Salaam's Story, by Nick Jubber

  Back at the house of one of Ahmed’s friends, I was shown photos of other demonstrations – an old man with blood on his lips; a woman’s bare red back, rashed by a police baton; a youth with a red gash on his forehead from a stone thrown by a policeman. The range of ways in which people had been attacked was telling, as was the volume of the material. 

Nick making Saharawi tea

  But it was the stories they told that struck me more forcefully than the pictures, and none more so than Salaam’s.

 She had been taking part in demonstrations since she was fifteen, when her mother had to go and pick her up at the police station after she was kept in overnight.

  ‘Of course we take part in demonstrations,’ she told me, ‘we must! It is our land as much as the men’s. And a lot of the men can’t take part because they will lose their job if they are seen at the demonstrations, or maybe they are already in prison. You must understand, we are different from women in Morocco. Our status is different. We have respect in society. If you are a woman in Morocco, your husband will beat you all the time and you cannot complain, but it isn’t like that here. In Saharawi culture, if a man beats his wife it is very shameful. We will go to our family and the man must do a lot to get us back.

  ‘Once I stood in front of fifty policemen, we were demanding freedom, work, our resources, the opportunity to bury our martyrs. They shouted back at us. They said, ‘you’re mercenaries’, and the deputy police chief hit me with his baton, they knocked me over and pulled off my milfha. You know, in our society, this is a great shame. They surrounded me, dragged me away from the others and pulled me by the hair and threatened me with rape.’

  ‘Are you ever nervous before the demonstrations?’ I asked.

  ‘Never! I feel hatred against them. When fifty policemen are facing you and I am only a single woman. I don’t feel scared, I feel hatred for them. Women are more involved than ever now,’ she said, ‘that is since Gdeim Izik. It was a breakthrough, it changed the mentality for women, now a lot of women who used to sit around gossiping, they talk about the political situation.’

Saharawi girls, by Nick Jubber

First Steps in Laayoune, by Nick Jubber

    It’s hard in Laayoune to ignore the military presence. Every corner produces another military kiosk, and every time you cross the road you have to watch out for another artillery-loaded truck roaring round the corner. Wandering under schoolyard murals of the Moroccan army or portraits of King Mohammed, you can feel the weight of a city living under the heavy cloak of oppression. But in many ways, it’s the most innocuous details that are most telling: the empty teahouses, the lack of young men loitering about, the uncracked roads, the huge public squares with their squat palm trees and bougainvillea, gaudily sprayed about like an uninvited guest’s faltering attempt at charm. And occasionally, more specific signs of the political situation seep through – from the heavily gated compounds of the rich Moroccans who’ve made their fortunes off Western Sahara’s resources to the pink Lux minivans, their back windows taped with signs for the UNHCR “Saharawi Family Visits Programme” – underlining the population displacement caused by the Moroccan invasion of 1975.

A house in Laayoune, Nick Jubber

  On a hot street of orangey-pink hardware stores and tailors’ workshops, where the bench outside the local eatery was full of men in workmen’s overalls and the air pulsed to the beat of jackhammering, I met a group of Saharawi activists.


   ‘You chose the right day,’ said one of them, called Ahmed. ‘There’s a demonstration this afternoon.’ He looked at his friends, before adding with a dark grin: ‘but it would be the same if we met you tomorrow. Most days, there’s a demonstration.’

School murals in Laayoune showing the Green March
and the Moroccan invasion, Nick Jubber

   This one took place on Avenue Smara, one of the longest roads in the city. Wearing a white djellaba, Ahmed sat beside me in the back of a car. Beside him was Salaam, a young woman in a midnight blue milfha, who carefully folded a pair of gloves over her hands and tightened her head covering so she wouldn’t be easy to identify.

   ‘Wrap your turban tighter,’ she told me – I’d been given a black one to hide my face and told to keep my giveaway white hands under the window.

A schoolyard in Laayoune with the Moroccan flag, Nick Jubber

  A dozen dark blue police trucks lined the road. Helmeted officers stood outside them, holding plastic shields and gripping their batons in their fists. The white vans of the auxiliary forces were parked in the side alleys. As we drove down the road, you could see the crowd gathering – jaws were stiffening, lips were being bitten, brows were being creased. Secret policemen swarmed between them - ‘You see the men on the motorbikes,’ said Ahmed, ‘that’s them – watch out. If they find out about you they’re gonna give you hell.’

Into the Deep, by Nick Jubber

It felt like the world was dying. After the lush green hills of North Morocco and the palmeraie of the south, now I was surrounded by nothing except for vast dunes of powdery dust.

The desert of Laayoune, Nick Jubber

  I had boarded an overnight bus at Inezgane, one of Morocco’s chief transport hubs. Sitting around me were a group of teenage boys who were all returning from a camping trip. It had been organised by the Justice and Development Party – currently the largest party in the Moroccan parliament.

  ‘Oh yes, we are all Saharawis,’ one of them, Ibrahim, told me. No, he admitted, his parents hadn’t actually been born there, ‘but there is a lot of work to be done because Western Sahara is in need of development.’ One of his friends, Mehdi, was more forthright. ‘You need to understand something,’ he said. ‘Maybe you will meet people and they will say they are the only true Saharawis. But they want us to do all the work for them. My father and his father,’ he continued, wagging a finger at Ibrahim, ‘they are the people who are making this land something more.’ This issue – the settlers and their children versus the indigenous Saharawis – has become one of the core issues in Western Sahara, especially in regard to the proposed UN referendum to decide the fate of the region.

Camels in Laayoune, Nick Jubber

  Blinking into the glare, as the sun floated over the roof of the bus, we looked across the rocky desert towards Laayoune. We passed a wind turbine, a dairy farm and a cement works. Farmsteads built from the abundant local stone skulked beside acacia groves. Most noticeable of all, though, was the checkpoint: a small pink kiosk where a soldier in grey sat behind his ledger and a tea tray buzzing with flies. Black and white mug-shots of ‘miscreants’ (many of them simply Saharawi activists against the occupation) were tacked to the wall above him. He asked me why I was visiting Laayoune and suggested I move on to Dakhla.

  ‘You can windsurf there,’ he explained.

  Red flags with green five point stars – trumpeting Moroccan sovereignty – fought against the breeze and an archway hooped over us, patterned with seashells in the spandrels. Beyond the Oued Sakiya, military trucks loaded with artillery and Sûreté Nationale vans trundled around us, soldiers in olive-green uniforms picking their way between the early-morning strawberry cart pushers and women in brightly coloured milfhas or men in loose blue dira’a robes. I found myself a room in a downtown hotel above a café frequented by football enthusiasts. I was itching to explore – and to find out for myself what’s really going on in Laayoune.

Stories from the Occupied Territories

We're starting a new series of short stories (in English) by people from occupied Western Sahara or who have travelled there and want to share their experience. Do you want to participate? Just write an email to us with your story and we'll publish it on our blog. Don't forget to include some pictures!

Map of occupied Western Sahara and surrounded
territories painted on a wall in the camp February 27.
Photo by Danielle Smith

Saharawi arts and culture at the V&A

Last Saturday 23rd June Sandblast, with the support of the V&A Museum and in an event linked to Refugee Week, put together 'Out of the Sand - We are Saharawi', a sensational Saharawi arts and culture day at the Sackler's Centre of the museum. The event run from midday until approximately 4.30pm, and involved music, film, talk and a jewellery making workshop.

MUSIC: EL ANDALUZ

El Andaluz at the V&A Sackler's Centre

Fantastic Algerian music group El Andaluz Band, made up of Yazid Fentazi (oud), Karim Dellali (darboucka) and special guest Redha Boudbagh (voice and Algerian and oud), kicked off the afternoon with some incredible music. Having collaborated with Saharawi musicians in several occasions in the past (they performed in the jam session at Sahara Nights and Karim has travelled to the Saharawi refugee camps), these musicians offered the audience the perfect musical set up for the day. We were all soon tapping our feet and clapping to the intricate melodies and uplifting rhythms of the classic Arabic and Andalusian music they were performing.

FILM: BEAT OF DISTANT HEARTS

Umm Deleila, Saharawi singer
featured in Beat of Distant Hearts

Danielle Smith, filmmaker, photographer, anthropologist and Sandblast Founding Director, travelled to the Saharawi refugee camps for the first time in 1991. From the very beginning her imagination was captured by the inspiring Saharawi culture and the powerful role the arts, especially the music and poetry, but also the newly developed painting style, had played during the revolution and the 16 years of war (1975-1991). She decided to film a documentary showcasing this part of the story and Beats of Distant Hearts, the Art of the Revolution in Western Sahara was born. Although filmed in 1996, it was not released until 2000. Twelve years later, the film is still relevant today as it shows how the Saharawi arts and culture continue to be the best way of reaching international audiences and raise awareness about the Saharawi situation. After the screening, there was a Q&A with the filmmaker.

JEWELLERY MAKING WORKSHOP
In 2007, French Florie Salnot, a design student from the London Metropolitan Art Media & Design was challenged by her professor to develop a design project that could benefit both a community and the environment. Inspired by a talk by Danielle Smith, she developed a unique craft technique using hot sand and plastic bottles, both available in the refugee camps, and taught it to twenty-one Saharawi women to re-discover an ancient tradition of creative expression of their cultural identity.

Danielle shows us the thin strip of plastic
she's cutting off a bottle. At the back,
Florie supervises another workshop attendant

The technique is the following: the plastic bottle is first painted and then cut into thin strips. After that, any type of pattern can be made by positioning nails into the holes of a nail board: the plastic strip is placed around the nails and the whole board is submerged into hot sand. The plastic strip reacts to the heat by shrinking to fit the nail drawing, and keeps its shape when removed. The piece of jewellery then requires a few last steps and fittings to become finished.

On Saturday, Florie gave a workshop at the V&A for the attendants of 'Out of the Sand'. In a couple of hours each of us created a small ring out of thin strips of golden plastic using small copper sticks to shape the pieces of jewellery; it was fascinating to see how an everyday plastic bottle can become something so pretty and decorative!