Safía, 28 -year -old Saharawi, lives hidden in a small room in Algiers. As soon as he goes out and, when he does, he calls volunteers of the Saharawi feminist movement to accompany her. He fears that they be kidnapped by force in a car and that its trail is lost in Algerian territory where the Saharawal refugee camps of Tinduf are located, about 1,700 kilometers further south. For 17 months, the woman recounts by phone (she asks not to give her last name), she is in vain to return to her home in Seville. In February 2024, his parents took his passport when he went to visit them to Tinduf and forbade him to return to Spain. After escaping Algiers a year ago, he discovered that the Polisario Front “had issued an administrative retention order” that prevented him from leaving Algeria, even with the salvoconduct that the Spanish consulate had issued him in the capital of that country.
This case is not the first in which a Saharawi of legal age, a legal resident in Spain or even Spanish nationality, denounces being retained in Algerian territory against his will for the Polisario Front. According to various testimonies, this organization – which for more than 50 years demands the right recognized by the UN to the self -determination of the Saharawi – issues travel prohibitions for these women or denies them the “mission order”, a document that the Algerian border authorities claim to allow them to leave the Maghreb country. That in the event that these women have managed to get away from the relatives that retain them.
The number of Saharawis that have gone through that trance is unknown, but, in recent years, there has been public cases. Tfarrah H., militant of the Saharawi feminist movement, believes that they can be “several tens”, a calculation “nothing exaggerated, which can even fall short, because the cases that are known are not even because of all those who happen.”
Batiste Llopis, reception father of Mayuba Mohamed, a 23 -year -old Saharawi who, he explains, remained “kidnapped” for three months in Tinduf in 2014, estimates that they may have been “more than a hundred.” His daughter managed to return to Spain, but not all get it. Tfarrah recalls cases of women who have been kidnapped and then transferred to the Saharawi camps or even the remote “released zones” “20% of the Western Sahara who is not occupied by Morocco -, where her trace has been lost.
The stories of these Saharawi have many points in common. It is almost always a young resident since I was a child in Spain with a host family, after having arrived in the country thanks an initiative of the State Coordinator of Solidarity Associations with the Sahara. It consists of the temporary reception of Saharawi children to pass the summer away from the desert. Some then remain in Spanish territory with permission from their biological families, usually to receive medical assistance – that was the case of safía – or because their parents consider that they can obtain a better education.
The conflict is usually triggered when the girl becomes an adult. In some cases, simply because the family of origin wants your daughter to return. Other times for the type of life in Spain, especially if it departs from the rigid patriarchal and religious norms in the Tinduf camps.
That was probably one of the triggers of the case of a Spanish Saharawi origin “kidnapped” in 2015, says his adoptive father, José Morales. The young woman had a Spanish boyfriend. Morales de Mato returned to Spain in 2022, married to a Saharawi and with three children.
The Polisario Front has not only retained women of legal age without legal justification, according to the testimonies collected by this newspaper. He has also imprisoned at least a man for helping to escape one of these women, according to what was reported by the victim herself.
Asked by El País about the case of Safía and other similar ones, Abdullah Arabi, representative of the Polisario Front in Spain, sharply denied that his movement has retained women and rejected that this is “a usual practice.”
The escape of safía
Safía speaks with a strong Sevillian accent. “All his life,” he says from Algiers, he is in Seville, where he had a fixed job and lived since he was eight years old. One day in February 2024, when he was about to return to Spain at the end of his parents in Tinduf, he discovered later they told him that “he had already given Spain too much time” and that he had to stay with them. “I told them that in any way,” he recalls. Two months later, Safía tried to escape. When their relatives discovered her, they locked her up for “two or three days” and tried to take off the phone.
In a second attempt, the woman managed to reach Algiers. To his surprise, even after obtaining a safe -conduct from the consulate of Spain in the city – the legation has already given him two – he could not travel: the Saharawi authorities had issued an “illegal administrative retention.”
This newspaper has had access to a document with the seal of the Saharawi Democratic (RASD) Arab Republic ―The Saharawi State self -proclaimed by the Polisario Front in 1976 – signed by the auxiliary prosecutor Cheij Laulad, in which it is forbidden to travel to Safía. The text indicates that it is “at the request of her father”, but does not collect any position against women.
The delegate of the Polisario in Spain said that the resolution of this case is pending a “judicial process”, but eluded answering the questions of this newspaper about what are the reasons for that procedure or the content of that document. This newspaper had asked him what supposed charges weighed against Safía and why the role was issued at the request of the father of a woman of legal age.
“The only crime I have committed has been to demand my right to choose where to live,” says Safía, who says the polisario told him that “he would negotiate with his family” when he claimed them to solve his case. “I replied that I am of legal age and that they had nothing to negotiate with my family.” Then he insists that his situation is not “a family issue, as the Polisario says, but that they have issued a retention order.”
This Saharawi emphasizes that his situation is because he is “woman” and that the polisario “only retains women.” Then he expresses his fear that they get into a car by force and take it to the camps, “something that has already happened in other cases,” he regrets.
Imprisoned
That was exactly what happened to Salka, the assumption name of a Saharawi of about 20 years – does not reveal his exact age – who traveled to the camps at 17, when there were a few months to reach the age of majority. As Safía, that was when his family told him that he was not going to return to Spain, he explains.
Salka also managed to escape and arrive in Oran, in the north of Algeria. He did it after he turned 18 and with the help of Hammada ,. Already in that city, when he appeared before the Saharawi delegation to obtain the mission order to return to Spain, they asked him to return the next day. When he returned, his mother and his aunt – his father had died – were there. Then they took his passport, which until then had managed to hide.
Two days later, as he walked down the street with his relatives, Salka escaped running while asking for help from passersby. Two of them accompanied her to the Spanish consulate, so she could return to Spain. However, when leaving the building, he met his family and with agents of the Algerian Police who were waiting for her outside. Then, he remembers, they took her to a police station, where they interrogated her, before they forced her to climb a car to Tinduf. He was retained there, he says, and I can only return to.
Hammada, the man who had helped her, ran worse. He was accused of “kidnapping of minors” for helping this Saharawi to flee, even though Salka was already of legal age. The young woman testified in favor of man at the trial and denied that he kidnapped her, but gave the same. Hammada was sentenced to six months in jail, which he served in the Refugee Camps prison. During the trial, he recounts, he had refused to marry the young woman, with whom she did not maintain any sentimental relationship, something that the prosecutor Cheij Laulad had proposed to withdraw the charges against her. The name of that prosecutor is the same one that appears in the order of prohibition of Safía, the Saharawi hidden in a small room in Algiers.
