From the first week of January, we have been three new FK volunteers in the camps, replacing Maren and Andrea and Andrea. They have gone back to Norway and are now giving talks and lectures about the life in the camps and the general situation of the Saharawi people. The new volunteers - Lene, Ida and Renate - will continue this blog and share their experiences from the second part of this project.

Visiting AFAPREDESA at the Human Rights Centre

Today we visited the human rights centre in Rabouni, run by AFAPREDESA.
AFAPREDESA is the first NGO in Western Sahara and it was formed in 1989.
During our stay in the camps, we will do some voluntary work at the centre.
We met Mohamed Ahwed Labeeid, one of the seven persons who work at the centre, and he told us about the organization.
The organization gathers information, investigate and document violations of the human rights in occupied area. They cooperate with organizations and human rights defenders in occupied area, and give information and reports to international human rights organizations and the UN.

The NGO also participates in international meetings and congresses all over the world. Last year they went to Sweden, and next month they will go to Brazil.
In addition to the traditional North/South solidarity, they focus on south/south relations. They work with organizations from East- Timor (the country was formerly in a situation very similar to Western-Sahara) and countries in Latin America where they have a lot of experience in working with human rights. The organizations meet and discuss their situations and exchange experiences.


At the centre there is an exhibition with photos of victims from violence and torture performed by Moroccan authorities. The photos show women and men who are heavily bruised and some of them have big wounds and other damages.
Personally, I have met a lot of young saharawis who have been beaten and tortured by Moroccan police and sent in jail with no reason.
There are also photos and information for saharawis who have disappeared, probably kidnapped by Moroccan authorities. Today, 526 saharouis are missing. The UN has confronted the Moroccan government with reports with detailed information of missing persons, but the Moroccan government claims that these people never existed.

www.afapredesa.org

A home made flag

A copal of months ago I was sitting on the floor in the sand house of our family in the Refugee Camp Laayoune. We had to spend the evening inside, since a giant cloud of sand was passing the camps, turning the whole world red. In the beginning it was exciting; however, as the sun disappeared behind the horizon and the amazing colors outside turned into darkness, we grew a bit bored.

That was when a copal of the girls in the family disappeared into the tents. They came back with hands full of flags and the traditional clothes of the Saharawis. We spent the rest of that night dressing up and making photographs. It gave me a strange
sense of dejavue. Just one year ago I had been sitting on the floor of another house looking at a woman holding the same flag.

The woman was the mother of my Saharawi friend Rabab. She had sown it from the old clothes of family members, and as she showed it to me the whole room was silent. Our location was also Laayoune, but this time I was in the occupied part of Western Sahara, and the flag the mother was holding put her and the whole family in the risk of being arrested and tortured.

During the two weeks I spent in the occupied parts of Western Sahara the summer of 2007 I heard a lot of terrible stories. I met people who had been arrested or detained more times than they could remember. I met mothers who had been beaten up while demonstrating for the release of their children. Saharawi boys and girls told me about how they had been tortured in police stations.

One thing they all had in common was their “crime”. All of them were people expressing their opinions and their culture, separate from the Moroccan. One boy told me about how he had been arrested while walking to school. The reason was that he had been wearing the “daraa,” the Saharawi male costume, on the 27th of February, the day when the Saharawi state had been founded. A girl I met had just been expelled from school. The reason was that when the teacher told her to sing the Moroccan anthem, she sang the Saharawi instead.

During the first week of December we participated in Auserd Cultural Festival. Seeing Saharawi men, women and children celebrating and sharing their culture was a strong experience, knowing that their families in the occupied zones are prevented from doing the very same thing. For three days we were taken around long columns of traditional black tents. We were shown the old Bedouin tools, clothes, haircuts and way of life.

The culture of a people is more than the songs, traditions and customs it is made up by, it is also a part of a person’s identity. As a consequence it is a human right to have the possibility to express your culture without fear of being tortured or arrested. Even though participating in the festival was wonderful, I couldn’t stop myself from thinking about the Saharawis living inside Morocco’s wall, where flags are sown from worn out clothes, and the old songs can only be song behind closed doors in silent voices.

Saying goodbye

And then it was all over.

Even though it felt to me like no time at all had passed, I was going home. I was leaving the little rows of sand houses, the sight of colorful mehefas making their way up and down the streets, and the goats that seem to eat everything they find lying around (including Coca Cola boxes). But what hurt the most was the thought of leaving the people who had for four months opened their hearts to me, and let me think of one of the world`s most inhospitable places as home.

Before I left my house in the small village of Klæbu in the center of Norway, four months seemed to stretch out in front of me like eternity. I kept asking myself the same questions over and over. Was this the right thing to do? Did I really want to spend almost half a year isolated in the world’s biggest desert? Even as the car was driving us away from the Tindouf airport I felt a tight knot in the middle of my stomach as I looked out into the black desert night.

And my nervousness was perhaps in its place. Our stay in the camps was by no means a vacation. We were met by problems and challenges on a daily basis, both due to the harsh desert climate and the fact that we were living in an unfamiliar situation. Everything was strange and different; the culture, the language, even the daily routines.

Despite this, as time passed, I became more and more certain I had made the right choice in coming to the camps. The problems and challenges did not disappear, but as time passed and we understood more about the people and the culture around us, daily challenges became easier to overcome. Today I feel a great admiration of the people living in the refugee camps. Even though they are living in a harsh climate in a forgotten conflict, their sense of humor and strength made a big impression on me.

So time continued to pass, and each day I felt like I was learning something new, until all of a sudden (and a lot sooner than I had expected) our time in the camps was over.

The only thing left for me to do was to say goodbye. But how do you say goodbye when you know you are about to go back to a different reality, a different world. How do you say goodbye to a friend who has walked for an hour just to talk to you for 15 minutes one last time? Or a grandmother who points her finger between you and her grandchild and says “kif-kif – You are the same to me”. How do you leave to go home, when you know you are leaving a homeless people behind?

For me it was a hard thing to do, but I felt better known I was going home with a purpose. In Norway hardly anyone knows about the conflict in Western Sahara. Even though I was leaving the camps, I was taking with me the voices of all the people we had met, and I will try to use the months and years to come telling their stories.

Saying goodbye to our last host-family!

Me, Andrea2, Dæhaba and Momna