It came as something as a surprise to Aminatou Haidar when Moroccan authorities finally relented and filled her request for a passport. They had kept her waiting 17 years.
Haidar is from Western Sahara, a bone-dry territory on Africa's northwest coast that is slightly smaller than Italy. Morocco claims sovereignty over the largely unpop-ulated area.
Haidar sees the Moroccans as occupiers, and has paid for her anti-Moroccan activism with lengthy imprisonments.
The struggle over Western Sahara has gone on with scant international notice. Moroccan authorities have not been accustomed to allowing partisans such as Haidar to go abroad. But that is now changing and Haidar, armed with her passport, has been telling the story of the Saharawi people, as Western Saharans are known, in Europe and the US.
"I was in a secret prison for three years and seven months," Haidar said in a recent interview here, alluding to her incarceration from 1987 to 1991. "We never went before a judge. We had no communication with the rest of the world. Our families did not have any news about our whereabouts."
"For all this time I was blindfolded," she said. "They only took it off four days before my release. The first three weeks it was a nonstop interrogation and beating. We had nothing. We just slept on the bare floor with a small blanket. We had no right to showers. There were all kinds of parasites," she said.
Haidar was imprisoned for her activism a second time in June last year. She said she was confined to an isolation cell without fresh air or light and that her head injuries remained untreated.
In some ways, though, her imprisonment was more humane than the first time.
"My family at least knew where I was, and could visit me," she said. "I wasn't blindfolded and at least I was taken before a judge."
Haidar was released from prison last January after seven months. Her subsequent receipt of a passport, obtained with an assist from Amnesty International, reflected the more tolerant attitude of King Mohammed VI and his government toward Western Saharan dissidents.
Haidar, 39, sat for the interview dressed in a flowing gown typical of her region. She smiled often and showed little bitterness about her ordeal. Between stints in prison, she earned a degree in modern literature and had two children, who are now 10 and 12 years old.
"I go wherever I can to explain the violation of human rights in Western Sahara," she said. "The leading power is the United States. I can't go to other places without coming to the US to explain."
Morocco, citing historical claims, assumed control of the Western Sahara after Spanish rule ended in 1975. Polisario Front rebels, a pro-independence group backed by Cuba, fought a 12-year guerrilla war against forces loyal to the monarchy.
The UN brokered a truce in 1991, but the continued presence of Polisario militants at several camps located in neighboring Algeria makes it clear that the conflict is continuing.
Morocco has shown that it recognizes that change in the region is needed. It wants to grant autonomy to the territory, with an elected governor and legislature but with Rabat retaining strict sovereignty. A transition plan is being drawn up by a special advisory council known as Corcas.
The secretary general of the Corcas council, Khalli Henna Ould Errachid, a native Western Saharan loyal to Rabat, led a delegation to the US last week to explain the plan for the region to senior officials in Washington.
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