In front of me is a man who spent ten years in a secret detention center 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, Brahim 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.
But Sabbar's story is far older. It starts in the early 1980's near Dakhla, a port town off the coast of the Western Sahara. It was the second anniversary of Mauritania's defeat and withdrawal from the territory.
Brahim was celebrating but around midnight on August 14, 1981, several plain clothed Moroccan policeman arrested him. Ten years later, he emerged from the infamous Kalaat Megouna secret detention center. Thankful to be alive.
Kalaat 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 center 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,” says Brahim Sabbar. 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 theater 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 colors 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 theater, 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. The current governor of Laayoune, Aallal Sa’adaoui, was among those. On his last visist, he told the remaining 369 Sahrawi prisoners they would be released. Sabbar didn't believe it.
For all those years in prison, his friends, his family had no idea. Dead most likely. His mother, he says, stopped speaking. She was in shock he said. Two weeks after his return home, she began to speak again.
Now that I’m back home, I think about these people, their struggles, their conditions, and the obstacles they face on a daily basis. Africa has not yet been fully decolonized.
The Western Sahara is one of those issues that rarely make it into the press. Most people have never heard of it. Indeed, there are so many struggles around the world. So much blood. Sometimes it all seems too much to comprehend.
