This is one of a collection of seven short stories from inside the Moroccan Occupied Territory. These are ordinary Sahrawi people who responded to Konstantina Isidoros’ request for every-day examples of the difficulty of living under an occupying power. She has retained their anonymity.

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There is a Sahrawi young man of 21 years of age. Today he neither works nor studies, his life wasted between the café and the house. He does not pay much attention to what is around him. He looks back five years to when he was a youth in secondary education, with high ambitions in becoming a pilot or an aeronautical engineer. One day his ambitions ceased to be, causing him to leave education and move to live in the wilderness for a long period of time.

The root of his problem began five years ago, when one day he passed through a street where he saw some friends in an organised gathering for Sahrawi people’s political rights – and he saw political slogans. He paused for a second observing this scene and recalled the memory from his childhood when he would hear over the radio the faded voice of the ‘polisario broadcast’ raising the same slogans and speaking about the same demands. ‘Before I would listen over the radio – me and my father – and today I see it directly in my town’. He felt passionate and remembered also what his mother would say when she would ask him to stay away from every issue relating to politics because she fears for him torture and abduction and arrest and imprisonment by Moroccan security agencies.

After a few minutes of observation he decided to come closer, then decided to participate. They were demanding their political and economic rights. After one or two days of this occurrence his life began to enter a new course, his brother called him suddenly asking where he was. When he answered his brother replied that he must come immediately and that he was awaiting him at home. Upon his arrival he told him that men from the security forces arrived looking for you; what have you done? And during this discussion they arrived again and demanded that he leave with them. When he asked for the reason why they told him in a diplomatic tone that he should just hurry, quickly, and that he would find that out very soon.

‘They moved me to the police station, and when I entered they started hitting me with sticks and hands while coming upon me, and using foul language “we will do this and that with you”’, and started the investigation which lasted three days in which they asked him about every detail of his life and didn’t let him sleep, interrogating him while he hung by his feet head-down. It was truly hell, and after three days they decided to set him free after making him sign a confession that they arrested him for a criminal offence (theft). He returned to his home having decided that he wouldn’t abandon this issue for which they had tortured him.

After a while, he got to know a group which writes political slogans on houses and administrative buildings, and started working with them. One night they arrested him and moved him to an unknown location blindfolded. ‘This time was the deciding hit when they abducted me and excreted on me for two days torturing me inhumanely.’ He assures that the state he lives today goes back to that period; ‘I am worthless, my life is finished, I do not wish to live and if I do live I do not want to remember those times, I don’t want to wake up to my reality because it is painful for a man to lose his honour and dignity; there is then no meaning for life.’

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