Revealed: the luxurious lifestyle of a Gaddafi nurse

As Col Gaddafi's regime slowly comes apart at the seams, one of the Libyan leader's four Ukrainian nurses, Oksana Balinskaya, has spoken out about life under Gaddafi, revealing him to be a "great psychologist" with "some odd habits".
 
'Papik', as she calls him, loved listening to Arab music on a cassette player, and was obsessed with changing outfits several times a day, even at the expense of being late for guests. His favourite outfit, according to Balinskaya, was his white suit.

Balinskaya, who fled back to Ukraine two months ago when the unrest began, was part of what the western media has called Gaddafi's "harem". This included Galyna Kolotnytska, described in WikiLeaks cables as "the voluptuous blonde who travels everywhere with Colonel Gaddafi" until she, too, ran for the hills.

Writing in Newsweek, Balinskaya insists that "none of us nurses were ever his lover; the only time we ever touched him was to take his blood pressure".
 
She was, she admits, chosen for her looks - "he just liked to be surrounded by beautiful things and people". In fact, Gaddafi picked her out of a line-up of women after only a handshake. "Later I learned he made all his decisions about people at the first handshake," she said. "He is a great psychologist."
 
In true dictatorial fashion, he was meticulous to the point of paranoia about keeping his health, which goes some way to explaining the cabal of nurses.

"When we drove around poor African countries," she explained, "he would fling money and candy out the widow of his armored limousine to children who ran after our motorcade; he didn’t want them close for fear of catching diseases from them."
 
Unlike ordinary Libyans, Gaddafi's staff never wanted for anything, and travelled with him in luxury wherever he went. The mark of being in Gaddafi's service was an expensive gold watch decorated with a picture of the brotherly leader. "Just showing that watch in Libya would open any door, solve any problem that we had," said Balinskaya.
 
He was a fan of couscous with camel or lamb meat, but was also keen on pasta, especially macaroni, a food staple in the former-Italian colony.
 
Comparing him to Stalin, Balinskaya also put paid to any speculation that Gaddafi, like the deposed Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, might be forced to retire out of health concerns: "He had the heart rate and blood pressure of a much younger man".
 
Despite her special treatment, Balinskaya was constantly aware of the discrepancy between her experience and the reality of life for the majority of Libyans. "He has all the power and all the luxury, all for himself," she said. "If Papik had passed his throne to his son Saif when he still had a chance, I believe that everything would have been all right. People would not be dying right now." ·