"For over a year, the Polisario has been trying by all means to stop the projection of the documentary," said  Bolivian-Australian Violeta Ayala, co-director of the documentary along with Australian Dan Fallshaw.

    "We never had the intention to make it a political, but we realized that these people were living in a political prison," Alaya told Spanish Press Agency EFE.

   Once the Polisario knew of the turn of events, it started to exert pressures on Ayala and  Fallshaw, who after six days of detention in Tindouf, managed to escape to Paris with the help of the UN  and the Austrian embassy, according to EFE.

   These pressure were also exerted  in Sydney on the directors of this movie entitled "stolen". Separatists sent letters to the film producers, accruing the authors of lies, manipulation, and exerting pressures on interviewees.

   The Polisario invited in 2007 the two directors to visit the camps of Tindouf to make a documentary of the UN-sponsored family exchange program.

   "Stolen" reveals several cases of slavery in Tindouf, notably on that of Embarka who tells her enslavement story with father de Deido Ambark Omar, with whom she had several children, or  Emirik Olud Salem another victim who showed her "liberation certificate", saying that "if you talk about slavery, you go to prison.. and simply disappear."

   "When we talk about the kidnapping of a white child, we call it a crime, but when it is about a black child it is called a social custom," said Ayala, commenting on an explanation provided by a representative of the UN on the subject in the documentary.

   In 2008, Ayala and Fallshaw raised the issue before Human Rights Watch (HRW) who opened an investigation, which revealed that certain Sahrawis of black origins are the “property” of people coming from families of white origins.

Source: MAP
News and events concerning Western Sahara issue/ Corcas