ll send it to their men. We know how to humiliate those bastards!”

  The first one was cursing Gaddafi and begged us not to tell his mother what he was accused of having done. Tearful, the second one claimed he was eaten up with remorse and unable to find any peace. He was reading the Koran and praying day and night, had denounced all his leaders, and said he was ready for any punishment. Including death.

  “The order came from very high up,” Mohammed al-Alagi confirmed. “On that topic we have testimonies from those closest to Gaddafi. I myself heard Moussa Koussa, his former minister of foreign affairs, state that he had seen him order the Kataeb chiefs: ‘Rape first and then kill.’ It went hand in hand with his way of governing and conquering through sex.” Was there any other proof needed of his strategy? Of premeditation? It was there. Hundreds of boxes of Viagra had been found in Benghazi, Misrata, Zuwarah, and even in the mountains. “They were everywhere that his militia had been stationed. And we discovered contracts of prepaid orders, signed by the ‘State of Libya.’ A military weapon, I told you!”

  At times Muammar Gaddafi thought of himself as a writer, and in 1993 and 1994 he published sixteen short stories, full of lyrical flights of fancy, overwritten, and replete with mortifying clichés and delirious thoughts. “The stories reflected his sufferings,” recalled al-Alagi, struck by the fear of the crowd that Gaddafi confessed to in Escape to Hell, and by how prophetic this book of short stories and essays was.

  “These intemperate crowds, even towards their saviors, I feel them pursuing me . . . How affectionate they are in times of joy, holding their children high above their head. They’ve carried Hannibal and Pericles . . . Savonarola, Danton, and Robespierre . . . Mussolini and Nixon . . . And how cruel they are in times of anger! They plotted against Hannibal and made him drink poison, they burned Savonarola at the stake . . . sent Danton to the scaffold . . . broke Robespierre’s jaws . . . dragged Mussolini’s body through the streets, and spat on Nixon’s face when he left the White House, although he’d been carried there on the wings of applause!”

  Gaddafi added: “How I love the freedom of crowds, their enthusiasm after the chains are broken, when they burst into cries of joy and sing after moaning in pain. But how I fear and dread them! I love the multitudes the way I love my father and I fear them the way I fear him. Who, in a Bedouin society without any government, would be capable of preventing the vengeance of a father against one of his sons?”

  Indeed, the crowd took vengeance. Many times during my stay in Tripoli I caught Libyans, half terrified and half fascinated, in the process of viewing the chaotic and obscene images that showed Muammar Gaddafi dying under the fighters’ triumphant cries. Revolutionary songs were added to the edited scenes filmed on cell phones, an epic exultation. But there is one image the rebels didn’t dare slip into most of the films. An image that two women showed me on their cell phone a few days after the Guide’s death, as they placed a finger on their mouth as if it were a secret. I opened my eyes wide—the screen was tiny and the picture a little blurry. I couldn’t believe it. But, yes, it was certainly there. Even before the lynching, the bodies, the bullets, the crush, a rebel violently shoved a wooden or metal stick between the buttocks of the fallen dictator, who immediately began to bleed. “Raped!” one of the two women said without an ounce of regret.

  A lawyer from Misrata confirmed it. “So many Libyans felt they’d been avenged by this symbolic gesture. Before his appointment with death, the rapist was raped.”

  EPILOGUE

  Summer returned rapidly to Tripoli, while in Paris the winter continued into an icy spring. Or so it seemed to me, at least. The sky was low and gray, the rain disheartening, and the horizon blocked. And for a brief moment every now and then, I would regret not having written this book in Libya, in the bright light, facing the Mediterranean, this story of Soraya and of Gaddafi’s secret that nobody was talking about, at least not yet. The truth is that I had fled. Too much pressure, too much tension, toxic silences, poisonous confessions. I urgently needed to get some distance, reread my notebooks away from the muezzin who gave my Libyan days a rhythm with his call to prayer, which the mosque’s loudspeaker would direct straight at the windows of my room.

  But the distance was very relative. Even though I was in Paris while writing, my spirit remained in Tripoli and I was anxiously keeping an eye out for news from Soraya. She was probing, stumbling, becoming depressed, then picking up hope, childlike, devoid of any schedule, not knowing what to do with this past that haunted her, the terrible burden of her secret. The concept of a future didn’t make any sense to her yet. Her daily obsession consisted of her cigarettes, three packs of Slims without which she couldn’t live. And I angrily thought back to the scene in which the tyrant had put the first one in her mouth by force: “Inhale! Swallow the smoke! Swallow!”

  Every day the Internet provided me with a sense of the Libyans’ growing impatience with their temporary regime. Gasoline was flowing normally and its production was almost at the same level as before the revolution, but the people were not yet seeing any benefit. The whole country was in a state of suspense. No legitimate government, no legislators, no provincial governors, no national army, no police, no labor unions. In short, no state. Public services were in disarray, hospitals lacked equipment, and corruption was suspected everywhere. Far from being dispersed or integrated into a national structure, the militia, made up of former rebels, was reinforcing its power, declaring its own rules, and jealously guarding its prisoners in many different sites scattered throughout the region. Skirmishes between its members would occur from time to time, including the outbreak of a new kind of conflict connected to property. Ah, the wonderful Gaddafi legacy! In the late seventies, he had nationalized vast swaths of land, as well as buildings, factories, and villas. Now the former owners were appearing, armed with titles dating from the Italian occupation or the Ottoman era, and eager to immediately recover their possessions, by force if need be.

  The women? They were perhaps the only ray of hope. They held their heads high, raised their voices, finally demanded a full place in society. They must have felt like they had grown wings, they were so ready to venture anything. Their participation in the revolution had been so massive that they had helped to give it legitimacy and a foundation, and they certainly intended to gather its fruits in terms of freedom, expression, and representation. They couldn’t be kept out of it anymore, they thought. “It’s like after the first and second world wars!” proclaimed Alaa Murabit, a brilliant medical student, raised in Canada by dissident parents, who’d come back to Libya seven years before. “The women have faced fear, risks, and responsibilities. In the absence of men, they were obliged to come out of the homes where they are frequently confined, and they have started to enjoy becoming active members of society. No more being treated like second-class citizens! We have rights. And we’ll be heard!”

  The Gaddafi era had opened the doors of the university to them, had provided them with military training from male instructors in high schools who br
oke a taboo and convinced their parents that they could work side by side with men without any undue risks. The girls had successfully taken advantage of these new educational opportunities, in medicine and law, often bringing home the highest grades. The frustration of not being able to build a prestigious career afterward had thus been all the greater. Those who intended to be a cut above the rest, aim at a prominent place, and be noticed no matter how, risked a great deal: Gaddafi and his clique of commanders, governors, and ministers were on the lookout. Were a woman to attract their attention, they would use her unscrupulously. Rapes, abductions, forced marriages . . .

  “You can’t imagine how afraid girls were of appearing too smart, too intelligent, too talented, or too pretty,” Hana al-Galal, a lawyer from Benghazi, told me. “They would stop themselves from speaking in public. They’d relinquish illustrious posts and curtail their ambitions. They even renounced flirting, abandoned the short skirts and blouses they used to wear in the sixties to adopt the veil and loose clothing to cover their body. The golden rule was to keep a low profile. By wearing drab gray clothes, for instance—in assemblies and meetings women looked like ghosts.”

  That period was well and truly over. Or rather: they were hoping it was over. In post-Gaddafi Libya women are getting back in touch with their ambitions again—be they professional, economic, or political—while being quite aware that, in spite of everything, people’s minds can’t be changed overnight. The old guard is watchful. The proof? The famous speech given on October 23, 2011, the day that Moustapha Abdeljalil, president of the National Transition Council (CNT), officially declared that the country had been liberated. Tens of thousands of people came to attend the ceremony, which took place on the largest square in Benghazi only three days after the dictator’s death. Throughout the land millions of TV screens brought together families deeply affected by the importance of the event. Libya was declaring her faith in democracy. Everyone held their breath. And without saying so, the women were waiting for a gesture, a mention of past offenses, and maybe a tribute. But it was a fiasco.