Western Saharan activist featured in Al Jazeera English doccie

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Western Saharan activist featured in Al Jazeera English doccie --

Tue, 28 Jan 2014 16:40

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The 25-minute documentary Broken Families, which premieres on Sunday 2 February on Al Jazeera English at 22h30 GMT, follows Western Saharan community leader and activist Brahim Dahane as he seeks justice for his community against a range of abuses.

Brahim never set out to be an activist, says Giles Trendle, Al Jazeera s director of programming. But from his first detention while a teenager, he has been imprisoned three times and undergone severe physical and psychological torture at the hands of the Moroccan authorities.

His marriage has been destroyed by the stress of his imprisonments and his family life deeply affected. Now, through his work and voice, he is determined to help reunite other families separated by the conflict, Trendle adds.

In the documentary, which was filmed over six months, Dahane finds himself becoming the voice for the families whose sons or brothers have been randomly imprisoned, secretly detained or disappeared, held without trial, tortured and ultimately tried by a Moroccan military court during peacetime.

The documentary follows Dahane, a spokesperson for his Saharawi community, in his daily life as he is caught up in the conflict in Western Sahara, which has been occupied by Morocco since 1975 and is one of the world s longest-running and least-known struggles.

Comments Dahane: For me, occupation is a synonym for slavery. It is injustice and punishment. It is all forms of human rights violations. It is aggression and subjugation.

Met with resistance, Morocco signed a controversial European Union fisheries agreement for Western Sahara waters in December 2013. Morocco also has a bold solar project planned for the disputed region. This, combined with repeated human rights abuses, has led to increasing pressure and demonstrations across Western Sahara before April s United Nations (UN) discussions on the peacekeeping mission there.

Calling for the UN to monitor human rights abuses, Dahane was one of a number of activists assaulted in January 2014 at a demonstration. Dozens of Saharawi protesters were injured after police attacked the crowd with their truncheons, says Louise Orton who directed Broken Families. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have consistently reported human rights abuses in the Moroccan-occupied zone of Western Sahara.

But astonishingly, the United Nations Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara, the peacekeeping mission in Western Sahara, is the only modern peacekeeping mission in the world without a mandate to monitor human rights. People in Western Sahara are eagerly waiting to see what will happen when this is up for discussion in April this year, concludes Orton.

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