Degja Lachgare was forcibly taken from her home by four plain-clothed police officers one afternoon in 1980. Thrown into a car and taken from one secret prison to another, she spent eleven years of her youth in prison, often blindfolded, and in constant terror of her next interrogation and torture. Her crime: she was the wife of a soldier in the Polisario Front, the Western Sahara liberation movement that at the time was fighting a war against Morocco.

Soukeina Jid Ahloud lived in a cramped cell for ten years. After her arrest, her youngest daughter died of starvation because nobody could take care of her. She was less than one year old. Leila Dambar, a modern day Antigone, cannot lay her brother Said’s body to rest. He died in December 2010. Since then his family has been asking the Moroccan government for an autopsy on the young man killed by the police in unclear circumstances, but the authorities did not respond to their requests.

Enforced disappearances, torture, secret prisons, mass graves. No trials and no justice. The story of Western Sahara, the territory south of Morocco with an as yet undefined political status, is marked by a dark sequence of human rights violations. It’s considered the last African colony: the referendum for their independance has always been deferred, despite of several UN resolutions. Since 1975, Saharawi people live half in Western Sahara and half in refugee camps in Algeria, divided by a 2,700 km wall built by Morocco during the war.
Just To Let You Know That I’m Alive gives voice to Saharawi women who were victims of violence, both in Western Sahara and in the Saharawi refugee camps in Algeria. Reconstructing, through their testimonies, diaries and old photographs, the history of the Saharawi people from a female and intimate perspective.