Gaddafi's harem: Dictator forced thousands of girls to work as sex slaves

New Delhi: A French journalist Annick Cojean has in her book, Gaddafi's Harem, revealed for the first time how women were abducted, imprisoned, raped and abused by the Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi during his brutal regime. .The first half of this book is one woman's account of how Muammar Gaddafi forced her, when she was barely 15, to become his sex slave, keeping her and other victims imprisoned for years. He summoned them to his bedchamber day and night, where he drugged them, beat them, raped them and sodomized them.Annick Cojean came to know about the horrifying serial sex crimes by the Libyan dictator while investigating the rape incidents during Libya's revolution.Cojean broke this story in 2011 in the newspaper Le Monde.Later she visited Tripoli for deeper reporting . She interviewed teachers, principals, government workers, soldiers, journalists, professors and doctors. She also interviewed woman after woman after woman, all of whom had been raped and brutalized by Gaddafi or his men. Then he decided to write this book Gaddafi's Harem.In Gaddafi's Harem, she reveals the story of a girl ,whom she named Soraya.The book says, Soraya was 15 when she first encountered the dictator. Now Soraya is 22,when she came in contact with Annick Cojean.Soraya met Gaddafi when she presented him with flowers at her school in Sirte. The father-of-eight patted her head in an apparently paternal gesture. ‘Really, it was a sign to his guards to say: “I want that one,”' says Cojean.The following day, guards snatched Soraya and took her to a remote encampment where she was given a blood test (to ensure she was disease-free) and dressed in lingerie. A failed rape attempt ensued. Shortly after, Gaddafi assaulted her so badly that she needed medical treatment.For the next five years, she was confined to a small room in the basement of the Tripoli base. Given porn to ‘learn from' and ordered to consume alcohol and drugs, Soraya was raped and beaten almost daily. She witnessed Gaddafi rape many others, boys and men included.The book reveals another story of a women who was raped, fell pregnant and had the baby in secret. ‘If she'd had the child in a hospital she'd have been arrested for having sex outside marriage,' says Cojean. The baby was adopted and the woman married a rebel soldier willing to ‘salvage' her honour. Despite this, her brothers found her and stabbed her. ‘There was no inquiry, no one would talk about it,' says Cojean.Mansour Daw, Gaddafi's former security chief, told Cojean the dictator's activities were so well known within the regime that officials sent their daughters to be educated overseas to avoid him. Gaddafi also tried to woo performers, TV presenters and wives of foreign dignitaries with gifts.‘He had his everyday prey but would also target this more precious kind,' Cojean says. ‘He used sex to humiliate, punish and reward. Rape was a weapon of war and sex was a weapon of power for him.'Here we have mentioned about just two women, the book reveals the stories of Soraya in detail in the first half and in the second half it states about many other women who suffered such fate.There were thousands of young Libyan girls and women who were kidnapped from their schools, homes or places of work and forced to be Gaddafi's sex slaves.