Gaddafi's Harem by Cojean Annick

Author:Cojean, Annick
Language: eng, fra
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Atlantic Books Ltd
Published: 2013-08-13T16:00:00+00:00

2

“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.

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