A Brush with Morocco's Secret Police in Laayoune

A Brush with Morocco's Secret Police in Laayoune

(2012-08-28) The following blog post by Kerry Kennedy, President of the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights, appeared yesterday in the Huffington Post. Ms. Kennedy is currently leading a human rights delegation in Western Sahara. She wrote this article while the delegation was in Laayoune, meeting with members of civil society including RFK Human Rights Award Laureate Aminatou Haidar.

 

A Brush with Morocco's Secret Police in Laayoune, Moroccan-occupied Western Sahara

Despite his civilian dress, there was no mistaking the secret police when he reached across the front passenger seat of the Toyota , to block the lens of my 17 year old daughter Mariah's Nikon from recording the beating of a woman by his colleagues, uniformed and not. Mariah's shutter was too fast for him, so he lunged further in an attempt to snatch the camera, grazing her face. Mariah was fine. The woman was not.

A few hours later, Front Line Defenders Director Mary Lawlor and Eric Sottas, Founder of the World Organization Against Torture, went to the local hospital, where they visited the bloodied and bruised victim, Soukaina Jed Ahlou, President of Sahrawi Women Forum.

As witnesses, we were not alone. A handful of women in multicolored melhfas—the traditional Sahrawi garb, a 20 feet of printed fabric wrapped around the body head to toe—surrounded their sister protester, as the police harangued them. We saw one local policeman in blue uniform. Then there were the handful of thugs, identified to us by local human rights leaders as members of the DST, or Morocco’s version of the Stasi. In addition, there were the two plainclothes informants who had been following us all day—when Mariah took their pictures, they tried to shield their faces and then one ducked behind his car. Two of the brutes planted themselves in front of the windows of our car, partially blocking our view of the beating. The third one cursed Mariah, called her an unprintable name, and blocked her camera with his hand.

RFK Human Rights Award laureate Aminatou Haidar recognized the DST thugs immediately. One of them, mustachioed and bald, Al Hasoni Mohamed, was the same man who accosted her thirteen year old son, menacing "I will rape 'til you're paralyzed." (...) Read more in: http://rfkcenter.org/a-brush-with-moroccos-secret-police-in-laayoune