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 broke 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.
Not a word about their suffering or their contribution to the revolution. No allusion to the role they would be playing in the new Libya. Ah, yes! I forgot: a brief mention of the mothers, sisters, and daughters of the magnificent fighters to whom the country owed so much; and the announcement that, out of respect for Sharia law, henceforth the supreme reference in matters of law, polygamy would no longer be impeded by the obligation—established by Gaddafi—to ask one’s first wife for permission to marry a second one. That was all. It was a slap in the face to every woman present, who from the beginning of the ceremony had been listening carefully and trying in vain to find a female silhouette on the official platform, where a host of men in suits and ties were strutting about, so proud to be embodying the takeover.
“I was shocked, furious, disgusted!” Naima Gebril, judge at the Court of Appeals in Benghazi, admitted to me a little later. “What a disastrous speech! I can assure you that it made me cry. All of that for this?” she wondered, as did so many others. “The struggle of our mothers and our grandmothers to be allowed to get an education, to get work, be respected. The energy we gave to our studies so we could triumph over discrimination and freely practice our professions. And then that complete commitment to the revolution from the first day on, while most of the men were afraid to go out. All that, just to see ourselves ignored on the day of liberation? What a disgrace!”
What a disgrace, indeed. And this is how all the women I spoke to experienced it. “Do you remember the flood of images showing the CNT [National Transition Council] delegations as they toured the Western capitals?” the first female judge of Benghazi, nominated in 1975, asked me. “Not a woman in sight!” And Hillary Clinton’s visit to Tripoli, the evening before Gaddafi’s capture? “Not a single Libyan woman to welcome her!” The American secretary of state had publicly taken offense at that, insisting on the need for equal rights of men and women. “How humiliating it was!” the academic Amel Jerary had said in regret. “But there you have it: no man will ever let us be in the picture or move aside to make room for us, even on the least important platform. We will have to impose ourselves by force, and I assure you that the initiatives created by women will turn out to be the most significant.”
Women’s alliances have been created everywhere, in the form of clubs, associations, and NGOs. These associations are grouped together in professional, amicable, regional networks. Small, clandestine cells formed during the revolution have been transformed into organizations that serve women, children, and the wounded and whose goal is further reconciliation. They have replaced masses of failing services and the government’s cruel lack of initiatives. They have established internships for civic instruction to bring to mind the rights and responsibilities each woman has in a democracy: “Voting is a privilege. Use it. Now it’s your turn to play!” And they are burning with desire to transform this presence in the arena into a political lobby. For they know very well that their emancipation will come only through politics.
Even a quick search on Facebook will show the abundance of Libyan women’s groups, the liveliness of their discussions on the future of Libyan women, their eagerness to become informed on the situation of women in other countries of the Arab revolutions, and their desire to coordinate with these sisters as quickly as possible. Yes, they are full of hope. They comment on the plan for an electoral law, debate the appropriateness, or lack thereof, of quotas. They demand female ministers and ambassadors, directors of banks and public and administrative enterprises, affirming that they, at least, “were not molded by the Gaddafi system.” Reading what they have to say is invigorating and refreshing. And I had to laugh at the picture, which they published themselves, that shows them proudly waving their new voter registration cards. And oh, yes, they certainly plan to use them!
They openly state their enthusiasm, but also admit to dispiriting moments. On May 18, a young woman I knew for her activism posted a personal and disappointed message on Facebook: “It’s Friday and the weather is gorgeous. But as a woman in Libya I find myself shut away at home and depressed because I’m not allowed to go to the beach. Why are there no beaches for women? Don’t we have enough shoreline? How many of you girls have the same feeling?” How many? Thousands, of course!
“It’s unfair!” one of them responded.
“I lived on a street that looked out directly over the beach and wasn’t even allowed to set foot there!” wrote another one.
“Totally unacceptable!”
“It’s not even a matter of law. It’s one of this country’s tragedies!”
And this exchange:
“And yet, I still remember a time when I swam in a bikini!” . . . “A bikini? When did that change?” . . . “When a dark cloud invaded our spirits. In the middle of the seventies.” . . . “We should be able to swim in bathing suits rather than in Batman outfits!”
Soraya doesn’t go to the beach. She doesn’t surf the Internet. She has no Facebook account. She doesn’t even have any friends anymore with whom to share her angry frustrations or get registered to vote in the next elections. But she keeps hoping that Gaddafi’s sexual crimes won’t be forgotten. “I didn’t dream it, Annick! You believe me, don’t you? The names, dates, places—I’ve told you everything. But I really wanted to testify in a court of justice. Why should I have to be ashamed? Why do I have to hide? Why should I have to pay for the harm he did me?”
Her rebellion is mine. And I would very much have liked to share it with other Libyan women: magistrates, lawyers, those close to the CNT, defenders of individual rights. Sadly, for the time being, not one of them will wage her fight. Too sensitive. Too taboo. Nothing to be gained. Everything to lose. In a country that is entirely in the hands of men, sexual crimes will be neither debated nor judged. The people who bring up the subject will be declared insolent or deemed liars. The victims will have to remain in hiding in order to survive.
The only female member of the CNT, the lawyer Salwa el-Daghili, listened to me talk to her at length about Soraya. “How brave that little one is!” she said, shaking her head. “And it is essential that the story be known. This is the real face of the man who governed Libya for forty-two years. This is how he governed, despised, subjugated his people. We need pioneers like Soraya who dare to talk about the tragedy of women and what this country really experienced. But she runs huge risks for having spoken.” She was taking notes, her face distraught under a pink headscarf, her iPhone vibrating in her Louis Vuitton bag. “The subject is taboo, they must have told you so. I hope with all my heart that Soraya is being protected. She is nothing but a victim. There are so many others. But I cannot get involved in bringing out a dossier like this.”
Nobody will. And throughout the world women will continue to keep silent. Shameful victims of a crime that turns their body into an object of conquest, the spoils of war. Targets for predators toward whom our societies—from the most barbaric to the most sophisticated—continue to show an appalling level of leniency.
Before leaving Tripoli in late March I wanted to take a last look at the site of Bab al-Azizia. Not much was left of what for so long had symbolized the absolute power of the master of Libya. Bulldozers had pulverized the walls, razed most of the buildings, transformed the residence into a chaotic pile of stones, cement, and sheet metal. After the final battle, hordes of people had looted the place and nothing, absolutely nothing, that might recall a human presence was left. From the dust rose mountains of trash now being handled by the population in the absence of any organized collection, and the gray palm trees shaded a swimming pool filled with brackish water. The sky was leaden, crows perched on wall remnants were surveying the place, and I was walking aimlessly over a disaster area. The landmarks one of Gaddafi’s former guards had mentioned to me had been destroyed. I was lost. No matter. I moved on, trying to find a sign in this barren setting that would remind me of Soraya.
I ran into a rebel who was surveying the place—perhaps he was guarding it—and who pointed out the entrance to the basement to me. A few cement steps, an enormous red door reinforced like a safe, and a never-ending tunnel through which the man led me with his flashlight for a hundred meters or so. Climbing over a jumble of cement as we came out of the tunnel, I noticed a piece of a cassette between two stones and under a Kalashnikov. It was strange, outlandish. The title, written in Arabic, was incomplete, and the rebel explained simply: “Music!” Could it possibly be one of the tapes of syrupy songs to which Gaddafi had forced Soraya to dance? I put it in my pocket and continued the climb, then the walk. A little farther on, a crack in the floor drew my attention. Why did I stop there? There were so many of them that brought the battles of the month of August to mind or simply indicated a basement. I leaned over. At the bottom I saw a red object and was intrigued—everything else there was so gray. I couldn’t work out what it was, so I grabbed a tree branch and lay down on the ground to try to hook the object onto it. It was easy: it was a piece of fabric. Out of the entrails of Bab al-Azizia came a small red lace bra. The kind of bra Soraya had been forced to wear.
For the first time since this journey had begun, I felt like weeping.