34 years and waiting

This is a story that is over 30 years in the making. It begins in the barren deserts of the Western Sahara and stretches into a stalemate between the Sahrawi people and the Kingdom of Morocco. It involves a conflict of state-centric interests, human rights abuse, plunder of natural resources, refugees, a protracted status quo, a fragmented independence movement, and a monarchy with a nationalist agenda. It involves people, some with extraordinary abilities to mobilise and continue a struggle against insurmountable odds. These are the people I met and whom I will tell you about.

Foreign media are banned from reporting about the Western Sahara so I travelled as a tourist to avoid police questioning. From Tangiers I eventually made it to Laayoune where I met clandestinely with various Sahrawi. But events took a turn. Upon my return to Agadir I witnessed the organisation of a student protest over the deaths of two Sahrawi students killed the day of my arrival. The protest quickly spread to Fes, Rabat, Marrakech and Casablanca. Everywhere, Sahrawi students along with sympathetic Moroccans were staging demonstrations. The police began rounding up students and the Moroccan secret service (DST) were on alert, at which point my contacts became too afraid to meet me.

In 1963 the United Nations recognised the Sahrawi right to self-determination, while the International Court of Justice ruled in favour of the Sahrawi case for self-determination in 1975. How can one then begin to measure the promotion of world-peace and cooperation if the Security Council undermines its own value system as inscribed in article 24 of the Charter? In the slums of Laayoune, in the refugee camps in Algeria, in the quiet demeanour of tortured victims, individuals attempt to elevate the discourse of repression by aspiring for the rights to dignity, equality, and justice.

© N NielsonPART TWO: GOING TO THE FRONTLINE

The journey to the occupied territories in the south is a journey through all six senses. In a few days the landscape will change as the Western Sahara draws closer and eventually stretches into a hot, dry desert. As I slowly make my way down, starting first in the chaos of Tangiers and into the silence of the vast desert plains, the Sahrawi continue their movement. Inside cafes and on billboards along the highway, portraits of King Mohammed VI dominate. Newspapers must refer to him as ‘His Majesty the King, Mohammed VI, may God help him in his task…’ and are not allowed to criticise him.

A national symbol, his shy nature and his rare interviews add to his mystic. In over a decade, he has accorded only a handful of interviews to the foreign press and none to the Moroccan. Time Magazine called him the King of Cool. As a powerful national symbol of a dynasty 350 years in the making, the man is quite simply revered. But he is also the Amir al-Muminin or leader of the faithful, and lest one forget, this man rules with absolute authority.

SEGUIAT AL HAMRA

The Seguiat al Hamra underground lake basin that runs along the northern edge of Laayoune is a place of fear.

For the Sahrawi youth who have been tortured at its edge, the shimmering water and wading birds, indeed its natural beauty and serene settings, are a mark of indifference betrayed only by the eyes of 18-year old Hassanna Aalaia. Hassanna, who had been taking photos of victims of Moroccan oppression, recalls the moment when he was abducted by the police. Already arrested nine times for gathering testimonies of Sahrawi and distributing them to the banned human rights organisation ASVDH, Hassannaʼs run-ins with the police have left him more determined. ‘They took me to the river, they beat me there, they tortured me, and then they left me there,’ he says.

At a distance, you see the reflection of the opposing sand dunes on its surface. This is the lahmada, a desert with no vegetation and literally translated as, ‘Oh the heat, the cold.’ Secrets are buried in its shallow depths.

Seguiat al Hamra is the back alley beating where speckles of blood dot the concrete. Only the evening before I had taken a cab to meet my contact in the Sahrawi-populated Eraki neighbourhood. Four youths, one maybe not even 10 years old, were lined up against a wall, visibly shaken by the three Moroccan police officers yelling into their faces. ʻDrugs,ʼ commented the cab driver. But only a few metres away a slogan calling for a liberated Sahara had been spray-painted on the wall.

The closer one gets, the more Seguiat al Hamraʼs isolation seems to close up in itself, locking away the panic of those unfortunate enough to have been led to it. A green algae flourishes thick along the edges in stagnating water. Empty water bottles and rusting Pepsi cans appear stuck in the green swill. There is a striking odour of decay. The walls of the apartment blocks facing the river are cracked.

Along the footpath leading down to the river are broken concrete slabs and scattered debris from a collapsed apartment. On the rooftops, antennas appear like an anachronism in this slum where electricity and running water are either in short supply or non-existent. A boy stands at the edge of the water and is tending several goats that are quietly grazing at some litter.

‘They accused me of things I didn’t do. They said I attacked the police,’ says Hassanna. The police came after him at night, around 9pm during Ramadan in 2007. They accused him and seven others of vandalising a police car. They forced them to strip naked, took photos and threatened to send the pictures to pornographic web sites if they didnʼt stop protesting. They also threatened to pour acid on him. ‘We are living under repression and oppression. Help us end this. We are struggling for independence.’

Looking at the waterʼs edge and the concrete slab that leads to it, I picture the scene. Here, near this stagnating water, in the middle of a desolate desert, behind the slum walls of Laayoune, the secrets of the conflict in the Western Sahara begin to unravel.

BACK IN THE FRAY

I met the Sahrawi human rights activist, Ahmed Sbai, in the outskirts of this wasted city of Laayoune, in the Eraki neighbourhood where the marginalised live in bland block apartments. The days pass by in a blur and time has slowed to a crawl. Sbai, a young man with rectangular glasses, is now on the run, chased by the Moroccan police. But the story doesn’t begin here and the memories, the faces, the voices, are coming back to me. I receive the call in my hotel room at around 8pm. It’s my contact Mohammed Mayara. He tells me to take a cab to Eraki and then wait. Then a figure of a man appears, he waves his arms and I follow him at a distance; we walk quickly. To my right, the desert. Plastic bags and dust are kicked about in the cold wind. We arrive at a courtyard, a door opens, light momentarily basking the gravel and dirt.

Inside, are Mohammed Daddach and Brahim Sabbar, two men who have known imprisonment and torture. Sabbar once spent 11 years in the French-built secret detention center, Kalaat Megouna, and was released after spending another two years in the notorious Black jail. His crime - meeting with human rights activists in Boujdour.

‘You enter the Black jail lost, you leave as a new born,’ says Sbai, also a member of several banned Sahrawi human rights organisations. ‘I cannot really express with words what it is like.’ In 1999, Sbai says he was kidnapped from a demonstration in Smara and sent to Lebbayer, a secret jail 25 kilometres outside Laayoune. He was taken to a room inside the compound and tortured. ‘Itʼs an empty room with no furniture except for a table and a large light. There are at least eight people in the room who then band your eyes before the torture begins. They place you facing the wall on your knees with your hands bound behind your back. I sat like this the whole night until they set me on the table and beat me.’

© N NielsonHe says he was then taken by his hands and feet, stretched out with his face pushed to the floor while someone pounded on his kidneys. Accused of belonging to a criminal organisation, Sbai was then sentenced to prison for two years in what he describes as rigged court proceedings.
‘There is no independence in the court system. The judge will always decide in favour of the Moroccan government.’ Sbai describes the Black Jail as a building coming apart at its foundations.

Inside, there are five rooms three to four meters in length with a maximum total capacity for 250 prisoners. ‘I lived among thieves and criminals but I did meet two other political activists. Each room has at least 60 prisoners,’ he says. Even in these closed quarters, Sbai says drugs and alcohol are rampant, smuggled into the jail by prison staff. ‘The authorities allow the drugs to control the prison population. The food made us sick and we were given water that [had"> been stored in [the] cistern where rats swam.’

El-Garhi Chrif, who was born blind, says his imprisonment continues to haunt him. ‘I suffer from nervous tensions and psychological disorders,’ he says. Ten days after being released, Brahim Bensaami, feared among the Sahrawi as a ruthless torturer, along with a handful of police officers, came to El-Garhiʼs home to force him to retract his testimonies of torture while at the prison. ‘Bensaami threatened me and said if I continue to speak out, he would arrest me. I told him I didnʼt care. He then pushed me to the ground.’

Sitting across from El-Garhi is Brahim Sabbar, a man who spent a decade in a secret detention centre in southern Morocco. Here is a human rights activist who understands the world as it is, its beauty and its terror. Somewhere between both, lies the inspiration of human nature in all its complexities.

While imprisoned in the Black Jail, Sabbar received over 600 letters from around the world. He is still moved by the gesture, he says. And with the help of Amnesty International, he finally saw the light of day in June 2008.

Kalaat Megouna is now empty, a shell, and is nestled on the foot of the Atlas mountains, near the Draa valley where the French built an administrative centre in 1928. The memories of 43 dead Sahrawi prisoners, some killed, others starved, others too weak to fight off typhoid, haunts the ground. Within those walls emerged the origins of a resistance movement - the Sahrawi Association of Victims of Grave Human Rights Violations Committed by the Moroccan State (ASVDH).

‘My story is very long,’ he says. And for the next several hours I listen to him speak. When Sabbar arrived at Kalaat he, along with eight other Sahrawi, remained isolated from the rest of the population. For four years. ‘We kept ourselves entertained by creating plays and using theatre as a vehicle. We became both the audience and the actor. In 1985 we came into contact with 15 other prisoners who then became our audience. We drew as well. We used art, writing, and drawing as tools about our resistance. We wrote on the back of our hands with nettle. We were able to create colours from labels. We also sculpted, sometimes objects like camels which we would barter with the guards in exchange for medicine. We created a lot of committees, committee of theatre, of culture, of coordination with the leaders, and tried to emulate the organized structure of the Polisario from inside the prison. Finally we got the right to get a radio with a single medium wave. However, we figured out how to get short wave so we could listen to the BBC and Radio France Internationale. The radio became a kind of intellectual nourishment.’

A commission from the region visited the prison once every two years to count the dead. A high-ranking Moroccan official in Laayoune, Aallal Saʼadaoui, was among those from the commission. On his last visit, he told the remaining 369 Sahrawi prisoners they would be released. Sabbar didnʼt believe it. For all those years in prison, his friends and his family had no idea about what had happened. Dead most likely. His mother, he says, stopped speaking. She was in shock. Two weeks after his return home, she began to speak again.

AGADIR

Ahmed Salem Dohi is trying his best not to cry. His eyes are bloodshot and his voice shaking as he tells his story of the two Sahrawi students killed the night before. He was there and had witnessed a Supratours bus crush them. He shakes his head and stares at the floor of the apartment at the university residence. ‘The people in the bus ran away when the police came. They were beating everyone,’ he says. Twenty-two year old Baba Khaya and 20-year-old Lheussein Abdsadek Laktei lay dead beneath the forward axle.

© N NielsonSitting next to Ahmed is Sahrawi student leader Aino Mohammed. His phone rings. A protest is being organised. If I go, I go alone and without a camera, they tell me. At that moment, Ismaaili El Bachir enters the room and describes the march from the university to the bus station earlier that morning. Aino says marches will soon begin in Marrakech and Casablanca, in solidarity with Agadir. Fifteen minutes later I’m in a taxi and arrive at a scene of mourning and anger. Several hundred Sahrawi students have gathered and formed a circle. They sing, they chant. A young man stands in the centre and leads the chorus. ʻJustice, justice,ʼ they demand.

The university is closed, its green iron gates are padlocked shut with heavy chains. Everyone is demanding justice and the chants get louder and louder as more and more students arrive. I stand alone, outside the circle, hoping not to draw too much attention. Aino says some of the students are Moroccan spies and will denounce me to the authorities. I feel the tension and the stares and decide to leave. I need my camera.

Another taxi back to the student residence. I grab my bag and head back. And as I arrive at the scene the students are marching, waving photos of Khaya and Laktei. A Moroccan in army uniform sees me in the cab. The driver continues past the protesters before I exit the cab. I can hear the voices now, loud, singing, on a street parallel to the one Iʼm on. But I decide not to follow their lead and walk in the opposite direction. I think Iʼm being followed by the Moroccan DST, the intelligence service. I spot a taxi stand but the cab driver refuses to take me. Three other cabs are available but they wonʼt take me either. Then another cab arrives. The driver keeps asking me questions about why I am there and what my profession is. He wants to know if the people I was visiting were Moroccan or ʻotherʼ, as he puts it. And then he says, ‘We saw you earlier.’

Foreign journalists caught writing on Western Sahara will have their material confiscated and be deported. Worse, the students I met will be beaten and possibly jailed for disturbing the peace and the national interest. My trip to the occupied Western Saharan capital of Laayoune from Agadir and back was delayed by numerous checkpoints. There is a media blackout.

Day three after the tragedy of Agadir Iʼm back in Marrakech. My contact in Laayoune says students are being rounded up and arrested. In Agadir, things canʼt be much better. Sahrawi students Ali Salem Labras and Fadali Lbanani said they had been abducted by police on Khartoria street and sent, blindfolded, to Wilaya police station. And as I left the station in Agadir, four garrisons of police vans were stationed at the far end of the concrete tarmac. Somewhere on that concrete pad once laid the crushed bodies of 22-year-old Baba Khaya and 20-year-old Lheussein Abdsadek Laktei.

Eugene Delacroix said that in Morocco, glory is a word empty with meaning. The vibrant colours of the Atlas mountains, the drive from Agadir to Marrakech, the desolation of the deserts in Laayoune. Yes, all that matters in such a time when a resistance movement, 30 years in the making, weaves itself through the psychology of identity - the identity of resistance that prevails with a deep horizontal comradeship among those on the frontline and those left to fade away in the scorching deserts of Algeria.

The Sahrawi seek what is their due cause. What can be said of the new fishing agreements off the disputed coastline that have been signed? The phosphate mines in Boucraa that are exploited? The plunder of natural resources in a territory still under litigation? What happened to international justice?

I see Minurso in Laayoune. I see the fleet of UN SUVs parked at the expensive hotels. Shining in the hot sun. A man walks his mule with his goods past a mandate that has no political will.

A double row of Moroccan flags wave alongside Minurso HQ. Moroccan soldiers ‘guard’ the HQ and as I walk by they politely if firmly ask me to walk on the street opposite.

Indeed, the neutral arbiter has succumbed to the real-politik of the Security Council, a bloated and incoherent institution pillared to resolve conflicts and maintain global security.

And now here I am. In Marrakech, I have just received a text message from a young man who can no longer meet me. ‘I am being followed by the police,’ it reads. And I feel ashamed and bitter.

* Read the full version of 34 Years & Waiting (PDF), which includes photographic illustrations and a journey to the Sahrawi refugee camps on the Algerian border of Western Sahara.

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