New book, Gaddafi’s Harem Alleges Gross Sexual Misconduct Against Late Leader [Details]

In a new book, “Gaddafi’s Harem: The Story of a Young Woman and the Abuses of Power in Libya,” acclaimed French journalist Annick Cojean unveils the deranged dictator’s deviant sexual regime and his enslavement of young women throughout the country.

The details are shockingly graphic and the stories horrifying, made even more so by the victim-shaming that has silenced the woman in the aftermath.

In the first half of the book, the Le Monde journalist relates the story of “Soraya,” a pseudonym for a woman who was barely 15 when Muammar Gaddafi’s placed his hand on her head at a school function, signaling to his procurers that she was to brought to him. Soraya would spend years in the basement prison of his compound.

In the second half of the book, Cojean verifies the details of Soraya’s story in a series of clandestine interviews with other victims who only stand to suffer more if they reveal their names and faces. She also report’s Gaddafi’s pursuit of the wives of foreign heads of states, celebrities, and university students with outrageously lavish gifts.

Soraya’s mother supported the religiously observant family of seven children with her hair salon in Sirte, Gaddafi’s birthplace on the Mediterranean coast. In fact, the Gaddafi women frequented the salon and behaved insufferably, one of them slapping Soraya when the teen burst out, “How beautiful you are!”

Still, Soraya was in a fever of excitement when she was chosen to present “The Guide,” as Gaddafi was referred to, with a bouquet of flowers on his visit to her high school in April, 2004. Dressed in the school uniform of black pants and tunic with a white scarf around her face, she kissed his hand as she bowed down holding out the bouquet.

It was then he pressed her shoulder, placed a hand on her head and patted her hair. She would later learn that that was to signal he guards that he had made his choice.

The next day at the salon, the Gaddafi women announced to Soraya’s mother that her daughter was coming with them for “an hour.” When they arrived at an encampment, the dictator barked at his henchwoman, Mabrouka, “Get her ready!”

When next Soraya saw Gaddafi, her hair loosened to her waist and she was wearing a satiny, white dress. He was on his bed. Naked.

“Turn around, you whore,” he ordered.

 

She fought him, and he tried to force her. Mabrouka was brought back and slapped her. She was threatened “satisfy your master’s desires or I’ll kill you.” After another failed rape attempt, Soraya was thrown in a car and joined the convoy back to a military compound where she was again forced to confront the naked dictator.

In her words:

” ‘Come here my little whore!” he said as he opened his arms. “Come on, don’t be afraid!” Afraid? I was far beyond any fear. I was going to the slaughterhouse. I was dreaming of some way to escape but knew that Mabrouka was lying in ambush behind the door. I remained motionless, so he leaped to his feet and with a force that took me by surprise he grabbed my arm, threw me on the bed, and flung himself on top of me. I tried to push him away, but he was heavy and I couldn’t manage it. He bit my neck, my cheeks, my chest. I fought back screaming. He shouted, ‘Don’t move, you dirty whore!’ He beat me, crushed my breasts, and then after pulling up my dress and pinning my arms down, he brutally penetrated me.”

Afterward, she was bleeding and so brutalized that even one of Gaddfi’s Ukrainian nurses complained, “How can anyone do that to a child. It’s horrible!”

Not only did he do it again, the next time he ordered her to dance for him.

Her final destination was Bab al-Aziza, Gaddafi’s fortress in Tripoli. She was lead to the basement and was shown a small, mirrored room that was hers. Summoned upstairs in the middle of the night, Soraya found another woman, Amal, gyrating to a Bedouin song for Gaddafi’s pleasure..

This time when he raped her, Mabrouka came and went repeatedly, delivering phone messages. Soraya was sent back to her room with a pile of porn DVD’s and ordered to watch and learn. The next morning she was delivered to the dictator with his breakfast.

Amal, she would learn later, had been in the compound for ten years, long enough to accept her fate and earn privileges. Another hint that Soraya was only one of many came when she was referred to as “the new young one.” Shewould discover that she was just one of a “great many girls” in his harem. And he was always collecting more.

Cojean would uncover in her investigation that Gaddafi many public appearances were fueled not just by his insatiable ego, but his insatiable sexual appetite as well. School events were specifically engineered so he could find his next victim. So were foreign tours. He always arranged to meet with women’s associations and groups when visiting African nations. In these instances, persuasion in the form of a gift of money and an invitation to spend a week in Tripoli were used. But violence would also be employed if a young visitor didn’t willingly submit to the dictator’s depravity.

Gaddafi, who delivered public rants in his guise as the great female liberator, established the Military Academy for Women that he used as a hunting ground. His famous squad of female bodyguards, the Amazons, was actually comprised of mistresses and sexual slaves, like Soraya, hastily dressed up in uniform with a machine gun she didn’t know how to fire slapped into her hands.

Post-revolution, a chilling discovery was made at the University of Tripoli. A door adjoining a reception area gave way to a secret bedroom. Across from it was a fully equipped gynecological examination room. The doctor who showed it to Cojean said flatly, “What illegal and perverse practices had been hidden from view here? There are two possibilities I can think of: interrupting pregnancies and reconstructing hymens.”

Female students brought to Gaddafi after the speeches he made in the university amphitheater could be treated and released. The women had no recourse but to keep silent and abandon their education.

Gaddafi’s procurers even canvassed the prisons.

Gaddafi would actually work to woo a woman if she was a star, “singers, dancers, actresses, and television journalists from the Near and Middle East. The wives or daughters of diplomats or other powerful opponents were a particular target.

“It was not so much about seducing a woman as, through her, humiliating the man who is supposed to be responsible for her,” writes Cojean.

The Department of Protocol would assemble a dossier on the wives or daughters of Monarchs or heads of states visiting Libya. A gift of dazzling jewels or pure gold would be delivered along with an invitation to meet the dictator. In fact, his own ministers and generals were wary of inviting the dictator to family events, such as weddings, or trusting their females to strange drivers.

Even the military wasn’t safe. Gaddafi was in the habit of sodomizing his male guards.

For the women from more ordinary lives brought to him by force, there was often an eventual pay off in the form of money or a home for her family. But no future. Their own shamed families wouldn’t welcome them back and marriage was no longer a possibility. So many stayed in sexual ’employ’ of the dictator, in turn recruiting for him.

After a year in the basement, Soraya recalls witnessing two “innocent, beautiful and naïve” new girls, a 13-year-old from Bayda and a 15-year-old from Darnah, being sent upstairs to Gaddafi’s bedroom. She says Gaddafi needed women every day, and “he’d usually try them out and discard them.” Or chillingly, “recycle” them among the ministers and military that shared his depraved tastes.

After five years, Soraya was able to return home but only Gaddafi’s death on Oct. 11, 2011, freed her from the sudden demands that she appear at Bab al-Aziza. While her family houses her, she is a shame to them, particularly her brothers who could only reclaim their honor if she were to die.

What future is there in the new Libya for her and the many other victims of the depraved regime? Cojean passionately argues for justice for the survivors, but knows that the crime committed against them is prohibitively taboo. Most of those not killed have been cast aside in one way or another. But in a country ruled by men, to defiantly come out of hiding in protest would not just bring further shame. It could very well prove fatal.

[NYDAILY]