It seems so long ago now. The fear, the anxiety, the dark alleys of Laayoune. I met the Sahrawi human rights activist, Ahmed Sbai, in the outskirts of this wasted city, in the Eraki neighborhood where the marginalized live in bland block apartments.
A week ago now, maybe even less. The days pass by in a blur and time has slowed to a crawl. Sbai, a young man with rectangle glasses, is now on the run, chased by the Moroccan police judiciare. But the story doesn't begin here and the memories, the faces, the voices, are coming back to me. Clear.
I received the call in my hotel room at around 8 pm. It's my contact Mohamed. He tells me to take a cab to Eraki and then wait. The cab driver drops me off at a corner butcher where whole sheep are strung upside down from hooks, blood dripping from their noses into small pools of crimson on the concrete. I can hear the voices of children in the distance. And then it's eerily quiet and I can just make out the silhouettes of the block apartments.
The moon is gone, the stars brilliant. Le Clezio wrote about these stars in his book, Desert. I imagine the same five eastern stars Alkaid, Mizar, Alioth, Magrez, Fecda, and the blue star Kochab. A color dignified by the Saharan nomads,the refugees I met in Algeria, and the blue sheik who instructed the legendary warrior Ma el Ainine to build Smara. Ainine fought the Spanish colonizers in Laayoune, Ifni and Tiznit.
Then I see a figure of man, he waves his arms and I follow him at distance; we walk quickly. To my right, the desert. Plastic bags along with dust is kicked about in the cold wind. We arrive at a courtyard, a door opens, light momentarily basking the gravel and dirt.
Inside, I see Mohamed Daddach and Brahim Sabbar. Two men who have known the horrors of torture. Sabbar once spent 11 years in the French built secret detention center, Kalaat Megouna, and was recently released in June 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. “I cannot really express with words what it is like. I can with tears.”
Sbai is a member of the banned ASVDH, Association Sahraouie des Victimes des Violations Graves des Droits de l'Homme Commises par l'Etat du Maroc (Sahrawi Association of Victims of Grave Human Rights Violations Committed by the Moroccan State) and Comité pour la Protection des Détenus de la Prison Noire.
Sbai then tells me his story.
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