TRIPOLI, Libya – The young woman police officer swaggers through a crumbling Tripoli slum, her dark hair cut boyishly short, an empty gun holster and walkie-talkie hanging from her police belt. A tattooed man with a cigarette dangling from his lips shrinks away.
He doesn’t want to mess with 25-year-old Nisrine Mansour.
A member of the regime’s vice squad, her hero is Libyan ruler Moammar Gadhafi. His image is on her cell phone, his face emerging from rays of green — the iconic regime color. Her ring tone is a tinny pro-Gadhafi chant.
Gadhafi has bestowed many titles upon himself during his 42-years of iron-fisted rule over Libya, branding himself “King of Kings” in Africa and “Brother Leader of the Revolution” in Libya.
Women like Mansour give him another title: emancipator of women.
“Moammar Gadhafi is the one who opened the opportunities for us to advance. That’s why we cling to him, that’s why we love him,” says Mansour. “He gave us complete freedom as a woman to enter the police force, work as engineers, pilots, judges, lawyers. Anything.”
Among Gadhafi’s most ardent loyalists are a core of Libyan women who have risen to high-profile roles in the police, military and government and credit Gadhafi with
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