THE PREDATOR
Never could Dr. Faisal Krekshi have imagined what he was to discover when he and a handful of rebels took control of the University of Tripoli in late August 2011. Not that this calm, levelheaded, fifty-year-old professor and gynecologist, who had been trained in Italy and then at the Royal College of London, was ignorant of the corruption in the university system, of the networks of surveillance and denunciation put in place by the revolutionary committees, of the immense instrument of propaganda wielded by the various departments. He knew how fresh the memory of the public hangings of students in 1977 and 1984 still was among the Libyan people, and he was aware that no university career could be envisioned without pledging complete loyalty to the regime.
So, after a night of intense fighting on the campus, he wasn’t surprised to find an improvised prison inside some shipping containers, an office for the dreaded head of the security services, Abdallah Senoussi, as well as drawers jam-packed with information on dozens of students and professors, including a list of individuals to be executed. But what he found by accident, as he was searching the nooks and crannies of the university looking for possible snipers and forcing the doors of a secret apartment in the “green auditorium” where Muammar Gaddafi liked to give speeches, went far beyond his worst suspicions.
A vestibule adjoined a huge reception room furnished with brown leather armchairs. Then a hallway led up to a windowless wood-paneled bedroom. A double bed had been made, covered with a quilted blanket, surrounded by cheap floral patterned rugs and two small bedside tables with lamps that spread an orange light. Next to the bedroom was a bathroom with a shower, a toilet, a bidet, and a Jacuzzi with a gilded faucet. It was strange to find what looked like a bachelor pad in a building reserved for study and for the teaching of the Green Book. But the next room completely baffled visitors and chilled me to the bones when I had the chance to explore the place myself. Across from the bedroom a door opened out onto a perfectly equipped gynecological examination room, including a bed with stirrups, a projector, X-ray equipment, medical instruments, and laminated directions in English.
Although otherwise completely restrained, Dr. Krekshi couldn’t hide his disgust. “How could one not be shocked and overcome,” asked the well-known specialist who had been named as rector of the university after the revolution. “Nothing, absolutely nothing, could possibly justify the presence of such a setup. If any emergency was ever to be expected, the center of obstetrics and gynecology was less than a hundred meters away. So why this? What illegal and perverse practices had been hidden from view here? There are two possibilities I can think of: interrupting pregnancies and reconstructing hymens, both of which are forbidden in Libya. And without uttering the word ‘rape,’ I feel compelled to think of some very disturbing sexual behavior.”
He spoke in a serious voice, weighing every word, mindful of the horror of his discovery. He told me that he had been the official gynecologist of Gaddafi’s daughters Aisha and Hana. “It puts me in a strange position,” he acknowledged with an apologetic smile. “The Gaddafi family respected my expertise, and I asked for nothing more. Occasionally, the daughters would express their father’s amazement at me. ‘He’s not demanding a car? A house?’ No, I wanted nothing. Nothing!” He was familiar with Muammar Gaddafi’s appetite for young girls. He had heard about what he called “the magic touch,” that hand he would place on the head of his prey as a signal to his bodyguards. And he, who taught family planning and each year devoted an entire course to the notion of “taboo,” was well aware that Gaddafi’s sexual mores fell under the greatest of all taboos. No one would have risked mentioning the subject, alerting the female students, or organizing a security cordon. They preferred not to know anything.
As for Gaddafi’s victims, they could only keep silent and inconspicuously leave the university. This meant it was impossible to estimate the numbers of those invited to Bab al-Azizia and those taken to the presidential suite concealed beneath the amphitheater. The day of his ghastly discovery, Dr. Krekshi told me he’d found “eight or nine” DVDs in the apartment with videos of sexual attacks perpetrated by the Guide. But he admitted he had destroyed them immediately. I was dumbfounded. Destroyed? Were they not crucial forms of evidence? “Think of the circumstances. The war was still on. I couldn’t guarantee that these videos would never fall into irresponsible or dangerous hands, that they wouldn’t facilitate coercion or blackmail. My first concern was to protect the girls.” A strange reaction. It was a heavy responsibility, but shouldn’t it be up to a court of justice to make such a decision?
The revelation that Gaddafi had a secret apartment right in the middle of the university created shock waves on campus. But this didn’t mean that people’s tongues were loosened. They reviled the dictator and, proclaiming their loathing, gleefully trampled on his posters, which were now used as doormats in front of the classrooms. Yet the veiled female students kept walking and ignored me when I tried to find out more, and one young man I’d asked to conduct a poll on the subject sent me a text message: “I’m calling it off. It’s taboo.” Really! There had to be witnesses, people who’d noticed suspicious goings-on or had heard talk of young girls being harassed! Was there really nobody who was willing to criticize the system?
The young editor in chief of the weekly Libya Al Jadida seemed to be the only one willing to break the silence. “I had a friend, a girl from a farmer’s family in the region of Azizia, who came to study medicine in Tripoli,” he told me. “During one of his visits to the university Gaddafi put his hand on her head and his bodyguards arrived at her house the next day to tell her that the Guide had chosen her to be a revolutionary guard. The family refused, so her brother was threatened, and after that she agreed to meet with the Guide, was raped and held captive for a week, then was let go with a packet of money. Her parents were too humiliated to take her back. Returning to the university was inconceivable for her. She was lost. Today she officially works in the automobile business, but I know for a fact that she lives by selling her body.”
With her light complexion, long curly hair down to her shoulders, and haughty demeanor, Nisreen isn’t surprised. Raised in Libya in a middle-class family, with one European parent, she knew it would be impossible for her to survive in the oppressive, hypocritical atmosphere of the Gaddafi regime and that she would be better off studying abroad. “Nothing could be further from our minds than the possibility of rape,” she told me one evening, “even though the escapades of the Guide’s sons and their gang were known by everyone. But sooner or later every girl was confronted with sexual exploitation. Women sent by Bab al-Azizia would crisscross the campus, install themselves in restrooms where girls were quietly doing their makeup, join their conversations, and quite quickly make propositions, including those of a financial nature.”
And it wasn’t only the dark shadow of Bab al-Azizia. The whole university was drenched in an atmosphere of sexual blackmail. “You can’t count the girls who failed their exams because they refused their professor’s advances. Or those who were aghast at their grades and then found they were being offered some very private courses. I heard of girls who gave themselves to the professor of their fiancé so that he would get his diploma, an indispensable precondition of their marriage. I’ve seen boys ask their girlfriend to do this and then, sometimes, break up with her afterward. Sex was a means of exchange, a means of promotion, and an instrument of power. The Guide’s mores turned out to be contagious. His mafia operated in the same way. The system was corrupt down to the bone.”
Alarmed by the organization he uncovered as he took over the university’s reins, Dr. Krekshi confirmed that this went on. It was an utterly broken system, with networks and spies in each department and administrative office, and coordinated by the institution’s secretariat in collaboration with Bab al-Azizia. The objective? To select the prettiest female students, under any pretext, and lead them first into the Guide’s net, then into that of his clique. Good grades, diplomas, prestigious assignments, study grants—everything was in their grasp as long as they remained meek and docile. The gifts could, of course, go beyond the scholarly and might include things like iPhones, iPads, cars, and jewelry. The bids could run very high for the most desirable girls who, generally speaking, didn’t come from poor backgrounds.
“It’s the law of silence: no one will ever testify to rape,” the doctor told me. However, he did allude to several stories that are illustrative of the practices in place—for instance, that of a female student registered at the medical school who found herself in the paramedical curriculum. “Given her excellent grades, it was incomprehensible. She asked for an explanation from the university secretary, who promised her the error would be corrected on the condition that she go to Regatta, the leisure center on the coast where the regime’s dignitaries, and especially their sons, gave themselves over to all sorts of vice. The whole of Tripoli knew about Regatta. It was an area without any laws, where everything was legal. The girl refused and for two years kept getting zeros on every exam. Can you imagine the pressure? Finally, I myself wrote a letter to get her transferred back into the medical school. In my new role I’ve passed on five more testimonies by brave young women that prove the abject corruption of the system.”
The apartment hidden on the ground floor of the Green Book Academy will keep its secrets forever. Apparently, there are other niches the Guide frequented that were set up especially for him, because he always needed sex partners, male and female, preferably young virgins. Khadija, the student who was raped and stayed at Bab al-Azizia for several years, forced to trap different men in the regime, assured me that Gaddafi wanted at least four a day. That number was confirmed in the British press by Faisal, an attractive young man also spotted by the Guide at the university. He was forced to interrupt his law studies in order to enter Gaddafi’s private service immediately. “The girls would go into his bedroom, he’d do his business, and he’d come out as if he’d merely wiped his nose.” Thirty years old today, the young man emphasized Gaddafi’s violence and his enormous consumption of Viagra, and confirmed that countless women “would go straight from his room to the hospital,” victims of internal injuries. That is Soraya’s testimony, and is confirmed by several others I spoke with. Not only was Gaddafi insatiable but he was sadistic and extremely brutal as well.
So, for him, schools and universities were perpetually restocked, natural fishponds. It was at the University of Benghazi that the Colonel also spotted Houda Ben Amer, the mother of his adopted daughter Hana. She was originally from Benghazi and had gained national notoriety when, during a public hanging of a young pacifist opponent, she came out of the crowd of spectators, all worked up and excited, and pulled at the legs of the young man with all her might to hasten his death. That cruelty gave her the nickname “Houda the executioner,” for the scene had been aired on national television. But Gaddafi had noticed her long before that. In 1976, proclaiming her attachment to the regime, she opposed the April student demonstrations and supported the repression, denouncing and hunting down any opponents and leading “purification” campaigns at the head of revolutionary committees. A fellow student remembers, “We’d never seen a girl so aggressive, so ambitious, and with such nerve. She would take the floor to make scathing speeches, participate in meetings until deep into the night, and relay Gaddafi’s messages while threatening any dissidents with more executions.”
After the hangings of 1977, with the support of the Colonel, and speaking on his behalf, she continued to increase her power. Early on, she all but took control of the university, ousting professors and students she considered too far removed from the regime’s orthodoxy. Then she vanished from Benghazi for a while, going to live with the Guide and joining his personal guard, and returned more influential than ever before, intimately linked to Gaddafi, who decided to marry her off (he himself was her witness) and appointed her to important functions: mayor of Benghazi, president of the Arab Parliament, president of the National Audit Office, minister. She became one of Libya’s wealthiest women and was widely hated by the Libyan people. Her house in Benghazi was burned by the rebels during the first few hours of the insurrection, and she is today in prison in Tripoli, where she admitted to her jailers that she had been forced to abandon her little daughter—the result of her liaison with Gaddafi. The girl was born on November 11, 1985, if I can believe the photocopy of a 2007 passport I obtained, and was later adopted from an orphanage in Tripoli by Gaddafi’s wife, Safia.
Every place where women regularly spent time was a potential source of women for the Guide, including prisons, where one of his bodyguards was at one point seen taking photographs of attractive detainees. Hairdressing salons and beauty parlors were a favorite locale and were diligently visited by Gaddafi’s scouts. Wedding celebrations were another. He loved going to festivities where women were dressed in their most beautiful finery. If he couldn’t get there himself, he would send his representatives and spend an insane amount of time looking over the photos and videos they’d take. A photographer from central Tripoli confirmed this, saying that he would always find a thousand pretexts not to submit any of the copies of wedding photos and videos he was asked for to Bab al-Azizia. Young girls confirmed that they had avoided certain parties at large hotels in Tripoli, afraid to be filmed and singled out for the Guide or his clique later on. Some parents lived in the same fear, forbidding their daughters—already deprived of social encounters—to go to parties or parades, especially if they were taking place anywhere near Bab al-Azizia. The Guide’s residence, although protected like a fortress, would endlessly receive school groups and young activists. It was a godsend for Gaddafi.
His employees—drivers, guards, soldiers—were often called on to bring him photos and videos of their weddings. At first, some of them were quite touched by the Guide’s interest, but they all became disillusioned. If a guest, a sister, a cousin had the misfortune of pleasing Gaddafi, the employee was instructed to arrange for a meeting. But if it was the young bride who caught the master’s eye, the employee would find out only after the fact, when it was too late. The Colonel would manage to get him away from his home under the pretext of some mission, and then take advantage of his absence to summon the wife or pay her a visit, one that would lead to rape if the woman resisted. I cannot say how many terrible stories I was told about guards who, after their young wives confessed to them, were made crazy with rage, spite, jealousy and then, known to be seeking revenge against the Guide, were murdered on his orders. Several were hanged, others were cut up in pieces. Two of them had their limbs tied to cars that would drive in opposite directions. The scene was filmed and shown to newly hired guards so they would understand what price they’d pay if they betrayed the master of Bab al-Azizia.
Nurses, teachers, pediatric nurses were equally targeted. The director of a Tripoli day care center told me how one of her pretty employees was visited one day by three Amazons who asked her to join a team of young women selected to go to the airport with flowers to welcome a delegation from South Africa. “Make sure you look beautiful!” A few days later they came by to pick her up in a minibus that suddenly veered off the airport road and headed toward Bab al-Azizia instead. The group was surprised and thrilled when the Guide received them right away and improvised a little speech. But when everyone went back to the bus, the baby nurse found herself taken to a small room with a Jacuzzi, where two nurses rapidly did a blood test on her. Then, no longer smiling, Gaddafi reappeared. His intentions were very clear. The girl panicked: “I beg you, don’t touch me. I come from the mountains. And I have a fiancé!” The Guide answered: “I’ll give you a choice. Either I kill him or I let you marry him and give you a house, and you’ll belong to both of us.”
One of the dictator’s close collaborators, a man who worked alongside him every day but had no decision-making powers, finally agreed—with enormous reluctance—to broach the subject with me. At first he denied knowing anything at all about what he called “the brother-Guide’s private life” and refused to get mixed up in it: “I didn’t stay around at night and I swear I never set foot in the basement of his residence.” It was a nice way of stating that this place was where all danger lurked. But when I promised him that I wouldn’t mention his name, he gradually began to trust me and in the end mentioned the service of “procurers” responsible for “answering the sexual needs” of the dictator. “They were pitiful and spineless sycophants, who groveled before him and fought to anticipate his desires.” And then he summarized the situation. “Muammar Gaddafi,” he said, could be described as a sexual obsessive—“It is all he seriously thought about”—and this “pathological” addiction led him to analyze everything via the prism of sex. “He governed, humiliated, subjugated, and sanctioned through sex.”
But he had two different kinds of prey. The run-of-the-mill women who made up his daily diet were usually young, had simple backgrounds, and were found by what was known as his “special service,” which was close to the Department of Protocol, and which during its final years was directed by the horrible Mabrouka Sherif, the Mabrouka so often mentioned in Soraya’s account. He’d take these girls, most often by force—a few of them, those who had been particularly well indoctrinated, said they were flattered to have been “opened” by the Guide—and would generously reward those who satisfied him or who agreed to come back and recruit new girls. And then there were the others. The ones he aspired to have. The ones whose conquest and domination would be a personal challenge for him. Those who would be trophies of the most extraordinary type.
He showed great patience and strategy in wooing those women, and also expended enormous resources. There were the stars, of course—singers, dancers, actresses, and television journalists from the Near and Middle East. He sent planes across the globe to pick them up and cover them with riches and jewels even before they arrived. They satisfied his narcissism—the idea that he could have anyone he wanted—but that was not what interested him most. What really excited him was the idea of possessing the daughters or wives of powerful figures or of his opponents, whether it be for an hour, a night, or a few weeks. It was not so much about seducing a woman as, through her, humiliating the man who was supposed to be responsible for her—there is no greater shame in Libya—trampling him, annihilating him, or, if the secret never came out, having ascendancy over him, consuming his power and dominating him, at least psychologically.
“That Bedouin son, born in a tent, had suffered poverty and disregard throughout his childhood, and was motivated only by the thirst for revenge,” was how his former collaborator put it to me. “He despised the rich and did his best to impoverish them. He hated aristocrats and the upper class—those individuals who naturally had what he would never have: culture, power, and good manners—and he vowed to humiliate them. By necessity that would happen via sex.” He was able to coerce certain ministers, diplomats, and high-ranking military men to have sexual relations with him. “They had no choice—refusing would mean the death sentence—and the act was so shameful that not one of them would either complain or boast about it.” Sometimes he commanded them to deliver their wives to him. If not, he’d make sure to trap the women—invite them to Bab al-Azizia when their husbands were away, or visit them himself, provoking their confusion and panic.
“But he really outdid himself in his schemes to get their daughters,” the man went on. “It could be a long-term project, taking time to collect information and photographs of them—finding out about their tastes, their habits, their daily outings; approaching them, then encircling and getting close to them, with the help of his famous guards and their madam mother. They’d tell these daughters how much the Guide admired them. They’d flash money, a car—a BMW or a large 4x4—before their eyes, a medical degree if they were studying, or an office in town if they were dreaming of getting established. Everything was possible.” What a victory when they finally came to him! What a hold over the man who had sired them!