A Benghazi-based psychologist will be asking the International Criminal Court (ICC) to issue arrest warrants against Muammar Gaddafi and his sons after collecting evidence of widespread rape.
Seham Sergewa arrived in Malta yesterday on her way to the ICC at The Hague, where she will give testimony and present a dossier detailing countless stories of rape perpetrated by the former dictator and his sons.
On June 27 the ICC issued international arrest warrants for Col Gaddafi, his eldest son Saif al-Islam and the former head of military intelligence Abdullah al-Senussi, wanted for crimes against humanity. Speaking to The Sunday Times yesterday, Dr Sergewa said she would be asking chief prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo to press charges and issue arrest warrants against all Col Gaddafi’s sons and former Prime Minister al-Baghdadi al-Mahmoudi, who was last week jailed for six months in Tunisia for trying to enter the country illegally.
“Gaddafi’s sons led militias that conducted systematic rape during the conflict,” Dr Sergewa said, reiterating that evidence suggests that thousands of women were raped by Gaddafi loyalists during the conflict.
Col Gaddafi’s other sons have fled to neighbouring countries or their whereabouts are unknown.
She said five women, who used to work as Col Gaddafi’s personal security guards, had now agreed to come forward and testify how they were systematically raped by the former dictator and his sons.
The Sunday Times broke the story of how Col Gaddafi’s female bodyguards were claiming they were abused after interviewing Dr Sergewa in Benghazi last month. They said they were discarded once the Gaddafi family were “bored” with them.
In Benghazi Dr Sergewa, who has documented thousands of rape cases, had told this newspaper that only eight women – none of whom included the bodyguards – were prepared to break the taboo associated with rape and testify.
‘Happy ICC is ready to look into case’
However, yesterday she said that international interest in the rape story and the fact that the ICC was prepared to receive her dossier persuaded the five female bodyguards to come forward. “I am happy for these women and the Libyan people that the ICC is ready to receive me,” Dr Sergewa said.
She spoke of her fear that the rape dossier may have been used at one point as a political tool when negotiations were ongoing to convince Col Gaddafi to give up.
“Before May 27 the rape file was delayed and I fear it was intended so to convince Col Gaddafi to leave. But now the whole world has listened to the rape stories and I will personally go to the ICC to testify.” Accompanied by her husband, Dr Sergewa came to Malta to obtain a visa that would allow her to travel to the Netherlands. She was met at the airport by a high ranking government official.
Asked whether her actions were supported by the National Transitional Council in Libya, Dr Sergewa said they encouraged her to continue with the job but did little else to help her.
She is expected to present the rape dossier at the ICC within the next fortnight.
Raped and blackmailed
Recounting the story of the five women who formed part of Col Gaddafi’s select unit of female bodyguards Dr Sergewa had told The Sunday Times last month that one of them was blackmailed into joining the bodyguard brigade.
The regime fabricated a story that her brother was carrying drugs on his way back to Libya from a holiday in Malta and the woman was told “you either become a bodyguard or your brother will spend the rest of his life in prison”.
The woman in question knew exactly what this meant, Dr Sergewa explained, because she had been raped a few weeks before 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.
Where are the Gaddafis?
The three men wanted by the ICC – Muammar Gaddafi, his son Saif al-Islam and Abdullah al-Senussi – are still believed to be in Libya but their whereabouts remain unknown as rebels continue to fight pockets of resistance in Sirte and Bani Walid.
Three of Col Gaddafi’s children – Hannibal, Muhammad and their sister Aisha – together with his second wife Safia fled to Algeria soon after the rebels overran Tripoli.
Another son, Saadi Gaddafi, fled southward and was given protection in Niger while the whereabouts of former national security adviser Mutassim Gaddafi and his brother Khamis, who led the feared 32nd Brigade, are unknown.
The least known of his sons, Saif al-Arab, was reported to have been killed in a Nato air strike on the Gaddafi compound on April 30.
Source: Malta Times
Now that the mass grave of the 1996 Abu Salim massacre has been located the only way Kadaffi can survive is by turning himself over to the ICC.
Kadaffi has proven to all of us he was inspired by Hitler deeply. He has been compared to him and I think Kadaffi is clearly guilty of what I call the Libyan Holocaust.
Background
Introduction to the Holocaust
http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005143
Jan 6, 2011 – “Holocaust” is a word of Greek origin meaning “sacrifice by fire.” The Nazis, who came to power in Germany in January 1933, believed that …
holo·caustal, holo·caustic adj.
Usage Note: Holocaust has a secure place in the language when it refers to the massive destruction of humans by other humans. Ninety-nine percent of the Usage Panel accepts the use of holocaust in the phrase nuclear holocaust. Sixty percent of the Panel accepts the sentence As many as two million people may have died in the holocaust that followed the Khmer Rouge takeover in Cambodia. But because of its associations with genocide, people may object to extended applications of holocaust. When the word is used to refer to death brought about by natural causes, the percentage of the Panel accepting drops sharply. Only 31 percent of the Panel approves the sentence In East Africa five years of drought have brought about a holocaust in which millions have died. In a 1987 survey, just 11 percent approved the use of holocaust to summarize the effects of the AIDS epidemic. This suggests that other figurative usages such as the huge losses in the Savings and Loan holocaust may be viewed as overblown or in poor taste. · When capitalized Holocaust refers specifically to the destruction of Jews and other Europeans by the Nazis and may also encompass the Nazi persecution of Jews that preceded the outbreak of the war.
Word History: Totality of destruction has been central to the meaning of holocaust since it first appeared in Middle English in the 14th century, used in reference to the biblical sacrifice in which a male animal was wholly burnt on the altar in worship of God. Holocaust comes from Greek holokauston (“that which is completely burnt”), which was a translation of Hebrew ‘lâ (literally “that which goes up,” that is, in smoke). In this sense of “burnt sacrifice,” holocaust is still used in some versions of the Bible. In the 17th century the meaning of holocaust broadened to “something totally consumed by fire,” and the word eventually was applied to fires of extreme destructiveness. In the 20th century holocaust has taken on a variety of figurative meanings, summarizing the effects of war, rioting, storms, epidemic diseases, and even economic failures. Most of these usages arose after World War II, but it is unclear whether they permitted or resulted from the use of holocaust in reference to the mass murder of European Jews and others by the Nazis. This application of the word occurred as early as 1942, but the phrase the Holocaust did not become established until the late 1950s. Here it parallels and may have been influenced by another Hebrew word, ô’â (“catastrophe,” in English, Shoah). In the Bible ô’â has a range of meanings including “personal ruin or devastation” and “a wasteland or desert.” ô’â was first used to refer to the Nazi slaughter of Jews in 1939, but the phrase ha-ô’â (“the catastrophe”) became established only after World War II. Holocaust has also been used to translate urbn (“destruction”), another Hebrew word used to summarize the genocide of Jews by the Nazis.
The Rwandan Holocaust ( wikepedia )
The Rwandan Genocide was the 1994 mass murder of an estimated 800,000 people in the small East African nation of Rwanda. Over the course of approximately 100 days (from the assassination of Juvénal Habyarimana and Cyprien Ntaryamira on April 6) through mid-July, over 500,000 people were killed, according to a Human Rights Watch estimate.[1] Estimates of the death toll have ranged between 500,000 and 1,000,000,[2] or as much as 20% of the country’s total population. It was the culmination of longstanding ethnic competition and tensions between the minority Tutsi, who had controlled power for centuries, and the majority Hutu peoples, who had come to power in the rebellion of 1959–62 and overthrown the Tutsi monarchy.[3]
In 1990, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), a rebel group composed mostly of Tutsi refugees, invaded northern Rwanda from Uganda in an attempt to defeat the Hutu-led government. They began the Rwandan Civil War, fought between the Hutu regime, with support from Francophone Africa and France,[4][5] and the RPF, with support from Uganda. This exacerbated ethnic tensions in the country. In response, many Hutu gravitated toward the Hutu Power ideology, with the prompting of state-controlled and independent Rwandan media.
As an ideology, Hutu Power asserted that the Tutsi intended to enslave the Hutu and must be resisted at all costs. Continuing ethnic strife resulted in the rebels’ displacing large numbers of Hutu in the north, plus periodic localized Hutu killings of Tutsi in the south. International pressure on the Hutu-led government of Juvénal Habyarimana resulted in a cease-fire in 1993. He began to implement the Arusha Accords.
The assassination of Habyarimana in April 1994 set off a violent reaction, resulting in the Hutus’ conducting mass killings of Tutsis and pro-peace Hutus, who were portrayed as “traitors” and “collaborationists”. This genocide had been planned by members of the Hutu power group known as the Akazu, many of whom occupied positions at top levels of the national government; the genocide was supported and coordinated by the national government as well as by local military and civil officials and mass media. Alongside the military, primary responsibility for the killings themselves rests with two Hutu militias that had been organized for this purpose by political parties: the Interahamwe and the Impuzamugambi, although once the genocide was underway a great number of Hutu civilians took part in the murders.
It was the end of the peace agreement. The Tutsi RPF restarted their offensive, defeating the army and seizing control of the country.