In the end, it was the crummy wages in Kiev that drove Oksana Balinskaya, a trained nurse with shoulder-length, brown hair, to get in touch with an employment agency three years ago. She wanted more than the 800 to 1,100 hryvnia (around €70 to €100) average monthly wage she could in the Ukrainian capital and the agency, with its lucrative job offerings abroad, had no problem obliging.

The headhunters served as mediators between Ukrainians and a particularly deep-pocketed client in the Middle East whose weakness for nurses from Eastern Europe is well-known: Moammar Gadhafi. A Western alliance is currently seeking to force Gadhafi to his knees with air strikes because the dictator has turned his weapons on his opponents and described his own people as “rats.” Balinskaya, though, has kind words for her former employer, a man she calls “Papa.”

Once in Tripoli, the Ukrainian was led together with other young women to Gadhafi’s tent. There, the dictator himself took care of the casting, “eyeing them steadfastly” and asking about the womens’ individual areas of specialization as nurses. Then he made his decision — Balinskaya was hired at a much more generous salary than she might have gotten back in Ukraine.

A ‘Voluptuous Blonde’

Gadhafi and the women who surround him are the stuff of legend. He is provided with protection, for example, by an “Amazonian Guard” of stunningly attractive women. And, of course, there are his Ukrainian nurses. In that regard, Balinskaya wasn’t alone — Galyna Kolotnytska, who returned to Ukraine shortly after fighting commenced in Libya, served the “Revolutionary Leader” for eight years. Her close relationship with Gadhafi fueled American diplomats to speculate floridly about intimate relations between Gadhafi and his “voluptuous blonde” Ukrainian.

Following the publication of thousands of US diplomatic cables by WikiLeaks last year, the US State Department’s suspicions about the dictator’s sex life are well known. The man once disparaged by former US President Ronald Reagan as the “mad dog of the Middle East,” has taken on an almost mythical status for his exploits.

But Balinskaya, who spoke to Russian daily Komsomolskaya Pravda in an interview published on Tuesday, claims the reports are “untrue.” The only thing that went on at Gadhafi’s harem of nurses, she claims, is that the despot got regular medical check-ups. “Galyna worked for eight years in the hospital that treated the Gadhafi family exclusively,” she said. “But she had the same duties as all the other nurses.” Besides, she added, Gadhafi’s chief nurse and confidante had always been a Serb, a woman named Draga who had accompanied the dictator on “every work trip.”

But even Balinskaya admitted that few had the kind of proximity to the despot enjoyed by Galyna Kolotnytska. Journalists from Ukraine claim that an agitated Kolotnytska expressed her hope during her February flight from Tripoli to Kiev that “Papa” would prevail and stamp out the revolt.

Couscous and Italian Food

Oksana Balinskaya is also intimately familiar with Gadhafi’s tastes. During trips abroad, for example, she says that stoves were constantly installed in his room. “Papa is a man of the desert who is used to the heat,” she says. He likes couscous, which he eats with camel meat or mutton. Like most Libyans, he also likes Italian food.

She also says that Gadhafi was not interested in packing lightly for state visits. “Papa’s plane was followed by two other jets — one with his things and the other with his cars,” Balinskaya says.

Even today, the Ukrainian still speaks fondly of Gadhafi’s generosity. As the Libyan despot symbolically ripped up a copy of the United Nations Charter at a September 2009 meeting of the General Assembly, he treated his nurses to a shopping spree at New York’s boutiques.

“You can tell if someone works for Papa by their watches they are wearing alone,” Balkinskaya said. On Sept. 1 each year, the anniversary of Gadhafi’s 1969 rise to power, he gives each of the employees of his residences a golden watch manufactured in Italy with his portrait on the face.

Balinskaya says that Gadhafi is in much better shape than a lot of people. She says she is hoping for a quick end to the war — and that she will soon be able to return to her job in the service of the despot.

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• http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,755470,00.html

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