Article by Rosa Moussaoui in L’Humanité on the situation of Sahrawi prisoner Naâma Asfari
“Sahara Occidental. Claude Mangin-Asfari, la Française qui défie le Roi du Maroc” – 07.05.2018
Link to the article : https://www.humanite.fr/sahara-occidental-claude-mangin-asfari-la-francaise-qui-defie-le-roi-du-maroc-654911
Since 18 April 2018, Frenchwoman Claude Mangin-Asfari has been on hunger strike to obtain visiting rights for her husband Naâma Asfari, a political prisoner in Morocco. Her decision was taken after she was deported for the fourth time by the Moroccan authorities. Claude Mangin has been trying unsuccessfully for 2 years to visit her husband, who has been in prison for 7 years.
Sahrawi activist Naâma Asfari is a leading figure in the peaceful resistance against Morocco’s occupation of Western Sahara. He was arrested following the dismantling of the Gdeim Izik protest camp and the clashes on 8 November 2010, which claimed the lives of 11 members of the security forces. Last summer, after a controversial trial, the Court of Appeal in Salé upheld the verdict of the military courts and sentenced him to thirty years in prison.
She was working for the Catholic Committee against Hunger and for Development (CCFD) when she left in 1990 for the Tindouf refugee camp in Algeria. Moved by the conditions of the refugees and their political struggle, she decided to stay on for a further 2 years. It was during this period that she met Naâma Asfari, then an international law student at Nanterre University […]. They married in 2003 in Tan-Tan (Morocco).
When her husband was imprisoned in 2010, she decided to fight for his release and visited him during the school holidays until 2016, when the Moroccan authorities refused to allow her to see her husband for the first time.
From the room she occupies above Ivry sur Seine town hall, she receives all those who wish to show their support and continues her fight for her husband’s release.
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