A ghost of the colonial past haunts Spain. A crime of Francoism in the Sahara that, 52 years later, is still a state secret.
The ghost is called Basir Sidi Mohamed Brahim Sidi Embarec Lebsir, alias Basiri, and the Polisario Front venerates him as the first martyr of the struggle for independence. He disappeared on June 18, 1970, at the age of 28, after being arrested in El Ayoun. Next Saturday is the 52nd birthday. He had committed the audacity of founding a clandestine nationalist party that had five thousand members when the Spanish discovered him. He was the embryo of the Polisario. The first demonstration, on the esplanade of Jatarrambla (Zemla for the Saharawis), ended in a bloodbath, as Legion troops opened fire on the crowd.
The official Spanish version is that Basiri was arrested and deported to Morocco, where his trail was lost. “There was an oath of silence,” said Colonel Javier Perote, a great defender of the Saharawi cause, in an interview with La Vanguardia in April 2021. He died five months later.
There are few people left alive who know what happened. That is why the testimony of retired Civil Guard colonel Miguel Ángel Ortiz, assigned to the information and security services of the presidency of the Spanish government in the Sahara between 1966 and 1975, is so precious. Ortiz, who is 80 years old and presides over a Canarian organization A supporter of Moroccan autonomy, she wields “military honor” to keep silent about Basiri’s fate. “The thing was resolved”, he limits himself to saying during two long interviews with La Vanguardia, in April 2021 and last week.
Ortiz, however, slips a very significant fact. He admits that he participated, from El Ayoun, in a “disinformation dissemination” campaign to make the Saharawis believe that he was still alive. He “was in charge of writing reports in which he wrote ‘confidential’, saying that Basiri had been seen in Agadir or in Tantan. He would go to the bathroom and leave it on the table, as if carelessly, so that the interpreter or the orderly could see it, because they were close to reading it, ”he says. “They wanted to calm the spirits of the population, who asked where Basiri was.”
There is an expulsion order, dated July 28, 1970, which the journalist Tomás Bárbulo located twenty years ago in the General Archive of the Administration, in Alcalá de Henares. The papers, packed in boxes, were still covered in desert sand.
Everything indicates that this document, like the rest that have come to light, was false. Tricks to cover up a state crime. “It was an execution,” Monsignor Félix Erviti, apostolic prefect in the colony, told Bárbulo. In his book The Forbidden History of the Spanish Sahara (Destiny, 2002), Bárbulo points out the following version: on the morning of July 29, 1970, the detainee was taken out of the dungeon by a patrol from the Tercio Juan de Austria, led to the outskirts of El Ayoun and executed in the dunes.
Ortiz assures that he was in Madrid when the Zemla massacre and Basiri’s arrest took place. He did not return to El Ayoun until the end of June and by then everything was “resolved”. According to his version, well, he was not detained for 40 days, as Bárbulo maintains, but only ten. Nor does it coincide with Basiri’s police file that the historian Ana Camacho obtained from the private file of the military man José Ramón Diego Aguirre, responsible for the intelligence services in the colony: “7.29.70- He is expelled to Morocco by a patrol from Tercio 3” , it reads. The official documents “are paraphernalia set up to mislead,” Ortiz ditches.
La Vanguardia has also collected the testimony of the retired Spanish diplomat Francisco Villar, who in May 1975 participated in the mission that the UN sent to the territory. He returned convinced that Basiri was dead. “A couple of Territorial Police officers told me about it, one was at least a lieutenant colonel. We met in the cafeteria and there, between beers, they said it. That they had received the order and they had charged him, ”says the diplomat. That he does not remember the details is explained by a simple fact: it was on that trip that Villar first heard of Basiri. Five years after his disappearance, he was unknown outside the Sahara.
Who was Basiri? He was born in 1942 in Tantán, in what was then the Spanish protectorate of Cabo Juby, but became Moroccan in 1958, when Spain ceded the territory after the Ifni war. He attends university studies in Egypt and Syria, where he is steeped in pan-Arab nationalism. In 1966 he returns to Morocco and begins to write for two Casablanca newspapers, but soon has problems due to the pro-Saharawi tone of some articles.
Ortiz remembers the night in December 1967 when Basiri entered the Spanish Sahara for the first time: he was there. The civil guard was head of the government office in Hagunia, near the Moroccan border, and they went looking for him late at night. “My lieutenant, we have detected infiltrators.” One was Basiri and raised suspicions on first questioning. He said that he was going to Smara, where he had part of his family, the Lebsir, a branch of the extensive tribe of Erguibat. “He looked cultured, that he was not normal. He quickly saw that it was necessary to know who this guy was, what ideas he had, if he came to create problems. For us, everything that came from the North, as we called Morocco, was cause for suspicion”, explains the old man. Basiri is taken to El Aaiún where, after several days of interrogation, the governor, General José María Pérez de Lema, does not trust him and sends him back to Morocco.
After a few months, Basiri returns. This time the chiuj (tribal chiefs) are putting pressure on the authorities to allow him to stay. He succeeds, after swearing that he will stay out of trouble and devote himself to religious teaching.
But Basiri begins there to spread his nationalist ideas. They are especially prevalent among young people, many of them members of Nomad Troops or Territorial Police, fed up with the corruption and ineptitude of the old chiuj. In December 1969, Basiri and five other young people – one was Brahim Gali, today the Polisario leader – founded the Advanced Organization for the Liberation of the Sahara (OALS).
His approaches were quite moderate, seen today. Basiri writes an anonymous “open letter from the Saharawi people to the Spanish governor”, ??in which he worries that Spain will end up ceding the Sahara to its neighbors, Morocco, Mauritania and Algeria. He affirms that the Saharawi people placed themselves under Spanish protection of their own free will, asking the government not to abandon them and that “in due time and by mutual agreement, we be granted to rule by ourselves, in a staggered manner”.
But in Francoist Spain, where parties were banned, a nationalist movement was intolerable. When the Spaniards discover the OALS, in the spring of 1970, it is spread throughout the territory, it has funds and, as Basiri will confess during harsh interrogations in prison, he has contacted Algeria to buy weapons.
“We didn’t get accurate information about the underground movement until it was very advanced. We were really surprised by the scope of the OALS, its infiltration of the military and police, trackers… There were many of our officials. Nervousness broke out,” recalls Ortiz.
The colonial authorities write a report on the OALS on June 12, 1970. In it they express suspicions that Basiri is an agent sent by Morocco to sow discord and list measures to put an end to the movement. A “direct action” against the leader, they argue, could produce “the opposite effect to that desired” and suggest an “indirect action, based on the use of force but carried out secretly.”
Knowing that he had been discovered, Basiri called for a demonstration in Zemla on June 17. It was a turning point. The police are unable to disperse the crowd and the authorities end up sending in the Legion, which acts for half an hour with total impunity. It is unclear how many were killed.
In Madrid they ask for explanations. Humiliated, the colonial government orders a massive raid. Hundreds of people are arrested that same night, including Basiri. “It is necessary that the guilty be punished with a heavy hand and not allow them to have the opportunity to deceive the Saharawi people once again,” writes Pérez de Lema in a letter to his superiors in Madrid, on June 23. .
Ortiz affirms today that, although “they gave him good,” Basiri left prison alive. Soldier Diego Aguirre, with whom Ortiz worked in El Aaiun and who, after persecuting the Saharawi independence fighters, ended up becoming a defender of his cause, used to say that “Basiri never reached the border.” A way of saying, without saying it, that he was murdered. “The responsibility for his disappearance must fall on those who ruled the territory at that time (…) The Sahara government was unable to assess Basiri’s personality for the political future and was carried away by a revenge as stupid and unjustified as it was bloody and unlawful, and ordered his disappearance”, wrote the soldier, who died in 2005. Diego Aguirre took the secret to the grave: who gave the order to kill, who carried it out and, above all, where the body is.
The military pointed to the myopia of the colonial authorities, who confused Basiri with an enemy of Spain when he could have been a solution. “The disappearance of Basiri forever broke the trust of the Saharawis in Spain and ruined the best opportunity to reach a peaceful decolonization of the territory,” writes Bárbulo in his book. Three years after that episode, the Polisario Front launched its guerrilla struggle against the colonizers.
“I don’t think Basiri was an enemy of Spain. He was a very prepared and intelligent politician, who spoke of a free associated state because he knew very well that they could not stay alone, as has been seen later, ”Ortiz reflects. “Maybe it was a political mistake, but it was decided to get it out of the way. He was not interested in a character with that charisma, who had also set up a match for us after swearing on the Koran that he would not create problems ”.
