Rabat – Ali Najab, a former Moroccan Air Force captain, has decided to share his experiences in a prison in the Tindouf camps, Algeria.
In an autobiographical text, the captain is exposing the torture and dire conditions he lived in for 25 years, following his capture by the Polisarion Front.
Najab’s 562 page book, “25 years in the jails of Tindouf,” recounts the“horrors” of the prison and the misconduct of “his jailers,” Maghreb Arab press (MAP) reported.
The former Air Force captain narrates his experiences in excruciating detail.
The captain, a native of Ait Ourain tribe in the Atlas mountains, tells of his experience when he joined the Air Forcein 1965, and his training in Morocco, the US, Iran and France.
The former victim of the Polisario, was assigned as a fighter pilot, detachment chief of a squadron of F-5 planes, and chief operations officer at the Moroccan air base in Laâyoune.
During a mission in the region, the pilot was hit by a missile, forcing him to abandon his aircraft in Smara on September 10, 1978.
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Captured by the Polisario Front, the captain was kept in the Tindouf camps, at the mercy of his captors for 25 years .
The air accident “was a decisive, even fatal, turning point in my life and in my military career,” Najab wrote.
He added that the Polisario jailers subjected their prisoners to “inhumane treatment.”
Some of them died due to lack of health care, he explained.
The 21-chapter book also exposes torture in the Polisario-run prisons in Tindouf and Boufarik (in the north of Algeria).
Najab recalled in the autobiography that prisoners were used in programs of anti-Moroccan propaganda broadcast on the radio or the press.
The captain believes that it his duty to share his experiences in order to educate Moroccans about their own history, particularly the history of Western Sahara.
He explained how he feels “personally disturbed” when he meets “young people who know the history of FC Barcelona and Real de Madrid, but know nothing about the Sahara conflict or the history of Morocco at all.”
Hubert Seillan, a lawyer of the Paris bar who wrote the foreword of Captain Najab’s book, the important historical document also provides information on the concept of freedom.
Published in 2019 at La Croisée des Chemins, the book will be presented on Tuesday January 7, 2020 at 5:00 p.m. at the National Library of the Kingdom of Morocco.
Najab is not the only Moroccan victim of the Polisario’s torture who has written a book recounting his experiences.
“Allah’s Garden,” a book by former Peace Corps member Thomas Hollowell, depicts gruesome scenes from the conflict and the struggle of Moroccan prisoners
In the book was released in 2009 and includes Hollowell’s narration of the story of Azeddine Benmansour, a young, recently-graduated medical doctor who was held for more than 20 years as a POW in a camp run by the Polisario Front.
Benmansour witnessed the killing of wounded Moroccan soldiers and articulated the pain and everyday challenges of the Moroccan survivors at the mercy of the Polisario.
