Where is the body? This question has been raised in our region, which is overcrowded with questions difficult to be answered.
The question word “where” is the most widely used one in our societies, which are full of ghosts of horrified authorities. In the Bermuda Triangle extending from the ocean to the gulf, it seems that the questions “where is he? Where is the body?” will last to an unpredictable time as long as the “Night and Fog” decree, issued by Hitler, is still valid in the cells of the Arab intelligence.
This question was rampant in Libya during the decades of the former regime. In the 1990s, it was bombarded with the question after many dissidents had been kidnapped and disappeared, including Mansour al-Kikhia, Izzat al-Maqrif, Jabballah Matar, and the father of Libyan novelist Hisham Matar.
Matar wrote three English novels: “The Land of Men,” “Anatomy of a Disappearance,” and “The Return.” Each of them investigates a narrative biography of these painful stages, during which he lived as a boy and young man a nightmare when his father disappeared in the night and fog night built by Gaddafi.
The professor Mohamed Makhlouf mentioned in “Libya…Our Nation” website information about the disappeared human rights activists Mansour Kikhia on Dec. 17, 2010.
The Professor Makhlouf told the website that he was invited to attend the “Arab Organization for Human Rights” conference in Cairo as a member of the executive committee to its branch in London on Dec. 1, 1993.
“During the daily session, Professor Mansour told me that the dictator’s cousin, Ahmed Gaddaf el-Dam, phoned him to meet him in Djerba, Tunisia. Each time, I warned him from meeting those criminals and urged him to be careful with their tricks and evil. Several days after I had returned from London, I was informed of his tragic abduction on the anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. At this important point in my life, I shifted career from journalism to documentary cinema, and I released my first documentary ‘My Name is Beshr – Mansur El Kikhia’ (1994),” Makhlouf says.
Meanwhile, Palestine Network for Dialogue stated on July 21, 2011, that former opposition leader Faiz Jibril accused Ahmed Gaddaf al-Dam, coordination of Egyptian Libyan relations, of Kikhia’s disappearance, according to al-Shorouk newspaper.
“Gaddaf al-Dam is the reason behind the disappearance of the Libyan opposition’s leaders and the former Minister of Foreign Affairs, Mansour Kikhia, in Egypt in 1993,” Jibril told the newspaper.
“Al-Dam knows all the secrets of Gaddafi, he is behind the abduction of the Libyan opponents in the era of Mubarak, not only Kikhia,” Jibril said, calling on Osama al-Baz to reveal what he knows of the disappearance of Kikhia as he was the undersecretary of the Egyptian Foreign Ministry at that time.
Undoubtedly, al-Baz knows more details about the crime.
“There were ties of friendships between us, and he was my professor. Hours before he disappeared, we had spent an evening at a Cairo hotel. Then we dined at his nephew’s house. He returned to the hotel where he was staying. The next morning, I received a phone call from his brother Mustafa, who had just arrived from Libya to Cairo, to tell me that Mansour disappeared. Then, the Prosecution summoned us for the investigations,” Jibril said.
In December 2012, 19 years after Mansour Kikhia has disappeared, his brother, Mahmoud Kikhia, told a French press agency that his brother’s body was found at a refrigerator in a villa that belonged to the former Libyan military intelligence around a month before ousting Muammer Gaddafi.
It is ironic that Gaddafi kept Mansour’s body all that time until Gaddafi fled. His funeral was held with the attendance of a large crowd in the city of Benghazi to be buried with his family. At the same time, Gaddafi’s body disappeared as if the body of a fighter retaliates against the body of the despot.
The enforced disappearance is based on the “Night and Fog” decree issued by Adolf Hitler on December 7, 1941, to conceal his critics and opponents in a night that swallowed thousands of victims whose bodies were found only after the suicide of Hitler.
