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.