“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 residence, 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 basement 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.
In February 2011, in the early days of the revolution, Saada Al Fallah paid her a visit with four soldiers and ordered her to make a declaration on a national television station stating that she was raped by a group of rebels. One might as well have dropped a bomb. Khadija belonged to the powerful tribe of the Warfalla. Publicly revealing a rape would be such an attack on the tribe’s collective honor, would cause such a scandal that it would give rise to instant retaliations and would prevent the largest tribe of Libya from joining forces with the budding revolution.
But, above all, Khadija understood to what extent such a false confession would condemn her in everyone’s eyes. “My own family would be responsible for killing me!” She refused. She was beaten, raped, burned with cigarettes. One of the guards broke her tibia with the steel heel of his boot, requiring one of Bab al-Azizia’s doctors to come immediately. In the end she pretended to accept the order on the condition that they allow her to recuperate at her mother’s house in the Tadjoura district. One night she managed to evade the surveillance of the guards who stood watch in front of the house and escaped in her nightgown via the back, with her passport. Rebels she met in her flight helped her to cross over into Tunisia, where she would stay throughout the revolution.
LEILA
Today Leila is about forty and feels like she is a survivor. She is married to a cousin who wedded her out of love, she is raising her children, and she lives with the dread that someday someone will discover the horrible secret that disrupted her youth. She wept while she told her story, a story she had never told before.
As an adolescent Leila had a schoolmate, the niece of a friend who was the right-hand man of Colonel Gaddafi, someone who had helped him take power during the coup d’état of September 1, 1969. Together they became active in one of the revolutionary committees and when her friend took the initiative one day to organize a meeting with the Guide for a school group, Leila was enthusiastic. A minivan brought the girls to Bab al-Azizia, where they were received in a large reception room on the second floor of what was then the Guide’s residence and would be partially destroyed in the American bombing of 1986. Muammar Gaddafi was charismatic and attentive. Relaxed, he took his time to show interest in each one of the girls, asking them questions about their family background, their tribe, and their region. He laughed a lot and the girls were captivated by his charm.
Not long after this outing, a school employee came looking for Leila in her classroom and brought her to the office of the principal who, clearly very impressed, announced that a car from Bab al-Azizia was waiting in front of the school. Leila didn’t understand why the car would be there but no one had any doubt that she should go with the driver. First she was taken to a room where she had to wait a moment and then Ahmed Ramadan, Gaddafi’s personal secretary, brought her to the Guide’s office. Dressed in a long white Bedouin shirt, he came to meet her, complimented her on her beauty, and began to caress and grope her body. Bewildered, Leila froze, and when Gaddafi took her chest in his hands, she pulled back, screamed, shook him off, and ran. Ahmed Ramadan was waiting on the other side of the door. “Are you finished?” he asked in a neutral tone. Leila was in tears. “You must say goodbye to the Guide before you leave!” he insisted as he opened the door again to show the Colonel with an erection, laughing. The driver took her back to school. Principal and teachers asked no questions. She just noticed there were signs of a new respect.
That same evening Ahmed Ramadan phoned her at home. “It’s a great honor that the Guide chose you. Your tears were ridiculous. The Guide simply wanted to be nice to you.” Leila said nothing to her parents.
But a week later some members of one of the revolutionary committees ransacked the family home, supposedly looking for compromising documents. Leila’s father, a member of the nobility, said to be a religious man, was humiliated, beaten, and dragged to the ground. The family was in shock.
Ahmed Ramadan called the next morning: “I heard what happened to your family. Rest assured: since you are working for the Guide, we will protect you.” He told her he was sending a driver, whom she was to meet very close to her house. She felt trapped, invented a story to explain to her parents why she was going out, and found herself back at Bab al-Azizia in front of Gaddafi. “Did you see what happened to your family? It could turn out very badly. But it all depends on you: you can help them or you can cause them a lot of harm . . .”
“What do I have to do?”
“Well now! Be nice! I can tell that I really excite you.”
He served her fruit juice, forced her to drink it, and kissed her greedily as he pressed himself against her, then disappeared.
The car came back for her a few days later. Ahmed Ramadan took her to a small reception room, where she waited, alone, for several hours. Then he took her to a library, where Gaddafi ended up, too. “I picked this setting for you, for I like students and books.” Then he threw her down on a mattress and raped her. This was such a shock, such violence, that she thinks she lost consciousness. When she got her wits back, he was working at his desk and burst out laughing. “You’ll like it later on!”
For three years he continued to have her brought to him and raped her. “I am the master of Libya. Every Libyan belongs to me, including you!” And: “You are my possession. And you should know that one of the verses of the Koran recognizes the master as having right over everything.” It was three years of unremitting suffering, Leila recalls. She turned inward, missed school, let herself be punished and beaten at home for the absences she could no longer explain. Her parents thought she was living a depraved life, but the Guide kept repeating: “One single word about me and you’ll never see your father again!” One day she told him she wasn’t getting her period anymore, which didn’t stop him from going at her one more time. But shortly thereafter Ahmed Ramadan handed her an envelope with some money and advised her to go to Malta. It was a minimal sum, nothing was arranged, and Leila herself had to find a hotel and a hospital. As he did the abortion, the doctor found her to be “in a sorry state” and suggested reconstructing her hymen a few days later. She was saved. Contrary to its usual modus operandi, Bab al-Azizia would never call for her again.
HOUDA
For several years Houda, too, was one of the countless involuntary mistresses of the Colonel who, without living at Bab al-Azizia, were called in at a moment’s notice and whose lives were a living hell. In the nineties she was seventeen and preparing for her final exams with a group of classmates who often studied together, alternating homes. One day, a woman who was visiting the mother of one of the girls noticed her and bombarded her with compliments: “How beautiful you are!” Houda was extremely embarrassed and fled the woman’s unrelenting gaze, but soon she ran into her once more and the woman began to praise her all over again: “I think you’re marvelous. If you take that exam soon, I’ll have a proposition for you.” Very ill at ease, the girl assumed she was a matchmaker.
Not long thereafter Houda’s brother was arrested. He never failed to attend the mosque and was thus bound to be suspect. The scheming woman got in touch with the schoolgirl: “I know some people who can get your brother out of prison. Look here, I’ll take you to them.” She picked her up by car and brought her inside Bab al-Azizia. Clearly the woman was used to being there.
Houda was stunned. “Ah! Is this the new one?” a man in the front office exclaimed. Houda found the comment alarming but still had no clue. Ahmed Ramadan entered, saying: “Ah! Here’s the girl whose brother is in such deep trouble! Now then, follow me!” He took them into a large office, where Muammar Gaddafi suddenly appeared. “Your brother is a traitor! I hope that you are a good revolutionary and won’t turn out like him!” He came over to her, then ran his hands over her body before pressing himself against her. “However, I’ll give your brother some thought, because I really find you magnificent.” He kissed her neck, tried to reach for her breasts, and took out his penis. The girl fainted.
Crouching on the floor next to her, the woman tapped her on the face: “Wake up! You’re being ridiculous! He is your master. This is your chance!” Gaddafi approached, wanted to touch her again, but she screamed and fought back. So he grabbed her by the clothes and hurled her brutally into a corner of the room. Wild, he seized the woman who’d brought Houda there and quickly penetrated her. He demolished the schoolgirl with a threatening look: “Next time it’s you!”
In the car that took her home, Houda was too shocked to utter a word. But the woman explained to her: “The master has every right over us. He will make love to you, set your brother free, and you might get a scholarship for the university.” The girl said nothing to her parents about what happened; it was impossible. But when her mother hit her, furious at her for being late, she simply told her some of the story, omitting any details: “I was arrested by the police and questioned about my brother.”
Three days later, the woman phoned her: “I can’t come with you to Bab al-Azizia but a car from protocol will come to pick you up. Think about your brother.” So Houda found herself in front of Ahmed Ramadan, who interrogated her about the young man and took notes. It reassured her; perhaps her approach hadn’t been in vain. But she was told she was to see the Guide again and was taken to his office, where he said: “You think a traitor is set free that easily? You’re dreaming! It’s not quite that simple. All the more so because you are a wild one! And will scream again if I touch you . . .”
“No, I don’t want to upset you. But when can my brother leave prison?”
“You won’t scream anymore? You promise?”
With a few rough movements he took off her clothes, threw her down on a mattress on the floor alongside a bookcase, and raped her. Then he left without a word.
Nobody came to see her or showed any concern for her. She didn’t know how to get out and spent the rest of the night in his office, terrified. Ahmed Ramadan found her there the following day and took her to a room, where she had just begun to fall asleep when Gaddafi joined her, then raped her again, hitting and biting her. She was bleeding profusely and remained locked up there for two days, without food or drink. On the third day, Ahmed Ramadan sent her home, saying he’d be back in touch.
When she came home her parents were horrified by the state the girl was in and were sick with worry. She didn’t want to talk but, since they hounded her with questions, she whispered that she had been at the police station. Alarmed, the family assumed that Houda’s condition had to be connected to their son. They surrounded her, fussed over her, and insisted on taking her to the hospital.
There, a doctor examined her, and said: “You were raped.”
“Yes, but I beg you, please don’t say anything to my parents.”
“You have to bring charges.”
“No, impossible.”
“Sexual relations outside of marriage is against the law, which forces me to report your case to the police.”
“Do you really have a death wish?”
Gaddafi wouldn’t leave Houda alone. For many long years, she had to submit to his demands, his madness, his brutalities, his fantasies. She could make no plans, living like a hermit, in perpetual fear that the scandal would be discovered. Her parents finally began to be suspicious, for the official cars were less and less discreet and Gaddafi demanded that she be present at his many speeches and lectures. That was when she discovered the horde of other women who were in the same position as she. They looked at each other but didn’t talk. How to bring up the subject? Whom could they trust? One day he asked her to run up to him and kiss him in front of the cameras during a public event. He phoned her at night, threatened her, insisted she wear a specific outfit, kept her permanently available. She became depressed, suicidal, was disgusted with herself. But after several years, a suitor presented himself and she fell in love. Gaddafi was enraged, but she got married. And from then on she refused to go to Bab al-Azizia, despite the orders and her fear about what might happen to her. She was lucky. Many young husbands who hadn’t been picked by the master would not survive their marriage to one of his favorites.
THE GENERAL’S WIFE
AND DAUGHTER
A general’s daughter spoke out in the weekly newspaper Libya Al Jadida. Her testimony was confirmed by the editor in chief, Mahmoud Al Misrati. Colonel Gaddafi, who always inquired about the family situation of his subordinates and the appearances of their wives, found out one day that the wife of a general in his army was extremely beautiful. Did he give the orders himself? Or was it Mabrouka’s idea? However it happened, three of his guards presented themselves one afternoon at the general’s house to hand his wife an invitation to a women’s reception organized by Safia Gaddafi for that very night.
The general was wary. He hadn’t heard any mention of such an event and didn’t at all like the thought of his wife going alone to Bab al-Azizia. Then one of the guards dialed a number and handed him his cell phone. Mabrouka was on the line. “It is a magnificent honor the Guide is doing you! It proves he knows you are close to him and considers you a true revolutionary. It will be a very fine party, strictly for wives.” Reassured, the general let his wife go. When she returned a few hours later, she was strange and evasive. “Something in my mother seemed broken,” her daughter says.
Other invitations followed, especially when the general was absent. After several months, the wife came home one day with the keys to a fine apartment. “A gift” from Safia Gaddafi, she said, announcing that they’d become great friends. The family moved, their lifestyle visibly improved; it was good to be in Gaddafi’s good graces. But then one evening Mabrouka and two other women presented themselves at the door of the general’s house, this time with an invitation for his daughter from Gaddafi’s oldest daughter, Aisha. Her mother’s face fell. Horrified, she held her hand over her mouth. Her daughter, on the other hand, was thrilled. “This evening? I’d be delighted! The only problem is that I have no evening gown.”
“Don’t worry, I came prepared!” Mabrouka said with a smile, then turned around and pointed to a suitcase. “Inside is everything you’ll need to look beautiful tonight!”
The girl quickly put on the dress, applied makeup, and followed Mabrouka, not understanding why her mother had tears in her eyes when they parted. The general himself seemed taken aback. He would be even more shocked when, weeping, his wife admitted that Safia’s invitations were cover-ups for her being summoned by the Guide and that the money, the gifts, the apartment were merely remunerations for a forced sexual relationship. The general blew up, bellowed, and decided to go immediately to Bab al-Azizia. But at that moment he collapsed and was taken to the hospital. He had suffered a stroke.
At the same time the general’s daughter was surprised to see Gaddafi enter the room where she had been made to wait. “Where is Aisha?” she asked with a smile.
“I am Aisha,” the Guide answered coldly. He didn’t try to seduce her, or to be tactful, but instead raped, beat, and humiliated her as much and as often as he could. She didn’t get out of Bab al-Azizia till a week later, when she went to the hospital to see her father, who was dying. His death would only make things easier for the Guide. When Mabrouka called to set up regular appearances for the daughter, she asked the mother to get her ready according to the Guide’s taste—“You know what needs to be done”—and to cover her arms and legs with henna.
The stories are many and, in the West, it’s hard to imagine what it costs these women to speak. Not only in terms of the trauma, which is the same everywhere, but in terms of the risks for them and their families. The chaos in which Libya finds itself—it’s filled with weapons—combined with the yoke of religion for the time being excludes any objective debate on the issue. It explains why, despite basic rules of journalism that require the identification of one’s sources, I agreed to accept the requests of the majority of the women quoted in this book to preserve their anonymity.