Bitter Enmities

This is what an inhuman regime can produce; men and women who prey on one another, and who are capable of performing the most savage acts of brutality against one another. There are Libyans living in Tripoli who claim that in their wildest nightmares they could never have envisaged people living in the same country, worshipping the same god, brutishly violating one another as has occurred in his country of late.

But one savage-minded tyrant who had succeeded in placing himself in the peoples' minds beyond criticism because he was the final and highest arbiter of human values to be respected under his regime, was capable of successfully draining humanity of its compassion and respect for each other. The human values that civilized societies consider to be immutable were overturned and to prey on one another overtook the social covenant.

How else explain that young Libyan women were proud to have been recruited as trainees in their country's militia, as sharp-shooters. Their families encouraged them to become an integral part of the state apparatus, without seeming to realize the extreme vulnerability of their daughters' positions once entrenched in the military, at the command of the regime.

Moammar Gadhafi had an obvious penchant for surrounding himself with female 'amazons'. Hand-picking women for their stature and physiques, recruiting women to undergo training to ensure they were capable of performing the kinds of protective services that a head of state requires. Enjoying the public spectacle of surrounding himself, particularly in foreign trips as a celebrated head of state, by 30 to 40 such Amazonian guards.

When the tide of events that began in Benghazi overtook Moammar Gadhafi's regime which has finally ended his 42-year reign as tyrant of Libya and Lion of Africa occurred, all of the regime's forces were brought into play to protect Gadhafi and restrain the efforts of the rebels, abetted by NATO forces. And the female branch of Gadhafi's Popular Guards underwent a protocol they may never have suspected would become an integral part of their training.

"All the girls in the Popular Guards were raped. The men sexually assault the female recruits and then train them in weapons. We have had four women in here as patients, all trained as snipers like Nisreen", explained a child psychologist, Dr. Rabia Gajum, who works at the Tripoli hospital where rebel forces are holding 19-year-old Nisreen Mansour al Forgani under guard. For her own protection, they say.

As well as to prevent her from escaping. There are many among the rebels who might wish to kill the young woman. For the simple reason that she was the instrument used to murder many young rebel men. She has herself helpfully described to her questioners that she used her AK-47 rifle to shoot ten or eleven rebels held by the regime's forces.

"I killed the first one, then they would bring another one up to the room. He would see the body on the floor and look shocked. Then I would shoot him too. I did it from about a metre away. They told me that if I didn't kill the prisoners then they would kill me. I tried not to kill them.... I turned and shot without looking. But if I hesitated, one of the soldiers would flick off the safety catch of his own rifle and point it at me. I killed 10, perhaps 11, over three days. I don't know what they had done."

She did, finally escape. She had witnessed the point-blank murder of a young friend and colleague, one of the thousand women who were trained as female Popular Guards, who out of curiosity at the entrance of Saif al-Islam when they were stationed at the 77 Brigade headquarters, got too close to Gadhafi's heir. "Faten went to have a closer look, and Saif's bodyguard shot her in the head. She had simply got too close."

Nisreen finally did manage to escape from Gadhafi's loyalists. She jumped, she explained, from the second floor of a building that the rebels had eventually taken. And they took her, as well. How, now, will young Libyans, those who represent the rebel side, and those who represent the loyalist side, manage to accept one another and set aside their bitter enmities and their roles during the uprising?