Tom Zubrycki Violeta Ayala Dan Fallshaw Deborah Dickson
Cinematography
Dan Fallshaw and Violeta Ayala
Edited by
Dan Fallshaw
Release date
11June2009(2009-06-11)(Sydney)
Running time
78 minutes
Country
Australia
Languages
Spanish, Hassaniya, English
Stolen is a 2009 Australian documentary film that uncovers slavery in the Sahrawi refugee camps controlled by the Polisario Front located in Algeria and in the disputed territory of Western Sahara controlled by Morocco, written and directed by Violeta Ayala and Dan Fallshaw. It had its world premiere at the 2009 Sydney Film Festival,[1] where a controversy started after one of the participants in the documentary, Fetim, a black Sahrawi, was flown to Australia by the Polisario Liberation Front to say she wasn't a slave. The POLISARIO, avowing that it doesn’t condone slavery and needing to safeguard its image on the world stage to support its independence fight, began an international campaign against the film. It put out its own video denouncing Stolen, in which several people who Ayala and Fallshaw interviewed say they were coerced or paid by the Australian duo.[2] On May the 2nd 2007, while filming in the refugee camps Ayala and Fallshaw were detained by the Polisario Front and Minurso and the Australian ministry of foreign affairs negotiated their release. "The Polisario Front officials criticised the interest the two journalists took in black members of the Sahrawi population, Reporters Without Borders has learned. Ayala told the press freedom organisation that she saw cases of enslavement. "The fact that they are fighting for their independence does not mean that Polisario’s leaders can allow themselves to commit such human rights violations", she said. "It is our duty as journalists to denounce such practices. We originally went there to work on the problem of separated families. But during our stay, we witnessed scenes of slavery".[3]
In 2008 Human Rights Watch published a report confirming that vestiges of slavery still affects the black minority in the Polisario refugee camps and in Western Sahara, the report included a manumission document signed by the POLISARIO's Ministry of Religious and Cultural Affairs.
Stolen television premiere on PBS World as part of the Afropop Series hosted by Academy Award nominee actress Gabourey Sidibe was initially scheduled for 5 February 2013. Due to the controversy around the film, the broadcast was pushed back. "There’s been significant pressure placed on PBS to not show "Stolen" from US-based lobbyists (US law firm Foley Hoag have been paid the best part of $1,000,000 annually by the Algerian government since 2007 to lobby in the US on issues related to Western Sahara) for the Algerian government, who back the Polisario. It was this pressure on PBS that prompted WGBH to carry out their own investigation and present the "Stolen" two-hour special".[4]
Stolen premiered nationwide on 26 February on PBS, 2013 with a special report carried by journalist Phillip Martin that included an interview led by WGBH journalist Callie Crossley with the directors, followed by a panel discussion whether slavery exists in Western Sahara with Eric Goldstein (Deputy Director, Middle East and North Africa Division Human Rights Watch), Madeline Campbell (Professor of Urban Studies, Worcester State University) and Bakary Tandia (Mauritanian Anti-Slavery Activist).[5]
Overview
Is it true my white grandmother beat you as a child? asks 15-year-old Leil. Her mother, Fetim, looks at her hard, still chewing her lunch. They sit at a table, a TV behind them, as well as a doorway opening onto a bright white daylight. Leil continues, "Violeta already knows", as the camera cuts to filmmaker Violeta Ayala, seated across from them. Her face turns cloudy as she listens: "You’ll be in trouble, by saying we were beaten", cautions Fetim. Again, the camera shows her instructing her daughter, "It’s always been that slaves are beaten from a young age".
The scene breaks here and the film, Stolen, has changed. Before this moment, as Ayala has narrated, the documentary was to film a UN-sponsored family reunion program between refugees and their families. Fetim had come to a refugee camp in the Algerian desert as a child some 30 years ago, leaving behind her mother Embarka and her siblings. With some 27,000 on the waiting list, the fact that Fetim and Embarka have been selected seems miraculous.
And yet: this story is now reframed, as Ayala and Fallshaw learn that their subjects are not only refugees, but also slaves. The filmmakers can't begin to imagine the complications that follow this discovery.
Their questions elicit astonishing and also cryptic stories, as Fetim and Leil, as well as Fetim's cousin Matala, sort through what is safe to tell "the foreigners".
As the film reports, the Polisario Liberation Front, a nationalist organization backed by Algeria, has been fighting with Morocco over Western Sahara for the last 34 years. Neither the Moroccan government nor the Polisario want stories about slavery documented. And yet, with at least 2 million black people living in slavery in North Africa, STOLEN insists, telling such stories is only a first step to bringing out slavery's end.
As a result of the filmmaking process whereby the Polisario and the Moroccan government attempt to confiscate and steal the tapes, STOLEN has a fragmented structure that pieces together conversations. The fragments, however, allow the black Sahrawi's stories to be heard, be it aloud or as a whisper.
Indeed, Fetim's initial revelation that she has a "white mother", Deido, surprises Ayala, who wonders how they ended "up together, with so much racism in the past?”. Deido explains, sort of. "Saharan people are not all the same...Some of them buy black people and own them, others free them, but keep them as their family. We don’t talk about this anymore".
A friend of Leil, Tizlam, is also outspoken concerning what it means to be a slave. "You’re just scratching the surface", she says, her face at once poised and fierce in dim shadows. "They come and take the children and the parents can’t say anything, they have no rights". Her grandmother concurs. "There is no law for us", Tizlam says, "What we want is for this not to exist. It should be erased, it should be from the past, not the present or the future". Ayala and Fallshaw describe their growing concern, not only for their own safety but also for "all the people who trusted us with their stories".
As the Polisario catches wind of the new topic for Ayala and Fallshaw's film, they begin to worry about their safety and those in the film. Their worries are well founded, as they are detained by the Polisario. The filmmakers bury their tapes in the desert—an apt and awful metaphor for the experiences they've heard about—and then escape to Paris, where they pursue the story, hoping to recover their material and make public what they've witnessed. A phone call with Leil reveals, however, that their own ambitions and hopes don't matter much: Leil cries, "Trying to do good, you did bad. Now the police are all over us". As Ayala ponders this notion in voiceover, that "without intending to, we got Leil and Fetim in a lot of trouble", the film structure makes clear the problem: she's in a hotel room, at a distance. None of us can know what Leil and Fetim are experiencing—off camera.
The film traces how Ayala and Fallshaw come to know the ongoing complexities of slavery. As it is denied by most North African regimes (in Mauritania, Mali, and Senegal, as well as Algeria and Morocco) and described here by Ursula Aboubacar, the Deputy Director of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, as "a cultural issue that is existing". That is, as Aboubacar puts it, the UN can only "combat" the practice by bringing it to the attention of local police forces, the Polisario included. Ayala is horrified by the lack of power wielded by the UN, or anyone else, it seems. Indeed, as Tizlam has said, "There is no law for us".
Controversy
The film generated significant controversy. One of the character's in the documentary, Fetim a refugee who live in the camps, travelled from North Africa to the premiere of the documentary at the Sydney Film Festival in Australia to denounce her portrayal in the film and to say publicly that slavery doesn't exist in the refugee camps. Her trip to Australia was paid for by the Polisario Front, the organisation who controls the refugee camps.[6] The Polisario Front have strongly opposed the film and deny the existence of slavery in the camps they administer.
Some Polisario supporters have claimed the translations from the non-written dialect Hassaniya Arabic to English are inaccurate. The film has been broadcast on the US public broadcaster, PBS. While disputes over the accuracy of the Hassaniya to English translations continue, much of the discussion about slavery in the film is conducted in Spanish.
In a letter from Mr. Antonio Guterres, UN High Commissioner for Refugees, to Mr. Abdelaziz, the President of the SADR (Polisario), dated 22 June 2009, Mr. Guterres expressed "regret that in the film of Violeta Ayala and Dan Fallshaw, the comments of an official of the HCR have been presented out of their context." He went on to state: "In the complete interview, of about 90 minutes long . . . [Mrs. Aboubacar] reiterated strongly that if certain residual practices of slavery could still prevail in the subregion of West Africa, she had no knowledge of such practices in the refugee camps of Tindouf." He further commented that "[T]he HCR has established for a long time a presence in the refugee camps of Tindouf. It does not have any information that practices similar to slavery have taken place in the camps. In fact, no occurrence of this practice has been brought to the attention of the HCR . . . ." This statement is contradicted in the interview on YouTube given to the filmmakers by Mrs Aboubacar, Deputy Director at the UNHCR for the Middle East and North Africa, who clearly states the UN is aware of the practice of slavery in the refugee camps.
The Human Rights Watch report published in 2008 ("Human Rights in Western Sahara and in the Tindouf Refugee Camps") indicates evidence of slavery in the camps. The report states the following, page 150 'In Sum, credible sources testified to Human Rights Watch about vestiges of slavery that continue to affect the lives of a portion of the black minority in the Tinduf camps. The practices involve historical ties between families that involve certain rights and obligations that are not always clear. Being a slave does not necessarily preclude enjoying freedom of movement. The issue of slavery in the Tinduf camps deserves closer scrutiny than Human Rights Watch has been able to undertake. It bears mentioning that Saharawis in the Moroccan controlled Western Sahara told us that residual practices of slavery can be found there, as well.'[7] It also noted that the Polisario is on record as "firmly opposing slavery in all of its manifestations," and that it has taken steps to ensure that its officials do not carry out the practice. These comments were not mentioned in the film although a senior Polisario representative was interviewed by Violeta Ayala during the Manhasset negotiations and is seen on record in Stolen denying the existence of slavery in the Tindouf refugee camps.
In the panel discussion that followed the airing of the film Stolen by PBS World as part of the AfroPoP series, Eric Goldstein, the Deputy Director of Human Rights Watch in charge of the Middle East/North Africa desk noted that when he had brought to the attention of officials in the camp an incident in which a dark skinned woman had been denied the ability to marry, they immediately took steps to remedy the situation. He also noted that this practice was the only vestige of slavery that he had found in his investigation of the camps. Bakary Tandia, a human rights activist in the movement against slavery, originally from Mauritania, commented in the post film discussion that Stolen depicts slavery in the POLISARIO camps as it is practiced in Mauritania.
A documentary was produced by Polisario supporter and filmmaker Carlos Gonzalez[8] refuting many of the allegations in the film. It is called "Robbed of Truth" In this film Mr. Gonzales, who was a camera man who accompanied the film makers of Stolen to the Tindouf camps on their second visit before they learned about slavery. Gonzalez was introduced to the filmmakers by the Poslisario representative in Australia, Mohamed Kamal Fadel. Gonzalez revisited the camps and re-interviewed many of the participant, some of whom had been jailed by the Polisario for speaking to the filmmakers about slavery. The stories they told Mr. Gonzalez differ significantly from the accounts given to the filmmakers of Stolen.
There is also a critique of Stolen published at http://awsa.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/critique-v3-pdf.pdf. The Australian West Sahara Association (AWSA) who published the critic has been a long time supporter of the Saharawi refugee camps and the Polisario Front.
Awards
Best Feature Documentary Prize at the 2010 Pan African Film and Arts Festival, Los Angeles, USA[9]
Best Editing and Special Mention at its NZ premiere at the Documentary Edge Festival 2010[10]
Best International Feature - Rincon International FF, Puerto Rico 2010[11]
Silver Olive at the XV International TV Festival Bar 2010 in Montenegro[12]
Best Film at the 2010 Festival Internacional de Cine de Cuenca, Ecuador[13]
Grand Prix of The Art of Document at the 2010 Multimedia Festival the Art of the Document, Warsaw, Poland[14]
Western Sahara is a disputed territory in North-western Africa. It has a surface area of 272,000 square kilometres (105,000 sq mi). Approximately 30% of the territory is controlled by the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR); the remaining 70% is occupied and administered by neighboring Morocco. It is the most sparsely populated country in Africa and the second most sparsely populated country in the world, mainly consisting of desert flatlands. The population is estimated at 618,600. Nearly 40% of that population lives in Morocco-controlled Laayoune, the largest city of Western Sahara.
All data about demographic information regarding Western Sahara are extremely error-prone, regardless of source. Most countries take censuses every ten years, and some every five in order to stay abreast of change and miscounts; the last count was conducted in 1970, and even that data by colonial Spain is considered unreliable due to large nomadic populations.
The Polisario Front, Frente Polisario, Frelisario or simply Polisario, is a Sahrawi nationalist liberation movement seeking to establish a Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic for the Sahrawi people through the means of self-determination and armed resistance in the disputed territory of Western Sahara.
Tindouf, also written Tinduf, is the westernmost province of Algeria, having a population of 58,193 as of the 2008 census. Its population in reality could be as high as 160,000 because of the Sahrawi refugee camps. Despite the barren landscape, Tindouf is a resource-rich province, with important quantities of iron ore located in the Gara Djebilet area close to the border with Mauritania. Prior to Algerian independence, the area served as a strongpoint of several tribes of the nomadic Reguibat confederation.
El-Ouali Mustapha Sayed was a Sahrawi nationalist leader, co-founder and second Secretary-General of the Polisario Front.
Sahrawi Youth Union, also known by its Spanish acronym UJSARIO, is the youth organization of the Polisario Front.
Guelta Zemmur is a small town or village in the Moroccan-administered part of the territory of Western Sahara.
The Government of Morocco sees Western Sahara as its Southern Provinces. The Moroccan government considers the Polisario Front as a separatist movement given the alleged Moroccan origins of some of its leaders.
Tindouf is the main town, and a commune in Tindouf Province, Algeria, close to the Mauritanian, Western Saharan and Moroccan borders. The commune has a population of around 160,000, but the census and population estimates do not count the Sahrawi refugees, making the population as of the 2008 census 45,966, up from 25,266 in 1998, giving the town an annual population growth rate of 6.3%.
The Western Sahara conflict is an ongoing conflict between the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic/Polisario Front and the Kingdom of Morocco. The conflict originated from an insurgency by the Polisario Front against Spanish colonial forces from 1973 to 1975 and the subsequent Western Sahara War against Morocco between 1975 and 1991. Today the conflict is dominated by unarmed civil campaigns of the Polisario Front and their self-proclaimed SADR state to gain fully recognized independence for Western Sahara.
Since the end of the 1980s, several members of POLISARIO have decided to discontinue their military or political activities for the Polisario Front. Most of them returned from the Sahrawi refugee camps in Algeria to Morocco, among them a few founder members and senior officials. Some of them are now actively promoting Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara, which Morocco considers its Southern Provinces. Their individual reasons to stop working for POLISARIO, as reported in the media, vary, but include allegations of human rights violations, monopolization and abuse of power, blackmailing and sequestering the refugee population in Tindouf, and squandering foreign aid. They also claim POLISARIO is controlled by the government of Algeria and as one former member of POLISARIO put it, "[was] a group of Moroccan students who were urging the Spanish colonizer to leave and who had never claimed independence or the separation from motherland Morocco."
The Sahrawi refugee camps, also known as the Tindouf camps, are a collection of refugee camps set up in the Tindouf Province, Algeria in 1975–76 for Sahrawi refugees fleeing from Moroccan forces, who advanced through Western Sahara during the Western Sahara War. With most of the original refugees still living in the camps, the situation is among the most protracted in the world.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic:
The 2011 Western Saharan protests began on 25 February 2011 as a reaction to the failure of police to prevent anti-Sahrawi looting in the city of Dakhla, Western Sahara, and blossomed into protests across the territory. They were related to the Gdeim Izik protest camp in Western Sahara established the previous fall, which had resulted in violence between Sahrawi activists and Moroccan security forces and supporters. The protests also purportedly drew inspiration from the Arab Spring and successful revolts in Tunisia and Egypt, although the Arab Spring proper did not reach Western Sahara.
Sahrawi refugees refers to the refugees of the Western Sahara War (1975–1991) and their descendants, who are still mostly populating the Sahrawi refugee camps in Tindouf, Algeria.
Dan Fallshaw is an Australian filmmaker, producer, editor and cinematographer best known for the documentary Stolen (2009), that uncovers slavery in the Sahrawi refugee camps in south-western Algeria and in Western Sahara. The film, which was co-directed with Violeta Ayala, premiered at the Sydney Film Festival in 2009 and screened internationally at the Toronto International Film Festival. The film was broadcast on PBS in 2013.
The Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic, also known as the Sahrawi Republic and Western Sahara, is a partially recognized state, located in the western Maghreb, which claims the non-self-governing territory of Western Sahara, but controls only the easternmost one-fifth of that territory. It is recognized by 46 UN member states and South Ossetia. Between 1884 and 1975, Western Sahara was known as Spanish Sahara, a Spanish colony. The SADR is one of the two African states in which Spanish is a significant language, the other being Equatorial Guinea.
The Western Sahara peace process refers to the international efforts to resolve the Western Sahara conflict. The conflict has failed so far to result in permanent peace between Morocco and the Polisario Front. The standing issues of the peace process include Sahrawi refugees, and human rights in Western Sahara.
Al Khadra Mint Mabrook, known as Al Khadra, was an internationally recognised Sahrawi poet.
Nadhira Mohamed is a Spain-based Sahrawi activist and actress. She has been described by some academics as the first Sahrawi actress.
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