Why did he immerse himself in international journalism? I'm a journalist because I like writing and I'm curious to know the world. I remember when I was 13-14, I watched on
television Los Marginados de Carmen Sarmiento. And the reports of journalist Rosa María Calaf in [TVE] Weekly Report. The first object I remember is a ball from the world. I was on the shelf above the bed, I was very small and spent a lot of time looking at it, looking at the names of countries and capitals. Sometimes it fell and split into two. I was dent. It looks like a metaphor for the world.

How did Estella pass around the world? After studying in Bilbao, I started doing local journalism in Estella in the Egin
newspaper. He wrote his own chronicles and took photographs. I would ship the reels to the bus La Estellesa to Pamplona before 17:00. I experienced the closure of Egin and then Egunkaria. I started making replacements in the Pamplona delegation and 21 years ago, when they closed, journalists were organizing support campaigns and selling t-shirts and actions during those months until the creation of Berria. They closed the newspaper on a Thursday and I started Monday in Mundo. I started with the creation of the news in Andoain's writing, and since then I've lived in Donostia. I have been on leave for four years and now I am back in the department of Bizigiro. I'm glad that for me journalism is walking down the street, and that department allows me to do interviews and reporting. I haven't read any telephones yet. I just interviewed Fermín Leizaola and write a story about refrigerators… I am delighted.

Most of the time, do you look at countries in conflict? Yes, it is. I have always had
a tendency to look at the forgotten shores and peoples, and I would say that Berria gives a special place to these conflicts. Now Gaza is on the line, but the genocide that is happening is not new. It comes far behind, like the Sahara conflict. Palestine and Sahrawi are silent conflicts and have many things in common. Many parallels can be made. These are conflicts arising from colonialism, we have two occupying states and two peoples who are in resistance to it. Both include the walls and apartheid, which are being used or used to bombard civilian napalm or white phosphorus. The complicity between Israel and Morocco is total. We must not forget that at the moment Morocco is buying drones from Israel to bomb the Sahrawi people in the liberated territories.

And both are supported by the West. That is
our hypocrisy. I would say that in this world we call civilization, there is more and more dehumanization, and these two conflicts could be resolved in two minutes if there was real will. There is nothing but international law, but it is clear that economic interests take precedence over political honesty and human rights. In the case of the Sahara it is also very remarkable. The United Nations has adopted dozens of resolutions in favour of holding a referendum.

Why don't you want it? For economic interests. That is the core of all conflicts. They intend to
capture the natural resources of these areas. In the case of Palestine, Israel has conquered a whole territory, not just Gaza. In the West Bank and Jerusalem they are also expelling the Palestinians, and in the case of Morocco it is also clear that behind this occupation there is a plague. Western Sahara is very prosperous in fisheries, for example. It must be said here that the European Union is an accomplice to Morocco because it has signed a fisheries agreement with it. In addition, the world's largest open pit phosphate mine, oil, gold -- they have enormous impunity. Israel is a laboratory to show that one country can do anything against another country and that nothing happens. The European position is being enormous. Sometimes I think we're in the hands of criminals. My concern is that, in view of Palestine, what is Morocco going to do now with the Sahara?

What do you think about the behavior of Spain? It is curious to see how Pedro Sánchez has sent a message in favour of the creation of the two states of Israel and, on the other hand, has made a turn and has recognised Morocco’s sovereignty over the Sahara. Spain remains the administering power, and as the Sahrawi people have repeated a thousand times, it has a political, legal, historical and moral responsibility.

When I interviewed Brahim Gali, president of the Saharawi Arab Democratic Republic last spring, I asked him why this turn, and he told me that it was the third betrayal, to move the knife itself into the same wound. He recognized that he did not expect that change of attitude and that there could be something personal there. “It is up to Spain to clarify, there must be something very serious, some secret, some blackmail, against the very identity of the president or his relatives”. He said so. Morocco puts pressure on the case of Ceuta and Melilla, Islamism, immigration… We have often seen how when Spain is not a “chinche” Morocco opens its borders and lets people pass through fences or pateras. They use it as a pressure mechanism. Many Saharans, on the other hand, are asking whether Spain would no longer be interested in direct agreements with a free Western Sahara outside the Moroccan dictatorship.

In firm resistance for almost 50 years. Yes. They are the symbol of resistance and the paradigm of dignity. In Western Sahara
all identity symbols, from Hassania language to music or poetry, are prohibited, even freedom of expression. Even Haima. In the occupied territories, however, resistance is enormous and especially that of women. Sultana Khaia, for example, was besieged in her house for 557 days. Soldiers, paramilitaries and gendarmes entered his house, beat him and tortured him, and even raped him, like his sister Uara, both were raped in front of his mother, and yet Sultana went out every day to bring the Saharawi symbol to the flat roof of his house.

What is the Saharawi population? It is difficult to specify the quantity, because in the end it is a divided people. When Morocco occupied the Western Sahara
in 1975, many fled the desert and in this exodus they took refuge in Tindouf, in Algeria, but many others remain in the Western Sahara and suffer harassment that lasts until today. Many were imprisoned or disappeared. Some women disappeared for sixteen years. When they left prison, they didn't know their children. Her husband was married to another woman. The stories are difficult…

Others live in camps. In Algerian refugee camps they live about 180,000 or have survived better. It is a desert of deserts, famine, an arid place where no one had ever lived before. The sky above and the sand below. The situation that a possible situation needed has been
perpetuated and yet have revolutionized the country. The Polisario Front remains a national liberation movement.

And then there's the wall. Yes. Western Sahara is divided into two. A military wall of 2,700 kilometers, the longest in the world, divides the territory. In the liberated territories to the south, so far the nomads lived, who with camels and haimas maintain their way of life. They
are children of the clouds, but the war that began three years ago endangers that life that comes from a cow. The liberated territory is being bombed with the drones in Morocco and have had to flee to Tindufera in search of refuge. A second Nakba, a second exodus, is taking place.

Are
the young people engaged in the struggle? Totally. It is a people in resistance. Western Sahara is the last African colony. After the Spanish betrayal came the occupation and then the exodus. The first war lasted for sixteen years, then 29 years in peace and war, and three years ago they returned to war. Young people, faced with international indifference, had been claiming war for years.

How was your first trip to Aaiun in 2005? Journalism is a gauge of
a country's democracy. Morocco has driven out dozens of journalists and monitors. He wants no witnesses. I was quite innocent the first time. Very little information was being produced and arrived in 2005. Berria decided to send someone. They got off the plane and then I got about four hours in a citrine cell, under a portrait of King Mohamed VI. The police didn't stop asking until I got bored of myself and they took me hard to the plane. I was waiting for the representatives of the Spanish Consulate in Agadir. From that class I had the opportunity to speak with Martxelo Otamendi.

Ten years later I managed to enter Aaiún with a delegation from the City Hall of San Sebastian. The famous human rights activist Aminatu Haidar was on our flight. The mayor of Aaiun himself went to the airport. The first thing he told us was that we couldn't meet the independentists, when they knew we were going to that. Despite the persecution of the police at all times, during these five days we held over twenty meetings with entrepreneurs.

Is it harder for a woman to walk in these places of conflict? I've never been in a war.
Gervasio Sánchez says that wars don't end when Wikipedia says so. Rather than macropolitics or geopolitics, I'm interested in telling what conflicts generate in citizens. I haven't had any problems traveling. I have always traveled alone and I would say that in some cases it is easier to reach some stories, such as the Sahrawi women. For me it has been a treasure, that in the camps they anden haimaz and hear stories of women while drinking tea.

Is there a special relationship between Euskal Herria and the Sahara? I think so. Here too we have experienced dictatorship and repression, and I would say that this proximity to other peoples in the same situation is noticeable. The Basque and Saharawi cultures have similarities: both come from the oral tradition, in both there are verses, or a
cry like the irrintzis, the ezgharit, or the auzolan… Julio Caro Baroja was the first Basque who was there and did a great anthropological work. Saharan studies (Saharan studies) is an essential book. It counts in 500 pages how the Haimak are erected, how many parts they have, how the word dromedary in cholera is said in nine ways… Until the beginning of the war there have been archaeologists here and many other institutions are working extraordinarily: Euskal Fondoa, Hegoa Institutua or Mundubat, among others. The Sahrawi people are very grateful because they know that there is some complicity between these two peoples. In addition, the Holidays in Peace programme has favored links between many local families.

What do they look like from a personality point of view? It's a very special town. They have a point of pride and special magnetism. They have enormous dignity. It is difficult to define a
people, but I very much like the fear they have to speak in the first person. If he asks a Sahrawi to tell him a fragment of his life, such as that of war or the former, he always says “what has happened to me is no worse than what has happened to other Sahrawis”. That strikes me. They speak as a people.

It's a people in resistance with another tempo to measure time. For them, the priority is that one day they should be released and not the date on which they will come. They don't measure time with our parameters. Maybe it's the nature of the desert. There is a saying that those who can expect will be shaken. In our fast-paced world, we struggle to understand this attitude.

He's making a lot of presentations of the book. Are you satisfied with the welcome? Very. The Argia Prize has served to make
me even more known. I go as a village nomad in town presenting the popular book, assembling and dismantling the haima. She's being beautiful. The other day in Arrasate 25 Sahrawi women were shocked with their melhf, their dresses.

These days at a refugee exhibition in Donostia, we can see your texts, right? Yes. If the leak is possible, the exhibition project is as beautiful as it is hard and necessary. It is an initiative of photographers
Gari Garaialde and Javi Julio, who I thank for the trust placed in me. This street exhibition confronts what is happening in the Bidasoa. We were going to do reports about migration before, but now it's the reality that we have here. It will be on the Boulevard until April 7.

The next trip? I'd like to go and take the book to Embarka Brahim Bumajrutari. She is the woman who appears
on the cover of the book: the Frente Polisario was born in her house and through her life can be told that of her people. She is a very dear woman, the mother of the Sahrawis, a living myth.

OF THE RECORD

Red lines of Morocco

Morocco is a dictatorship. As his hymn says, there are three red lines: Allah, al-Watan, al-Malik; God, Fatherland and King. You can't criticize the king, you can't criticize God and question territoriality. The Sahara problem is a taboo. It even denies war. The entry of journalists into the Sahara is almost impossible. Thanks to the work of human rights entrepreneurs and their journalists, a little bit of information comes, but it's a black hole. The information lockdown is complete. There are currently 55 Saharawi political prisoners. Journalists work in very harsh conditions. To record manifestations, they are uploaded to the rooftops or streamed through the windows. Women sometimes hide the cameras under the melhf and often beat, torture or take them to jail.