Everything seems normal in Terminal 1 of Barajas Airport. Several people quickly walk through its corridors, looking for the exit or hugging each other after meeting their loved ones. Almost no one notices a woman covered in the traditional Sahrawi melfa sitting on the ground in front of the airport police station on a gray blanket. He has been waiting for his daughter, his granddaughter and his son-in-law since he learned that they were leaving occupied Western Sahara to take a flight to Morocco and seek protection during their stopover in Madrid, but they never arrived, they were left stranded in no man’s land, in the unacceptable with dozens of Sahrawi asylum seekers.
For weeks, several Sahrawi activists have been detained at Barajas airport for fear of being deported to Morocco, although they declared to the authorities that they were fleeing the situation of repression they face in the occupied territories. from Western Sahara, including some for their activist work. The Interior confirms that there are currently 70 citizens with Moroccan passports (the Interior does not distinguish between those who declared themselves Sahrawi) in the asylum rooms at the airfield. One of them has been on hunger strike since last week, confirm the same sources.
Aicha stands guard at the airport even though no one allows her to see her family. She is worried about her granddaughter, who has had a fever for days, but especially for her daughter, who suffered from heavy vaginal bleeding – which she claims was an abortion and the Interior denies it – and who is still locked up ten days later. From these rooms, the conditions of which have been criticized on several occasions by the Mediator, the Sahrawi woman answers the phone: “We are very bad. They don’t treat us well. I got sick and so did my daughter. We are full of bedbug bites. Why do they treat us like this? It’s inhumane,” he laments. They are a few meters apart, but they cannot see each other.
Errabab and her little daughter
On September 9, the woman boarded a plane in Marrakech with Cuba as her final destination, but during her stopover in Madrid she informed the police of her need to seek asylum. Like all those seeking protection at the airport, Errabab, her husband and their one-year-old daughter were transferred to the asylum rooms in Barajas. The woman and her daughter are in a terminal. They separated her husband and transferred him to another terminal. Since arriving in Barajas, the woman began to complain of severe pain in her back and abdominal area. Three days after her arrival in Spain, on September 12, the pain intensified and she began to have very heavy vaginal bleeding. “I had a lot of blood, a lot, it wasn’t normal,” he explains from the rooms.
The police took her to the airport medical center and from there she was transferred to the University Hospital of La Paz, according to a series of medical reports accessed by elDiario.es. “I was guarded all the time by two police officers. They carried me badly by the shoulder. She looked like a criminal. They wanted to come into the room with me, with the gynecologist. The doctor told them they couldn’t go,” Errabab recalls. There, the woman says, health personnel confirmed that “she was one month pregnant” and that she “had had an abortion.” The medical report consulted by this doctor is not complete and does not include the page where the diagnosis should appear. The Interior categorically denies that an abortion took place in the Barajas asylum districts. Otherwise, she claims to have understood this information and that someone should explain to her what happened to her while in police custody.
“Now my back hurts a lot, it still hurts,” said Errabab, while holding her one-and-a-half-year-old daughter. His concern now focuses on the little girl. His face is covered in bites that appear to be from bedbugs. “He’s had a fever for three days,” his mother said over the phone. A medical report to which elDiario.es had access describes that the little girl had bites on her face and wrist, that she vomited and coughed. “They turn on the air conditioning and sometimes it’s very cold,” laments the woman.
She has been in this room for 16 days without knowing how to calm the little girl, in a place that does not have suitable conditions for detaining minors, as the Mediator concluded a few months ago. “He won’t stop crying. He asks me for things and I can’t give them to him. There is not enough food for her, it is very difficult,” laments the Sahrawi woman. “There are more children like that. Lots of bedbug bites. They are the ones who live the worst. “It’s horrible.”
The woman lived in El Aaiún, a town in Western Sahara occupied by Morocco, where she said she regularly participated in demonstrations demanding self-determination for the Sahrawi people, protests usually harshly repressed by Moroccan security forces. “My body is afraid. Every day, when the police come by, I think the time has come for them to come and get us to deport us. It’s a life without living,” explains Errabab. “If they expel us, I don’t know what Morocco will do with us. I’m afraid that he will take us to prison for trying to escape or that they will do something worse to us… Spain will be responsible for what happens to us,” laments the young woman.
Her mother also fled three years ago and, after trying to obtain asylum in Spain, was granted international protection in France, where she currently lives and has since boarded a train on September 9 when she learned that her daughter was going to Madrid. “I organized demonstrations, I was an activist. The Moroccan police raped me twice, once in 2014 and again in 2017, after dispersing the protests, they took us to the police station. My husband left me because of this. I was afraid that one day something even worse would happen to me and I left,” says Aicha, sitting on the floor in the arrivals hall of T1. She seems used to it, but she’s not. She fears that her daughter will be sent back to the place she had to flee long ago. “My father had a Spanish identity card. How can Spain do this to us? We were his colony and now he despises us like this…” questions the lady.
A young deaf
Among those who have been stuck in Barajas for weeks, there is also Ali. As soon as he arrived in Madrid, he recorded a video with his cell phone and sent it to several friends. He appears there speaking silently, in sign language. The young man is deaf and mute and it was his way of informing his acquaintances, shortly before the Police confiscated his phone. The boy has undergone several treatments for leukemia since he was a child.
His lawyer, Fatma El Galia, attached to his asylum application a detailed file containing numerous medical reports which document the different phases of his illness, from 2003, when he was only a child, until 2020, the last reported to elDiario. you had access. Beyond his illness, several photographs included in his protection file show his participation in certain demonstrations in occupied Western Sahara. The photographs show that this demonstration, which demanded more rights for the country’s deaf and mute population, was violently repressed by the police.
Dada is a friend of Ali and, since learning of the boy’s whereabouts, he has spent hours in Barajas trying to help the stranded Sahrawis. “Out of humanity, Spain should help him,” asks the young Sahrawi.
A singer and “political prisoner”
Isa picks up one of the telephones installed in the room where he has been locked up for several days. He is the only one to maintain the hunger strike started last week by a group of Sahrawis held in Barajas. “I’m a little lazy,” replies the young man. He decided to stop eating the day he managed to escape deportation, to protest against the police violence he claims to have suffered for refusing to board the plane: “They beat me in the police van, before and after, because I resisted. They hit me on both sides and they put a shirt on me that covered my mouth so I wouldn’t scream,” he complains. Then, he says, he spent three days in an isolation room, sleeping on a mat on the floor.
“I didn’t want to get on that plane, because I was afraid that Morocco would send me to prison again,” explains Isa. He is a singer and uses music to demand self-determination for his people. Several YouTube videos show him singing some of his songs. His songs, he says, have a claim: “There is one that I cannot sing in Morocco, they banned it,” says the boy. He also participated in various pro-Saharawi demonstrations. According to what he tells elDiario.es, he was imprisoned from 2012 to 2023. “I participated in the Gdeim Izik camp – a major demonstration in which hundreds of Sahrawis gathered to demand self-determination of the Sahrawi people – and I escaped in 2010. But two years later, the police arrested me and I was a political prisoner until 2023,” laments the Sahrawi from the airport.
The singer denounces the unacceptable room conditions in Barajas. “It’s full of bedbugs. One of these days, they came to fumigate, and a few hours later, they put us back here,” he criticizes. The Sahrawi sleeps in a six-bed room where eight people sleep. “Two people sleep on mats on the floor,” explains the musician.
“I never thought Spain would act like this with us. My grandfather worked as a soldier in the Spanish army, when it was a Spanish colony. “I didn’t expect that,” laments the Sahrawi singer. “Please, someone help us.” “I am asking for support to make my voice heard outside and tell the world through music the suffering of the Sahrawi people.”
