Gaddafi: the sexual predator

'I'm going to make some things clear to you: Muammar is going to sleep with you. He's going to open you. From here on in, you will be his possession." Chilling, terrifying words from the late dictator's subordinates to one of the many teenage girls who were forced into being his sex slaves.

Gaddafi liked to project the image of someone with traditional Arab habits, a simple man happiest in his tent among his desert people. We have since learned that he had an extremely bizarre and very opulent lifestyle. But what we did not know – and what this outstanding book reveals – is that he was also a depraved and sadistic sex fiend with a taste for teenage girls and sometimes boys.

Gaddafi's Harem is an astonishing portrait of this side of Gaddafi's dictatorship, of how he used his absolute power to indulge his sexual fantasies in a manner that was completely unchecked, wreaking havoc on dozens of teenagers and young women in his own country. His talent for tyranny was matched by his appetite for perversity.

Famously, he had a troop of female personal bodyguards, made up of Ukrainian, African and Asian women. It now turns out that what was speculated at the time was true: many of them were also his sexual partners. No one said no to Gadaffi if they valued their lives.

But it went far beyond that, as this book by French journalist Annick Cojean reveals with first-hand accounts from some of his former teenage sex slaves.

Cojean is a senior reporter at Le Monde. In 2011, she wrote an article called "Gaddafi's sexual slave", which told the story of Soraya, a 22-year-old Libyan woman who had been kidnapped and held captive since the age of 15. In 2012, Cojean went back to Libya to continue her investigations and in this book she reveals a depraved world of kidnappings, rape and humiliation.

The book begins with Soraya's story and continues with other cases, a grotesque catalogue of the multiple sex crimes of Papa Muammar, as his victims were forced to call him. A few days after Soraya's 15th birthday, she was chosen to present a welcoming bouquet of flowers to Gaddafi at her school. It was a huge honour and the young girl was excited as she dressed up in a Bedouin costume.

During the visit, when she presented the flowers, Gadaffi patted her on the head. Putting his hand on her head, she later learned, was a signal to Gadaffi's attendants: "I want that one."

"I was a sacrificial lamb," she recalls, as she explains how she was brought to the basement of his vast residence near Tripoli where she was locked up with other sex slaves. Soraya was raped, beaten and brutalised. It continued for more than five years. Her suffering even continues today as she now lives in fear of her own brothers. She is considered to have brought dishonour on her family because she lost her virginity outside of marriage and her brothers may want to kill her to "wipe away the shame".

The day after the school visit, uniformed women appeared at Soraya's mother's hair salon. They explained that Gaddafi needed her for another bouquet ceremony. She was driven through the desert, shaking after she heard someone ask: "Is she the new one?"

She was stripped and shaved. A blood sample was taken from her arm. She was dressed in a g-string and white satin dress. She remembers thinking "Mama wouldn't approve of that" as they painted her lips with gloss. Soraya was then taken to Gaddafi's bedroom. He was lying naked on the bed. "I hid my eyes and thought, 'It's a horrible mistake.' He grabbed my hand and forced me to sit next to him on the bed. I didn't dare to look at him. He said, 'Don't be afraid. I'm your papa. That's what you call me, isn't it? But I'm also your brother and your lover. I'm going to be all that for you. Because you are going to stay and live with me forever'."

She managed to fend him off so he summoned Mabrouka, the woman in charge of the harem, telling her: "Teach her. Educate her. And bring her back."

On their third meeting, Gadaffi beat her into submission and raped her. He asked for her again the next morning. He ordered her to dance and then watched as he ate his breakfast of garlic cloves and camel milk. Then he battered her, raped her and urinated on her. And so a hideous routine began. Mabrouka would appear in the doorway of Soraya's windowless basement, saying: "The master is waiting."

Sometimes Gaddafi forced her to drink whiskey and take cocaine. He would rape her and then pause to check his emails before resuming the brutality. Mabrouka would give her porn to watch, saying: "It's your homework."

Other young girls were raped and boys sodomised in front of her. She was allowed to telephone her family occasionally but couldn't tell them what was really going on.

Rape is a taboo in Libyan society and Cojean struggled to find women willing to talk. Another schoolgirl, 17-year-old Houda, said Gaddafi abused her for years after she reluctantly agreed to have sex with him to free her brother from prison. She was then rejected by her own family.

The women's stories are confirmed by a driver who used to ferry women to the compound and by Gaddafi's former chief of security who has estimated that over the years Gaddafi forced hundreds of women to have sex with him.

Irish Independent