'Do not forget us'

INTRODUCTION

Enaama Asfari is currently in Salé prison in Rabat from where he is unable to get any messages out to foreign observers. His wife, Claude Mangin in France, has given us permission to publish a selection of text from her records of his human rights advocacy work, and arrests and his diaries: The first between 2007-2009 and more recently since November 2010 to the present day. Enaama is one of the prominent human rights activists in the occupied territory and was famously arrested and imprisoned for carrying a key-ring that had a small plastic flag of Western Sahara. Here is his story.

A FAMILY OF RESISTANCE FIGHTERS

His father, like his paternal grandfather, was a great desert nomad, free men who had never pledged allegiance to anyone, neither the French nor the Spanish colonisers. He was a trader with a great mercantile caravan that travelled across the vast desert cities of Gao, Timbuktu and Marrakech. He was rich with a caravan of camels and many shops.

In 1976, Abdi Ould Moussa was 40 years old. Shortly after the Green March came the start of numerous abductions and disappearances, especially in Tan Tan where all families were affected, and whose consequences are still felt by their children. The Moroccan army installed themselves after the withdrawal of Spanish troops. Abdi was removed from his shop in front of his son, then aged six years, to whom he gave the keys and said, ‘Go to your mother’. All his property was confiscated. He disappeared for 16 long years in the prisons of Agdez and Kelaat M'gouna, in the famous ‘Valley of Roses’ in eastern Morocco near Ouarzazate.

In 1978, his mother, Moguef Ment M'Hamed, a female icon of the Saharawi resistance, was also arrested in Rabat, the capital of the Kingdom of Morocco, when she accompanied a group of Saharawi women to learn about the fate of their husbands. These women were deported to the town of Tan-Tan where Enaama’s mother spent more than two months in prison. When she was released, the authorities imposed on her house arrest in Tan Tan. She was 30 years old and a mother of four; Ennaama is the eldest of them.

Ennaama's mother, who was seven months pregnant during the arrest of her husband, lost her 15-days-old baby. She then fell ill with cancer and Ennaama and his brothers were supported by their uncles. Ennaama grew up in the house of his maternal grandfather in the oasis of Laksabi. He went to school in the village where his grandfather was the teacher of Arabic since the 1950s, when he was obliged to move his family to relocate to Guelmim to allow Ennaama to go to college. Marked as a son of political resistance, he was forbidden to attend the boarding school.

In 1981, his uncle, Brahim Bellagha, the brother of his mother, was taken from Tan Tan with a group of young Saharawi. They were incarcerated in the prison of Tan Tan where Moguef visited and supported them. He was then led to an unknown destination for 10 years of enforced disappearance in the same prison as his father. He remains today in exile in the region of Paris; he never returned home. Ennaama’s other uncle, the brother of Brahim, Mohamed Ali Bellagha, a teacher, is prohibited from living in Guelmim; he is relegated to Smara where he founded a school and moved to Dakhla when denied further residence in Smara.

© ASVDHIn 1991 his father was released with more than 300 victims of enforced disappearance on the eve of the launch of the United Nations resolution forcing the Moroccan regime to release all Saharawi disappeared. He was released in Tan Tan. This is where Ennaama went to see if his father was among the released. He had to be shown who his unrecognisable father was. His father is now an old man, still a fighter and highly respected. He lives in Tan Tan and is permanently under surveillance especially when he receives foreigners, such as the French girl who was arrested in April 2008 and was put in custody for 12 hours at the police station of Tan Tan before being expelled with observers, including a member of ACAT (Action of Christians for the Abolition of Torture and the Death Penalty), who had come to the trial of her husband in Marrakech. His father assists with all the trials of the Sahrawi youth and is at the helm to popularise the struggle for self-determination and independence.

ENAAMA’S HUMAN RIGHTS ADVOCACY BACKGROUND

Enaama arrived in France in 1999 with a scholarship to study law and French at the Alliance Française in Paris. He already held a degree in International Law in Arabic from the University of Marrakech, an academic subject that many male and female Sahrawi students still choose. He went on to obtain a postgraduate diploma in International Public Law from the Faculty of Legal and Political Sciences at Paris X-Nanterre University, in ‘Human rights and public freedoms’. His thesis was entitled, ‘The future of MINURSO, the United Nations Mission for the referendum in Western Sahara’. It was at this time that we met in Paris. We married on 20 October 2003 at Tan-Tan, his hometown; the marriage was recorded in the Consulate of Agadir. He holds a 10-year residence card which was issued by the Prefecture of Créteil as being that of the matrimonial home.

In May 2005 the intifada [uprising"> of independence started. In late May, his brother Khadad, who worked with him in their car rental business that they had created in Marrakech was arrested at home. He disappeared for three days before being released. He had been taken blindfolded with other Saharawi students in Rabat to be interviewed.

In September 2005, some months after the beginning of the May 2005 ‘intifada for independence’ uprisings across the territory of Western Sahara, Enaama participated in the creation of a new French-Sahraoui association, CORELSO (Committee for the respect of liberties and human rights in Western Sahara), of which he was elected co-chair with Aline Pailler, to raise awareness in French public opinion of the gross violations of human rights suffered by Saharawi citizens in the occupied territories.

Since then, CORELSO has been extensively involved as a human rights monitor, in particular by attending the trials of Sahrawi political prisoners that have occurred since 2005 in Morocco and the Western Sahara, and by accompanying delegations of civil society and legal observers and foreign journalists who attend the trials and make visits to families of the political prisoners. In 2006, Enama participated in Morocco and Western Sahara as an observer, along with groups of international observers, in most of the political trials of the Sahrawi.

In September 2007, he ‘disappeared’ for 72 hours in Agadir. He had spent three days on the premises of the DST [one of a number of Moroccan security forces">. Whenever stopped, his car is confiscated; it is most difficult to recover it during his detention and there are heavy fines. Since then he has continued to suffer harassment. At every turn, he is questioned for hours at airports on his activities in France in which the Moroccan secret services are well informed of. For example, he was arrested by Moroccan police in Laayoune on 20 May 2007 and held for 10 hours in a police station.

After participating in July 2009 with a group of Sahrawi in the 3rd Festival of Pan-African Culture in Algiers, he was arrested again on 14 August 2009 at the northern checkpoint entrance of the city of Tan Tan. During this routine check, police officers noticed that on the key-chain that Enaama Asfari carries was a small flag of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic [the nation-state in exile">. He was arrested and sentenced by the court to four months in closed prison and transferred to Tiznit prison.

RECORD OF ARRESTS 2007-2009

© ASVDHEnaama was first arrested on 6 January 2007 at the police station at the entrance to the city of Smara, while in the final stage of a family visit by my parents over Christmas. The day before, I had returned to college in France, where I heard about his arrest. After some days under arrest, he was released after being sentenced to a two-month suspended prison sentence with a fine, in a trial that took place in Smara and which had been attended by international observers such as Daniel Voduet.

Enaama was arrested a second time on Sunday 13 April 2008 and ‘disappeared’ from the apartment he rented in Guéliz, a district of Marrakech. He ‘reappeared’ on 16 April 2008 in Boulmharez prison. I had already arranged a civilian monitoring mission participating in human rights among other things, from ACAT. We started as scheduled on Sunday 20 April, but instead of going to the south we went to Marrakech where we could attend the trial of my husband on Monday 21 April with international observers. At the end of the hearing which postponed the trial for eight days, France Weyl and I were met by our request by the president of the tribunal and the king's public prosecutor and by Mr Wiet, the French Consul. The next day, I went to see my husband in prison and I found the marks of the beatings he had received during his abduction which I communicated to Amnesty International. The following Monday, in the presence of international observers and France Weyl and Aline Chanu, he was sentenced to two months in a closed prison and a fine of 3000 dirhams. He was released on 13 June 2008, after a trial of appeal which upheld his sentence.

Three days later, the monitoring mission that I was driving was stopped behind the house of my parents in Tan Tan and after 12 hours of custody at the police station, we continued at night to the airport of Agadir to await the arrival of Mr Perrier of the French Consulate but we were expelled for ‘disturbing public order’. Minister Kouchner responded to the letters sent by participants of the mission. Their parliamentarians whom they had alerted were particularly shocked by the way we had been treated.

Enaama was arrested a third time on 14 August 2009 in the evening at the north entrance to the Tan security post when he joined me with the new civilian monitoring mission I was driving. We saw the same night security guards; he was beaten during his arrest and his glasses were broken. The trial took place on 24 August in the presence of Aline Chanu and other international observers but was postponed to 28 August where it took place in the presence of observers, including Sylvie Bourjon. Enaama was sentenced to four months by the court of the town. He was transferred to the prison of Tiznit and made his appeal. In addition to international observers, a delegation of five of our fellow French citizens of Ivry sur Seine, including two municipal officials and a priest of the Mission of Francesont, went to his appeal hearing on 17 November 2009. He was released on 14 December 2009, at the end of his sentence.
Video-interview in November 2010 at Gdeim Izik camp
Videos of Morocco’s brutal dawn raid

RECORD OF ARRESTS 2010-2011

Recently, in October 2010, my husband had a prominent presence in the Gdeim Izik ‘freedom camp’ of 8000 tents in the vicinity of El Aaiun video of Morocco’s brutal dawn raid on the camp ">. The Sahrawi call it the ‘camp of pride and dignity’, where he helped to make known what was happening by explaining the objectives of this new movement of resistance, exceptional by its magnitude. He travelled back and forth to Laayoune, while the camp was besieged by the Moroccan Army, to edit videos with photographic images and interviews he had filmed in the campt o upload them to the internet for the international observers and media. video interview transmitted from Gdeim Izik camp November 2010

As the airwaves were jammed in the camp by the Moroccan authorities, he also kept returning to Laayoune in order to send news to his family and to me and make calls to the media and friends of the international solidarity associations, hoping in vain to avoid what finally happened on 8 November 2010 when the Moroccan security forces dismantled the camp by force. On 7 November 2010, my husband was in Laayoune, where he was being tracked down. He was hiding with friends when he called me at 8.15pm to give me his new mobile number. He wanted me to communicate with friends and in particular to the French delegation that was expected to arrive the same night in Laayoune, his other number having become too well known by the Moroccan security services.
But Deputy Mayor Jean-Paul Lecoq was at that moment already being held by the Moroccan authorities at the airport in Casablanca, where he stayed overnight before being expelled, as his visit to Laayoune for evidence of the events was something the Moroccan government did not want.

Meanwhile, Madam Marie Thérèse Marchand, commissioned by the Association of Friends of SADR to accompany Deputy Mayor Lecocq, arrived at Laayoune at two o’clock in the morning. Having not been identified by the Moroccan authorities, she remained 24 hours in the town and was witness to much of the violence. At 8.20pm, police entered the home of the friends of my husband, beat him and took him unconscious to an unknown location. Then nothing, no more contact with my husband, and no information from the Moroccan authorities to his family or to me. From Paris, thanks to calls from our Saharawi friends and Marie Thérèse Marchand, we watched from a distance the Black Monday of 8 November2010, the tragic attack and the dismantling of the camp of Gdeim Izik, the clashes in the streets of Laayoune and the mass arrests of Saharawi civilians. The following days were full of anguish. I was contacted by numerous French and foreign media and by international associations of human rights in search of information on this event which was a ‘surprise’ to many observers even though we had alerted them to the possibilities for several weeks.

Friday 12 November 2010, or five long days of waiting for me and the family, I finally got news at about 3.30pm. Witnesses had seen my husband at 5am in the morning in court in Laayoune with other inmates, half-naked, wearing only shorts, his body covered with traces of the ill-treatment. He was alive! Without a hearing or lawyers, the Attorney General of the King decided to transmit the records of Ennaama and the 5 other prisoners to the Military Tribunal of Rabat and transfer them there the same day. Two days later, they were joined by two more.

© ASVDHOn Sunday 14 November, I learnt that nine Saharawi detainees including Ennaama had arrived in Rabat’s Salé prison from Laayoune. They were incarcerated in an annex of Zaki prison, recently built for the exclusive imprisonment of terrorists and Islamists, this detention centre being under the responsibility of General Information and not of the Ministry of Justice. This would put them in a critically serious situation. For eight days after that, no witnesses saw them, no information was available; they are truly missing.

On February 3, 2011, a message was received from Enaama in Salé prison in Rabat, which read: ‘I ask everyone I know in the world to help us exercise our right as political prisoners, because until now the Sahrawi are isolated from other prisoners. We cannot send letters, we cannot do sports, almost no eating because of unsanitary [conditions"> and many have consequences of torture. We need your media broadcasting, do not forget us. Thank you.’

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* Testimonies collected by C. Mangin, in a civilian mission of observation of human rights in the Moroccan occupied territory of Western Sahara 2005-2007. To be printed in a forthcoming novel.
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