Moroccan Prisoners of War

Sitting across the table in Rabat, Morocco, I listened intently as Ali told his story. It was November, just a few days before Thanksgiving. He spoke quietly with his head down, staring into his plate of food. He did not laugh or smile. He did not try to appease the rest of us with a false happiness. There was not even a shadow of hope for happiness in his words: "We thought we had been forgotten."

Ali El Jaouhar was captured as a Moroccan prisoner of war during the early years of the ongoing border dispute over the Western Sahara between Morocco and Algeria. His captors, a group called the POLISARIO Front, held him in a camp in Algeria where he spent over twenty years as a prisoner, even after the United Nations issued a ceasefire between the two countries requiring all POW's released immediately.

While the rest of us listened, cried, and hardly touched the enormous Moroccan cuisine that was prepared especially for us, stories of torture spilled out of Ali's mouth. Stories of unbearable pain and humiliation that we could not begin to imagine, even as we heard them sputter out of him. Ali and all of the Moroccan POW's detained were daily beaten with a braided wire whip. They were forced to work in the hot sun without food or water and to sleep through the freezing nights without clothing or warmth in holes that they dug by hand. If they could not continue working from exhaustion, they were killed - crushed by the wheels of a truck or thrown in a cement mixer. If they misbehaved, they were forced to crawl naked in front of their colleagues, or they were kept in an iron box with no room for movement for days and days. There was no end to Ali's tortuous history; he could have talked all night, relaying his deprived past to us, and still we would not know all of it. Still there would be one more story of sadness to tell, one more inhumane act to reveal.

I still see Ali every few months. The pain of his history remains strongly within him, but now he can laugh out loud, now he can smile. Once again, I found myself sitting across the table from Ali, a man I could now call my friend. We spent many words discussing our favorite novels as we ate our breakfast together. His most prominent suggestion was Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway. It was the book secretly given to him by a Red Cross worker while he was detained, and it served as the only link he had left to reality. Everything else was taken from him, but he always found ways to hide this book. He does not hesitate to boldly claim that it saved his life.

Suddenly, in the midst of our conversation, he looked up at me and then down at his plate of food. "From lentils boiled in water to delicious breakfasts, from sleeping in holes to fancy hotels. But there are still others. And that is why we are here."

I often wonder if he saw the tears in my eyes when he looked back up at me and if he thought they were harshly deserved, as his had been, or simply naively foolish.

Today, all of the POW's held by the POLISARIO Front have been freed due to continued pressure from Morocco, the United Nations, and the United States, but the POLISARIO still tortures innocent people, working under the guise of a Christian refugee camp. Many Americans send money to support the guerilla group with the belief that they send food and warmth to the people within the camps - the Saharawis, a group of people originating from the Western Sahara. For over 30 years such humanitarian efforts have been sold on the black market, allowing the POLISARIO leaders to live extravagant lives in outrageous homes.

Ali, among others, works to spread the truth about the POLISARIO Front and the horrors they commit daily. He will not stop while over 90,000 Saharawi people continue to live in the unspeakable world that he understands far too well. No one should have to understand such a life.