Gaddafi's Amazing Amazonian Guards
The Amazonian Guard (also "the Amazons") was an unofficial name given by Western journalists to an all-female elite cadre of bodyguards officially known as al-rāhibāt al-thawriyyāt or "The Revolutionary Nuns", and sometimes also unofficially called "the Green Nuns", tasked with protecting the former leader of Libya, Muammar Gaddafi.
The group was formed in the early 1980s, after Gaddafi's official resignation as Libyan head of state in favour of the title of "Brotherly Leader and Guide of the First of September Great Revolution of the Great Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya". This came as a surprise,[by whom?] as Gaddafi was known for his misogynistic outbursts during the 1970s, and in his Green Book, he had made clear that he saw the role of women confined to housekeeping and motherhood.
According to Joseph T. Stanik, Gaddafi reportedly employed a cadre of female bodyguards because he believed that an Arab gunman would have difficulty firing at women. However, it has also been submitted by other authors that Gaddafi's female bodyguards were, in reality, just an aspect of the dictator's well-known eccentric showmanship and his fondness of surrounding himself with young women. Gaddafi would usually travel with fifteen of his Amazonian Guards.
Gaddafi ‘raped’ his female bodyguards
Five women who formed part of Muammar Gaddafi’s select unit of female bodyguards are claiming they were raped and abused by the now hunted dictator.
The women have told Benghazi-based psychologist Seham Sergewa they were sexually abused by Col. Gaddafi and his sons before being discarded once they were “bored” with them.
One of the women told Dr Sergewa how she had been blackmailed into joining the bodyguard brigade, once believed to number as many as 400 women, after the regime fabricated a story that her brother was carrying drugs on his way back to Libya from a holiday in Malta.
“She was told ‘you either become a bodyguard or your brother will spend the rest of his life in prison,’” Dr Sergewa told The Sunday Times.
The woman in question knew exactly what this meant, Dr Sergewa explained, because she had been raped a few weeks before this by Col. Gaddafi.
“She had been expelled from university and was told to seek Gaddafi’s intervention to be reinstated. She was told she had to undergo a medical test that included an HIV test that was administered by an East European nurse.”
Eventually she was taken to meet Col. Gaddafi at his Bab Aziziya compound in Tripoli. She was led to his private quarters where she found him in his pyjamas.
“She could not understand because she saw him as a father figure, leader of the nation, that sort of thing. She refused his advances and he raped her,” Dr Sergewa said.
A pattern emerged in the stories. The women would be first raped by the dictator and then passed on, like used objects, to one of his sons and eventually to high-ranking officials for more abuse before eventually being let go - Times of Malta