the essential
In 1984, journalist Memona Hintermann, a senior reporter at France3, managed to escape Gaddafi during a report in Libya. The manipulative methods of the “Guide” also shed light on the Sarkozy trial. Interview.
You were violently confronted by Muammar Gaddafi. Can you remind us under what circumstances?
The year is 1984. I am 32 years old and I am in Tripoli for France 3 in the context of the war between Libya and Chad. With French and Italian colleagues, I attended a joint press conference with the President of the Italian Council Giulio Andreotti who the Libyan dictator received in Tripoli. We all dream of interviewing Colonel Gaddafi and there are some of us who have been waiting for days, waiting for this. I ask a question, translated by Mohamed, a journalist from Jeune Afrique and, at the end of the conference, the latter comes to see me. We have just sent him the message that I will be able to interview Gaddafi.
But you are alone…
Yes. I don't have my team but I'm overjoyed, I prepared well for this interview and we must seize the opportunity. A white Peugeot picks me up and takes me to different places then to a fortified place, with multiple barbed wire, guarded by armed men: the Azizia barracks, feared by the Libyans. The interpreter who accompanies me, imposed by the regime, is called Leïla. She is Algerian. A first piece, a soldier whispers a word in his ear. We have to change location. Second wait. Then another change of location and the next moment, I see Gaddafi arrive in an aviator suit, with a jacket, his hands in his pockets. In this third room, I just have time to ask him if he will come to Paris and he tells me that he knows and loves France. It is clear that he dreams of being received there again as under Pompidou (while he faces the French soldiers in Chad, editor's note).
And the conversation won't go beyond that.
He wants to change location again. I'm surprised. A few steps, he opens a door on his left and, I will never forget, it is engraved in my memory, I discover a small room with a large bed, English embroidery, and a mirror on his right, in the twilight. It's a trap. He unzipped his fly, flipped me onto the bed, lay on top of me. I then have this defensive reflex of telling him that “I’m sick, I can’t, I can’t”. He gets it. An “indisposed” woman repels the majority of men, it breaks their momentum, I don’t know how I had the reflex to say that, but I take the opportunity to free myself. And then, unconsciously, I ask him what would happen if I told my colleagues about this attempted rape. I see him again in front of me: “I will kill you, I will send someone to kill you.” It was the only time he looked me straight in the eyes, the rest of the time he always avoided my gaze.
-In 2007, on the occasion of his visit to Paris, you broke the silence. Then you returned to Libya in 2011…
And it was confirmed to me that I had risked my skin…
Coincidence of your life, it turns out that in 2001, Nicolas Sarkozy, mayor of Neuilly, married you. Today, you must therefore look at this Sarkozy-Gaddafi trial in a very particular way, right?
I am not anti-Sarkozist and it was well known that Libya was a land of plenty for many French elected officials and leaders well before 2005. Tripoli did not skimp on its largesse. In the name of business and arms sales, it was easy to forget that Gaddafi had hosted PLO or ETA training and that he was responsible for the 170 deaths in the attack on the UTA plane. But regarding Sarkozy, now… I think he or his emissaries didn't even have to ask. Knowing the character Gaddafi, his ruses, his duplicity, his way of trapping people and his crude manners – he was a redneck, far from the image of the young colonel of the 70s – he was not the type to a “corruption pact” but to make himself understood with a look and to put suitcases of direct tickets on the table to surprise his interlocutor, by saying “it’s a gift to help you”. This is one of the scenarios that I do not exclude this hypothesis concerning the Sarkozy affair, to whom this type of “spontaneous help” could allow his right hand to ignore what his left hand was taking. Gaddafi was obsessed with regaining the harmony of nations and he knew the benefit to be gained from the upcoming election if he “helped”.
How did you experience the staging of his “return to grace”, orchestrated by Nicolas Sarkozy, in 2007?
Intolerable. I took time off from covering his visit and it was all surreal. The Bulgarian nurses, first of all, in the summer: why were we in charge and not our usual intermediaries from the Maghreb? Why wasn't it the Quai d'Orsay and the diplomats who went looking for them, as should have happened? Then the speed at which his visit was organized, between October and December, what was the urgency? On the British side, we must also remember that Tony Blair went to Libya, only the Queen opposed any visit by Gaddafi. But what also struck me, when I testified in December 2007 about what had happened to me to say who we received, was the silence of the feminists. Not a word of support…
