Current Life

During the 1990s, the stories of the rape camps in Bosnia and Herzegovina shook the world and forced the international community to intervene. Now, evidence is coming to light that a similarly gruesome situation was taking place during Libya’s Arab Spring uprising. When the Libyan unrest began, then-dictator Muammar Gaddafi gave orders to crush the peaceful protesters by any means, ordering his soldiers to go from house to house. This was a direct command, in encrypted military language, to start raping innocent citizens. What followed, according to evidence gathered by the International Criminal Court, was a major rape operation against anyone--man or woman—who rebelled against the former Gaddafi regime. Women were reportedly abducted from their homes, cars, and streets, and raped in unknown places. According to Margot Wallström, special United Nations representative on sexual violence in conflict, men were raped in detention centers, such as Abu Salim prison and Salah-al-Din.
When asked about systematic rape in the Gaddafi regime, he told with an emotional voice the story of Safiaya, a girl in her early 20s who, he says, was kidnapped and kept in a basement in a compound in Tripoli for five years. She was repeatedly raped and beaten by Muammar Gaddafi himself, who would urinate on her head and call her a whore. Indeed, Shalgam describes the Libyan leader as a tyrant who eliminated every political institution, ruled with an iron fist, and terrorized his people so completely that no one would dare to socially or politically oppose to him. Further, he says, Gaddafi was an egomaniac and a narcissist who saw himself as the leader not only of the Arab world but also of the entire African continent—and a control freak who pitted his own family members against one other, casting them as actors in a dramatic narrative more convoluted than Richard III.
Libyan Air Force jets bombed airfields and other military targets as he left the city, initially to Sebha, the town