After Rape Report in Libya, Woman Sees Benefit in Publicity

Albert Facelly/Sipa Press, via Associated Press

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

TRIPOLI ? 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. Thanks to the publicity in her first interviews since then, she may have gotten off easy.

Others in her situation, human rights advocates say, are typically confined for years in so-called rehabilitation facilities, subjected to unscientific virginity tests, deprived of any entertainment or education except lessons in Islam, and subjected to solitary confinement or handcuffs for any sign of resistance to authority.

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.?

At one point, Ms. Obeidy told Anderson Cooper of CNN in a second interview, she was even placed before state television cameras with several guns pointing at her from just off camera. She was told to change her story, but she again refused, she said.

Ms. Obeidy said she was now under a kind of house arrest in the capital, prohibited from returning to her family in the rebel-held east. On Sunday, she said she had been kidnapped and beaten for trying to meet again with foreign journalists.

?I was kidnapped by a car, and they beat me in the street,? she said. ?They told me, ?Whenever you leave the house, we will do this to you.?�? She added, ?I had asked to see the journalists, so they beat and hit me and sent me back.?

In a culture where rape can carry a severe stigma, Ms. Obeidy has become an unlikely heroine for her stubborn defiance of the Qaddafi government?s capricious police state. ?Pure, courageous and lionhearted,? declared the opposition Web site Libya February 17, named for the start of the revolt. ?May God give her patience.?

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.

But in her interviews, Ms. al-Obeidy said that she had submitted to a medical examination and that it had confirmed she had been raped. After three days of incarceration and interrogation, she said, she was transferred to a prosecutor who said he would press rape charges against the men but has done nothing so far.

She said her ordeal began when armed militiamen at one of the many checkpoints throughout Tripoli removed her from a taxi. In the CNN interview, Ms. Obeidy said the militiamen had bound her hands and legs, beat her and hit her, and poured alcohol in her eyes to blind her. She said they took turns raping her and sodomizing her with rifles. ?They would say, ?Let the men from eastern Libya come and see what we are doing to their women and how we rape them,?�? Ms. Obeidy said.

Ms. Obeidy said they bound her tightly in part because she fought back, but a 16-year-old girl who was also a captive was less resistant, Ms. Obeidy said.

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