Photo - The Guardian Newspaper

W.B. Yeats penned one of his most celebrated works at end of first the World War. The Second Coming drew allusions to a world that had lost hope, to an existential crisis into the human condition where a destroyed landscape had been littered with so many bodies - all for a few yards of dirt in the madness of trench warfare.  The lost hope seems particularly pertinent where today, in Afghanistan and elsewhere, the promise of change and reform has not only been undermined but where the everyday travails of life have been magnified and worsened.

It is times like these, after 8 years of war and after a strategic military change where General McChrystal is vying for the hearts and minds of the Afghan population, that desperate measures pounce on promises once made.  It is certainly easy to criticize the war in Afghanistan.  For all its faults and all the lives taken; many innocent.  But that conditions are steadily worsening and that the Taliban’s influence steadily increasing is a sign that:

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

-W.B. Yeats

Ahmad Zia Langari knows all too well about what could have been and what is.  He  is a commissioner at the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission.  Based in Kabul, Mr. Langari made a special appearance in Brussels on Thursday where I had the chance to speak to him following his presentation to the sub-committee on human rights at the European Parliament.

Mr. Langari said that women are extremely vulnerable in Afghanistan and that their daily lives are exasperated by violence from threats by the Taliban as well as recent  laws that appeal to the conservative elements of the Afghan government.

“A majority of the parliament are conservative and ex-mujahideen,” said Langari.  “Women lack education and some of the schools are 10 km from the villages.  Girls have to walk without any security so they don’t go,” he added.

Compounded by nepotism, cronyism and impunity, the nascent semi-functional Hamid Karzai government is unable to provide the most basic of needs.  In southern areas of Afghanistan, villagers will seek council from the Taliban who have set up ad-hoc judicial systems because of government corruption and lengthy procedures.  However, the Taliban are also pressuring people to use their council to settle disputes.  Afghanistan’s own constitution is beginning to resemble that of the Taliban.  Article 3 of the constitution states that no new law can be passed that contradicts Islamic law.

“The lack of access to government means the Taliban have been able to establish their own systems.  People go to them, not the government,” he said.

With the allegations of widespread election fraud, the discredited Karzia government is another indication of the international community’s failure to understand the intimacy that is Afghanistan.  A cartoon in the International Herald Tribune made the point.  Obama is telling Karzai that he doesn’t understand democracy.  Karzai responds - and you don’t understand Afghanistan.

Immediately following the elections, Richard Holbrooke lauded the Taliban by claiming they had failed to stop democracy.  But on the ground, the events tell a different story.  Of the 1180 international election observers from 50 different organizations, few if any monitored the counting process.  At the same time, the government has clamped down on media. Fourteen journalists were arrested for trying to report on the violence at election polls said  Rachel Reid of Human Rights Watch who was also present at the committee meeting.

“The European Union Election Observer Mission did not fully disclose the levels of violence,” she said. Instead, the European Union had painted a rosy picture which, ultimately and given all the media reports now emerging, further undermines international credibility in Afghanistan.

How then can Europe and the US possibly win the hearts and minds of the population?  McChrystal’s new strategic strategy to engage the population is a start but his objective has been made all the more difficult by international disingenuity and historic callous behavior.

Afghanistan seems like a lost cause, one mired in too many cultural, social and economic complexities that the bigwigs in Washington have failed to address or simply decided not to - at least in the beginning.   No one has ever won Afghanistan.  And it looks like the gross human rights violations and all the small but significant steps made for the emancipation of women over the past two years are quickly unravelling.  It is a disheartening situation.  One that seems hopeless and lost and yet one that we cannot give up on.

I already posted on how the United Nations Mission for the Referendum in the Western Sahara  (Minurso) is the only one of its kind to not have a human rights mandate. The conflict is over thirty years in the making and consistently hovers below the media radar screen.

Perhaps there is not enough blood spilled to get the world’s attention; a disturbing paradox for the human rights activists on the ground and on the frontline. The freedom of expression, of assembly, of political dissent are vital in any functioning democracy, but in Morocco and despite promises of reform, an entire people have been pushed to the edge and forgotten.  And over 160,000 refugees are wasting away in a desert near a former Algerian military base in Tindouf as a result.

It seems so long ago now but when I was there in November and December of last year, I had secretly met with a number of human rights activists in Laayoune - a former Spanish outpost in the middle of a vast desert.  There is an all out media blockade there and those caught risk jail - and those who are seen to associate with media incur even greater risk.  In other words, it’s rare to hear anything coming out of the region.  While access to the Western Sahara is no problem, getting access to the issues that Minurso is tasked to oversee is an altogether different experience.

For those of you interested in some of the issues I covered there and the people I spoke to - please read the following feature published yesterday at Pambazuka News:

The Sahrawi: Seeking solace in a dream

A row of Moroccan flags firmly embedded in a concrete wall too tall to scale, align a compound that has no political will and surround a United Nations mission that has no human rights bureau. Minurso, the UN Mission for the Referendum in the Western Sahara, is a sad spectacle where the single blue flag appears to reach tall into the warm sky.

But it hangs limp as the dozens of red draped green stars flutter in the slight breeze; defiant and dominant. In front of the mission’s gate are two armed Moroccan soldiers. They stare out onto an empty lot where some brave individuals had once staged a peaceful protest. Their demands for the fundamental rights of assembly, of freedom of expression and thought, were quickly kicked into the dirt by the black boots of the Moroccan security forces and their notorious DST.

The blue helmets of the mission were passive, behind their barricade sipping mint teas, their silence underlines the terrible cost of human suffering and injustice that has gone unchecked for over 34 years. As I walk by the compound, one of the soldiers approaches and asks if I work for the mission. He then tells me to leave.

This is Laayoune. A former Spanish outpost turned administrative centre where Moroccan soldiers, police, and security details are as common as the lowly soul attempting to carve out a life in the middle of this vast desert whose relative size is comparable to that of the entire UK.

Laayoune houses some 200,000 (this figure is in dispute) individuals and in its margins, in the Eraki neighbourhood and elsewhere, the Saharawi live in bland block apartments, some in slums, some in relatively decent housing. All under the tyranny of indifference and a media blackout.

Minurso was established in 1991 with a mandate to oversee a referendum for the self-determination of the Sahrawi and to keep the peace between Morocco and the Polisario. But years of deadlock, of missed opportunities, and a lack of political will in the Security Council has forced the blue helmets into a corner where comfort and complacency have replaced international law and rigour. Boredom erodes the soldier’s mind.

Their SUVs are shiny and brilliantly white, the tires a perfect black. Everything they have appears new and when parked in the asphalt lots of expensive hotels like the Nagir, the common Sahrawi can do nothing but walk by, her head turned low as the bustle of Africa’s longest territorial conflict and the UN’s last decolonisation procedure, continues unabated, unchecked and discredited.

She is alone with her thoughts, but a recurrent phrase shared by so many just like her runs like ticker tape: independence, independence now.

Human Rights Watch just released a report condemning Morocco's human rights record.  The watchdog says Morocco suppresses the activities of human rights activists in the occupied Western Sahara. The report also criticizes the Polisario.

In August 2007 I spoke to Polisario leader Baba Sayed while visiting the refugee camps.  His brother co-founded the Polisario movement.

The Polisario were planning their upcoming XII General Popular Congress in December. Sayed said that the congress needed to address the shortcomings of the Polisario. ” This congress must be a renaissance for us or it's over for Polisario,” he told me.

Apparently Sayed's often critical take on the Polisario had led him into hot water.  He once asked for political asylum in a North American country after resigning from his post in Canada. Though this was in 1998. Things settled since.

I saw him at the EUCOCO conference in Spain having a right laugh with top Polisario officials including President Mohamed Abdelaziz.

In front of me is a man who spent ten years in a secret detention center in southern Morocco.Here is a human rights activist who understands the world as it is, its beauty and its terror.  Somewhere between both, lies the inspiration of human nature in all its complexities.

While imprisoned in the Black Jail, Brahim Sabbar received over 600 letters from around the world.  He is still moved by the gesture he says.  And with the help of Amnesty International, he finally saw the light of day in June, 2008.

But Sabbar's story is far older.  It starts in the early 1980's near Dakhla, a port town off the coast of the Western Sahara. It was the second anniversary of Mauritania's defeat and withdrawal from the territory.

Brahim was celebrating but around midnight on August 14, 1981, several plain clothed Moroccan policeman arrested him.  Ten years later, he emerged from the infamous Kalaat Megouna secret detention center.  Thankful to be alive.

Kalaat is now empty, a shell, and is nestled on the foot of the Atlas mountains, near the Draa valley where the French built an administrative center in 1928 .  The memories of 43 dead Sahrawi prisoners, some killed, others starved, others too weak to fight off typhoid, haunts the ground.

Within those walls emerged the origins of a resistance movement - the Sahrawi Association of Victims of Grave Human Rights Violations Committed by the Moroccan State  (ASVDH).

“My story is very long,” says Brahim Sabbar. And for the next several hours I listen to him speak. When Sabbar arrived at Kalaat he, along with eight other Sahrawi, remained isolated from the rest of the population.  For four years.

“We kept ourselves entertained by creating plays and using theater as a vehicle.  We became both the audience and the actor.  In 1985 we came into contact with 15 other prisoners who then became our audience.  We drew as well. We used art, writing, and drawing as tools about our resistance.  We wrote on the back of our hands with nettle.  We were able to create colors from labels .  We also sculpted, sometimes objects like camels which we would barter with the guards in exchange for medicine. We created a lot of committees, committee of theater, of culture, of coordination with the leaders, and tried to emulate the organized structure of the Polisario from inside the prison.  Finally we got the right to get a radio with a single medium wave.  However, we figured out how to get short wave so we could listen to the BBC and Radio France Internationale. The radio became a kind of intellectual nourishment.”

A commission from the region visited the prison once every two years to count the dead. The current governor of Laayoune, Aallal Sa’adaoui, was among those.  On his last visist, he told the remaining 369 Sahrawi prisoners they would be released.  Sabbar didn't believe it.

For all those years in prison, his friends, his family had no idea.  Dead most likely.  His mother, he says, stopped speaking.  She was in shock he said.  Two weeks after his return home, she began to speak again.

Now that I’m back home, I think about these people, their struggles, their conditions, and the obstacles they face on a daily basis. Africa has not yet been fully decolonized.

The Western Sahara is one of those issues that rarely make it into the press.  Most people have never heard of it.  Indeed, there are so many struggles around the world.  So much blood. Sometimes it all seems too much to comprehend.

The Seguiat al Hamra river that runs along the northern edge of Laayoune is a place of fear.

For the Sahrawi youth who have been beaten and tortured at its edge, the shimmering water and wading birds, indeed its natural beauty and serene settings, is a mark of indifference betrayed only by the terrified eyes of 18-year old Ismaili Ahmed.

“They took me to the river, they beat me there, they tortured me, and then they left me there,” he says.

At a distance, you see the reflection of the opposing sand dunes on its surface.  The glitter of the sun.  An ideal getaway from the filth and tragedy of this occupied city where faces, both Moroccan and Sahrawi fade into images of a desolate urban landscape.   But the closer you get, the more you realize Seguiat al Hamra's  isolation and its hidden horrors and the details become crisp, clear, and terrifying.

I first happened upon this river by accident.  Wondering through the narrow streets of the Suuk Djema, then following a path to crumbling mud baked wall, I asked a Moroccan soldier on his moped where the path led. “To the river,” he said and sped away.

It is wide and still.  A green algae flourishes thick along the edge. Empty water bottles and rusting Pepsi cans appear stuck in the green swill.  An odor of filth. Behind me the crumbling slum walls.  A boy stands at the water's edge with several goats.  In the distance, a truck speeds across the dune and then disappears and along with it, the roaring sounds of its engines.  Quiet.

“They accused me of things I didn't do. They said I attacked the police,” he says.

The police came after him at night, around 9 pm during Ramadan earlier this year.  They accused him and seven others of vandalizing a police car.  They forced them to strip naked, took photos and threatened to send the pictures to pornographic web sites if they didn't stop protesting. They also threatened to pour acid on him he says.

“We are living under repression and oppression.  Help us end this. We are struggling for independence.”

Listen here:Download

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.

Please listen…

Download testimony

Day three after the tragedy of Agadir.  My contact in Laayoune says students are being rounded up and arrested.  In Agadir, things can't be much better.  As I left the station, four garrisons of police vans were stationed at the far end of the concrete tarmac.  Somewhere on that concrete pad once laid the crushed bodies of 22-year-old Baba Khaya and 20-year-old Lheussein Abdsadek Laktei.

Eugene Delacroix said that in Morocco, glory is a word empty with meaning.  The vibrant colors of the Atlas mountains, the drive from Agadir to Marrakesh, the desolation of the deserts in Laayoune.  Yes, all that matters in such a time when a resistance movement, thirty years in the making, weaves itself through the psychology of identity - the identity of resistance.

The Saharwi, a noble people, kind and generous, seek only what is their due cause.  A justice and a right for self-determination.  The kind granted to so many other people and denied to those forgotten and those without any benefit of a proper media campaign.Let the power hungry seek their glory somewhere else.  What can be said of the new European economic pact with Morocco?  Lucrative fishing agreements off the disputed coastline have been signed.  The phosphate mines in Boucraa exploited.  The plunder of natural resources in a territory still under litigation.  What happened to international justice?

I see MINURSO in Laayoune.  I see the fleet of UN SUVs parked at the expensive hotels.  Shining in the  hot sun.  A man walks his mule with his goods past a mandate that has no political will.  A double row of Morocan flags wave alongside MINURSO HQ.  Moroccan soldiers “guard”the HQ and as I walk by they politely if firmly ask me to walk on the street opposite.  Indeed, the neutral arbiter has succumbed to the real-politik of the Security Council, a bloated and incohorent institution pillared to resolve conflicts and maintain global security.

And now here I am.  In Marrakesh and just received a text message from a young man who can no longer meet me.  “I am being followed by the police.”   Two more days before I board that plane back home. And I feel ashamed and bitter.

I just witnessed a Sahrawi student protest in Agadir today.

Two Sahrawi students were killed last night when a Supratours bus (bus B-A 6687),  deliberately ran them over at the bus station in Agadir, according to 24 year old Ahmed Salem Dohi who was at the scene and was visibly upset when I met him.

Four Sahrawi students were wounded according to student leader Aino Mohammed. One is in a coma. The students were not allowed to board the bus despite available seats.  They then stood in front of the bus in protest.

Passengers inside the bus fled. Six to seven trucks of police officers then arrived and beat the remaining Sahrawi students said Dohi who managed to escape.

The two Sahrawi students killed are 22 year old Baba Khaya and 20 year old Lheussein Abdsadek Lakteif.  Baba Khaya is  Sultana Khaya's cousin.  Sultana is a Sahrawi human rights activist documented by Amnesty International.

I then attended the protest at the University of Agadir earlier today.  Several hundred Sahrawi gathered in front of the Law School and are demanding justice. Three were arrested.

I think I’m being followed by the Moroccan DST, their intelligence service.  After witnessing the protests I returned by taxi to grab my camera and note pad against the better judgement of one of the students.  When I arrived for the second time, the protesters were holding up photos of Khaya and Lakteif.

I then spotted a Moroccan in military uniform who saw me in the cab.  I continued and got out but then walked in the opposite direction and could hear the protesters on a parallel street.  I spotted a taxi stand but the cab driver refused to take me.

Three other cabs were available but they wouldn't take me either.  Then another cab arrived.  The driver kept asking me questions about why I was there and what my profession was.  He wanted to know if the people I was visiting were Moroccan or “other” as he put it.

Foreign journalists caught writing on the Western Sahara will have their material confiscated and be deported.  Worse, the students I met will be beaten and possibly jailed on false charges.

I’ll be leaving tomorrow.

The International Crisis Group calls the Western Sahara one of the longest and most neglected conflicts.  Agreed.  My trip to Laayoune from Agadir and back was delayed by numerous checkpoints.  There is a media blackout.  In Laayoune proper, I met several human rights activists, some had been jailed in secret detention centers and tortured.  I will write about these individuals once home.

The rays of sun hits the blue roof terraces of Chaufchaouen in Morocco at 8:15, stretch across the valley and then climb the face of the mountain ahead. The smell of kif is thick. Now back on the road through the mountains of the Middle Atlas, through the intensity of Fes, and now Marrakesh, a fatigue finally settles in.

The journey to the occupied territories in the south is a journey through all six senses and then some.  In a couple of days I’ll be in the Western Sahara to document a resistance  movement that has largely been ignored and forgotten.
And as I slowly make my way down starting first in the chaos of Tangiers and into the solemn silence of the vast desert plains, the Saharawi continue to protest, continue a civil resistance, to claim their right to self-determination.

And yet only a few days ago, Morocco celebrated its 53rd anniversary of independence from France.  The colonized have in turn become a colonizer. Somewhere along the way I passed a billboard of Morocco's current King Mohammed VI.  The photo was washed out and faded by the sun.

The young king is smiling, his left elbow perched on the chair, he wears a suit and tie.   He is revered and is a powerful national symbol that binds many and charms the west.  The longest unbroken peace agreement treaty US has ever signed is with Morocco.

A young man from Agadir told me Moroccans do not protest.  The tyranny of the king's father, Hassan II, has not been forgotten he said.  But today there are indeed greater freedoms of expression, greater freedoms for women, and vast development projects.  A new highway runs from Marrakesh to Casablanca. It cannot be said that the king has not introduced reforms.

In January next year, Morocco will officially have the controversial Advanced Status with the EU which will not exempt the disputed Western Sahara. In the meantime, Morocco continues to push for autonomy in an area it considers its historical land right.  Despite have initially agreed on the referendum for self-determination, it would appear the kingdom is squeezing to death any real chance of a popular vote.

The once nomadic Saharawi are now sedentary and marginalized.  Countless  landmines are buried  on either side of the Berm, a 2400 km sand wall guarded by over 100,000 Moroccan soldiers.  Make no mistake, this territory with the relative size of Colorado is occupied.  Journalists abstain or be deported if caught.