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An unrecognized  crime (2/2): Sexual assaults against Moroccan women in the Polisario camps (Ali Najab)

An unrecognized crime (2/2): Sexual assaults against Moroccan women in the Polisario camps (Ali Najab)

Titled "Moroccan Women Detained in Polisario Camps, Prisons: Serious Human Rights Violations," the study conducted by Malika Bensahra and Fatima Amrani at the University Sidi Mohamed Ben Abdellah in Fez sheds light on barbaric practices of the Polisario. The latter deliberately used kidnapping, followed by rape, to increase the captive population in the Tindouf camps.

After reviewing the content of the study, former Polisario detainee Ali Najab wants to clarify that the title of the study may be misleading because there are no Moroccan women prisoners of war in the sense of the Geneva Convention; but there are women from the Southern provinces who are being held against their will by separatists, with the help of Algerian military security services.

 

"How Algeria tried, through the Polisario, to artificially create a Sahrawi nation"

 

As a witness to the Polisario's practices, which needed to increase its ranks to artificially create an independent Sahrawi nation, Najab discusses the steps leading up to the abduction of women.

With 20,000 people from Moroccan cities in the Sahara forcefully brought to Tindouf between November 1975 and January 1976 and presented as refugees fleeing Morocco, the Polisario gradually incorporated Sahrawis from Tindouf and Bechar, whom Algeria had ordered to join their cousins to fight the Moroccan enemy.

Not content to stop there, the Polisario continued to artificially create "a Sahrawi population" by welcoming numerous members of the Haratine community.

In collusion with Algeria, General Salazar dissolved the Spanish Legion, which had a thousand Sahrawi fighters, and offered them to the separatists in 1975, along with all the necessary equipment, such as jeeps, weapons, and ammunition to fight.

On the eve of signing a peace agreement with Mauritania, the Polisario sent hundreds of children born in Dakhla to Nouadhibou, under the guise of school holidays, who were then forcibly transferred by truckloads to the camps in Tindouf. If the objective was to pressure their parents to join them, it did not work.

 

"Kidnapped to be used as sex objects"

 

According to Najab, after the start of the Green March, militiamen continued to increase their numbers by carrying out attacks against several Moroccan cities in the south between November 1975 and January 1986, before returning to Algeria with the loot of their raids.

"As a pilot, I often flew low over their convoys of 40 trucks, and I took photos where you could clearly see women, children, and even goats," the captain recalls. He adds that each truck had to carry about thirty women and elderly people.

Taken prisoner after his plane was shot down by a SAM-7 surface-to-air missile, Ali Najab was chosen with a few comrades to teach English first to his captors' children, then to girls aged 12 to 14 whose tongues loosened over the years.

"In a class of about 28 children, a girl once told me, first warning me about the Algerian spies who were watching over them, how her classmates had been forcibly transferred from Nouadhibou to the Tindouf camp," the captain reveals, adding that girls become sex objects from the age of 14 in these lawless areas that are the Tindouf camps.

 

"A deliberate policy to have surrogate mothers"

 

During his years of captivity, the pilot was transferred to several camps, where he remembers seeing on the walls of two brick barracks lists of names of captive women written in charcoal by those who probably wanted to leave a trace of their passage.

According to the information he was able to gather on the spot, Najab specifies that these barracks were intended for single fighters to satisfy their sexual needs during leave.

"They helped themselves as if they were at the supermarket, and when some victims of repeated rape complained, their torturers told them that they were not wives, but women of the revolution."

 

"Obliged to give birth to a quota of at least 5 future fighters"

 

When asked how many children had been born through what the Polisario considered a true war booty, capable of perpetuating the fight against Morocco, Najab says that the birth rate is difficult to measure due to high mortality among newborns facing deplorable sanitary and medical conditions.

"If few infants managed to survive in the desert context of Tindouf, it can be estimated that their mothers were forced to give birth to at least four or five children, of which a good portion died," the captain estimates. During his captivity, he remembers discovering in 1986, through another Moroccan prisoner and defector Omar Hadrami, that the Polisario's last census reported 56,000 people, including six-month-old babies.

Of these 56,000 people, Najab recalls that 20,000 of them actually came from Moroccan Sahara, and that the rest, namely 36,000 supporters, were added by the Polisario with logistical help from Algeria, which wanted to create a Sahrawi nation.

 

"Forty-eight years later, Boumédiène's policy has failed."

 

In conclusion, Captain Najab specifies "that today, all Sahrawis living in the Tindouf camps, except for those who make up the backbone of the Polisario, will tell you that they are convinced that Algeria does not care about their future."

"All Algeria and its ruling class are interested in is first amputating Morocco of a part of its territory, that is, a part of its body, to make it yet another Algerian wilaya."

"Then, by depriving it of the so-called Western Sahara, Algeria really thought it would isolate Morocco from the rest of Africa by definitively cutting it off from its African roots."

"In fact, Boumédiène believed that with the independence of the Sahara, he would raise the Moroccan people against their king and succeed in overthrowing the monarchy, but he and his generals did not properly evaluate the intelligence of King Hassan II and the courage of the Moroccan people."

"Where are we today? Morocco is in its Sahara, while the Polisario and the Algerian regime continue to languish in Tindouf, certainly ad vitam æternam."

And as the ancients said, "O time, father of all things."

 

Médias24

 

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