Arabic → English transcript

That one is the part controlled by him geographically— 80% of the territory,

excluding the population, is that 80%. In it, there are all the camps,

once you add up the people in them.

From those with really messed- up minds, more than 100 to 170 thousand.

One hundred seventy thousand,

of course including their children and their whole situation.

I am telling you about the adults.

In the diaspora there are about one hundred thousand in Europe, in Western Europe.

As for Sahrawis in Mauritania,

if anyone tells you they know how many, that is not accurate. It cannot be reliable,

because we do not fingerprint them and we do not require them to get a visa.

Some of them come from near the camps.

Those who come from under the de facto authority and are carrying

Moroccan documents. We treat them reciprocally. Moroccans impose visas on us,

so we impose visas on anyone carrying their documents.

Even if he is coming from Vietnam, he has to get a visa.

So the Sahrawis who come in are known,

although the Mauritanian authorities also know.

Anyone coming in through the Guerguerat crossing,

they know whether he is Moroccan or not Sahrawi. Moroccans, all of them,

can tell who is Sahrawi and who is not from the national

ID number they have And therefore, what Morocco controls is 80% of the land,

not 80% of the people And after that,

the minds over there have 80% dirt in them,

and the hearts are not under control And the human rights situation I told

you about is about men who are imprisoned and tried in a military court even though

they are civilians They are called the Gdeim Izik prisoners, they are well known,

with sentences ranging from life to 30 years That’s what I heard, and their trial

is military,

not civil And there were violations in the legal procedures against their

rights There are Sahrawi students imprisoned because of demonstrations,

some for four years and some for five And some

of them are minors And there are human rights activists,

journalists, and media figures, including Aminatou Haidar,

Sultana Khaya, and Mohamed El Mayara They are known by name and address,

and they are subjected to harassment in their homes and in their livelihoods When a

man greets them,

he can be fired from his job And there are activists

who are members of two or three major human rights organizations In Dakhla,

there have been cases of abduction,

and there have been cases of torture that Nuzha has not talked about before And

after that, the scale of

the Moroccan security presence in the Saharan cities This reflects a clear state

of human rights and security tension, in a situation that has no basis in reality,

whether in Boujdour, Laayoune, or Dakhla.

There are no four baisa for the police.

And that’s what really pissed off the cops,

every single one of them in the whole district,

way more than what people said about him. And this…

did anyone tell you that Abd al- Rahman has a mouth problem when he speaks?

As for me, thank God,

I’ve been speaking well since 2010, but… The people who emigrate,

those who really emigrate and disappear,

they will end up seeing more of the Western Sahara police vans on the side under

Moroccan control than they ever saw of taxis. That’s what the source told me,

that’s the story, there is a problem.

All right, here I wanted to ask you about another point.

Some people think that this return to armed struggle

in 2020 was a reckless gamble in terms of the balance of power. What do you think?

My opinion is that the Sahrawis had no choice but to take up arms again.

Because I saw that Brahim Ghali is seventy-

one years old and he does not want to die in his office instead of as a fighter.

I understand, and he keeps his people in mind,

and he has something you could call loyalty to the blood of the martyrs.

I understand,

liberation movements are not a group of religious lodges that only teach or preach.

That is what you heard,

this is a group that has a blood pact,

and they are consumed by passion.

After the Polisario had broken up, it went back to armed struggle.

And its martyrs now include some who took up arms in the eighties,

and others who are the sons the sons of exile, born in exile.

And when you speak with the Sahrawi fighter in the camp, you see that the

determination he has is stronger than that of his grandfather and his father.

And this is not just a story,

the human sources are not biased, they have turned their war academies back on,

they have brought the volunteers back.

Those who were cornered and finished in Spain in 2020 and came back, they

did not find among them even a single one, they did not even find where to train.

Because the Polisario

found strong momentum and regained its value when it announced the armed struggle.

You heard that, and now they, the fighters themselves,

are writing their wills and their statements every day.

And they will take the ceasefire, the Ministry of Defense will take it,

which now has a young staff.

The heads of the military regions have become young, most of them.

This means that there is a transfer of that spark between two generations.

Anyone who goes into the Sahrawi camps and finds the fighters, like we do,

knows that the people are not asleep.

And that they are not surrendering, and that they are going along that same path.

Of course, as Abdelrahman told you, circumstances change, and even war itself,

its vocabulary changes.

The concept of heroism has changed,

but the human factor is still there.

And people write their wills every day in

the Sahrawi army because they do not know whether they will end up alive or dead.

For example, that generosity of his is still there for him,

and honestly, we are not ungrateful for it, it is still a favor. Marouf, with the

spark of battle still blazing