After Rape Report in Libya, Woman Sees Benefit in Publicity [View All]

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Source: New York Times


Eman al-Obeidy being escorted away last month after she burst into a hotel in Tripoli to report a rape by militiamen.

Eman al-Obeidy says the government of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi victimized her twice. First members of his militia kidnapped and repeatedly raped her. Then his state television network attacked her as a thief and a prostitute. But unlike most rape victims here, Ms. Obeidy, a law student, took her case to the international news media, forcing the Qaddafi security forces to drag her out of a hotel full of journalists as she screamed to tell her story.

Ms. Obeidy, who showed severe bruising on her face and thigh when she burst into the hotel, said in the interviews that after she was dragged out she was held for three days in solitary confinement, without medical or psychological help, and repeatedly interrogated by security officials. But her captors were preoccupied with the publicity, she said in an interview with a Libyan opposition satellite channel. “During my entire arrest period, I was being asked one thing: to come out on the Libyan state channel and say that those who kidnapped me were not from Qaddafi’s security forces; rather they were from the revolutionaries and armed gangs,” Ms. Obeidy said. “That was their only request, and I kept refusing.”

The Qaddafi government has spun through a series of contradictory statements about Ms. Obeidy since she was forced from the hotel. The government spokesman, Musa Ibrahim, first suggested that she was drunk and possibly insane, later that she was a stable person bringing credible criminal charges, and lastly that she was a prostitute and a thief who had a long history with “those boys.” He later said that her rape charges were dropped because she refused a medical exam and that the men had brought defamation charges against her.

“I knew that they could imprison me and that no one may ever know my story,” she said. “And even when they were hitting me and trying to cover my face so that I would not tell people the truth, I was not afraid.” “I have reached the end of my tolerance for this as a human,” she said.

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/05/world/africa/05tripoli.html?_r=1