9. Gaddafis' Harem
I wish for my little boy Tirus to grow up and love his girl, companion, wife, lover and treat her like a princess. I know he will 'cause I see the care he takes of me when I am ill and distraught. He sits next to me and strokes my hair, pulls the blanket over me and barely whispers while entering the bedroom. So, when I tell him that I want him to grow up to be a wonderful man, who has to protect all the women he knows and even those who would be strangers, the only thing Tirus does is to listen intently. I know for sure he is recording everything I am saying to him, which is really good 'cause the World will be needing a lot of good people, especially men to protect the women.
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So, what I felt when I completed reading Gaddafi's Harem was that we would probably need more good parents, especially mothers to love their sons.
Gaddafi grew up in a Bedouin family and never got much love and attention while he was growing up. So, at 27, when he took over Libya, it was not so much as to liberate it but to set up his own kingdom; a kingdom which bled inside a veil of innocence. Gaddafi gave this impression to the rest of the world that he believed in equality of women and to make it more authentic, he even had an army of women as his guards. He traveled with them to diplomatic tours abroad, making him the cynosure of most leaders.
However, Libya was crying under the cover of Gaddafi's pseudo prophetism to 'enhance the position of women'; and all beautiful women from the age of 12 onwards, who probably had dreams of becoming a doctor, a nurse, a beautician some day and serve their country well had their dreams snuffed out at the verge of their flight.
Gaddafi's Harem is a chronicle of Soraya, a girl born of a Libyan father and Tunisian mother, kidnapped by Gaddafi's clique when she was barely 14 years old and repeatedly raped by him for more than a decade. Even after Gaddafi was overthrown by the rebels after 42 years of his excruciatingly torturous regime and murdered in public, Soraya was never accepted by society and is now living a life of utter remorse, repeatedly asking the question, "Why me?"
It is not only Soraya but 1000s of others just like her, who were either kidnapped or trapped into prostitution. So many women have perpetually gone into hiding, some fleeing the country after Libya was temporarily taken over by the rebels, more so from the fear of being shammed by society.
A riveting novel, which has more goose bump effects when Soraya narrates her story in the raw, making it somewhat unreal in parts of the nightmare she faces in the hands of the dictator.
Annick Cojean, the French writer however, did get death threats for trying to reach out to most of the people involved in Gaddafi's Harem, Bab-Al-Azizia and get the pieces of the story together.
