You don't know what a dead man weighs

"You don't know what a dead man weighs"¹

On that fateful and sad day in August 1975, the hottest month of the Hamada, reveille was blown and all the prisoners, once innocent revolutionaries (young romantics attracted by the call of the revolutionary siren), ran out of their cells like hares towards the meeting place. Immediately, they were surrounded by an enclave of Algerian Saharan guards, with a very bad temper, armed with weapons donated by Algeria, ready to use them for free; their looks were unbearable and their fearsome faces were terrifying. 

The apparent reason for the meeting was the arrival, on the same day, of a Land Rover hijacked from the Spanish territorial police forces, bringing the lugubrious letter, sent by the supreme leadership of the Polisario Front, meeting in the notorious Rabuni, capital of felony and theft and other less illustrious things, and determined to show its true face: to impose its ideas by violence and death.

The letter ordered that poor Tauri, the poor boy who was barely fifteen years old, should be shot on the spot and without delay for treason against the fatherland - what fatherland? In what does his treason consist? This ignominy, without a name, was justified only to put fear into us and terrorise us, to fulfil the macabre desires of this group of madmen, born in the most absolute misery, who wanted to start everything from scratch, from the creation of a people to the independence of a country they themselves do not know. A republic of tents in the middle of the Algerian desert. 

Once the prisoners were gathered there, almost in rags, hungry and frightened, and attentive, the most bloodthirsty murderer at the time, Salem Rubaei, who acted as the prison director, took the floor. He mumbled some indecipherable sounds, which no one understood. Visibly, there was confusion and fear reflected not only on the faces of the prisoners, but also on the faces of the guards and their bosses. The warden regained his composure, for a moment, and ordered his subordinate to read the sacralised letter from the leadership of the "tandim" (organisation), which had arrived at that very moment. The second one, more frightened than us, the hostages, read the letter in a jiffy in an incomprehensible and very fast way.  Without understanding anything, the "public" (that is, us), perhaps out of an instinct for self-preservation, realised that something serious was happening at that very moment. Something unusual and sad, very sad. There was a terrifying silence. Nothing could be heard, nothing was moving. We were all frozen in time and space for a moment in total silence.

Suddenly, Salem broke the silence, like an obsessive, and shouted for Mulay Ahmed el Bugarfaoui, alias el Tauri, to take a few steps forward, in the middle of the circle of prisoners, scared shitless. The haughty, handsome young man, over six feet tall, raised his hand in awe to understand what was happening. But Salem Rubai, the revolutionary smuggler, already had his mat 47 rifle ready and was ready to pull the trigger, his nervousness betrayed him, and he was shot at point-blank range with a volley of furious bullets, which instantly caused him to fall to his death, close to our own feet. He almost riddled us too, those of us who were close to the murdered man, it was thanks to the man who brought the missive, standing next to Salem, that he hit his hand, deflecting, luckily, the shots towards the sky, and shouting at him: may the devil burn your father, you are going to kill them!

Poor Tauri was then denied the word, and died riddled with bullets, with his hand raised. The executioner "killed him head-on, like a man"². He never spoke again, never had a chance to defend himself, and died in doubt, unable to understand how a poor immigrant boy, who wanted to make a decent living in any French city, could end up machine-gunned in the middle of the most inhospitable desert, a victim of his own innocence, of being in precisely the wrong place, and of falling into the hands of murderers who never forgive. What the poor victim did not know was that circumstances and tribal games would turn him into a scapegoat, considered as a small literal damage that nobody would claim - and so it was - that his death would serve to frighten the rest of his friends, fallen into the hands of murderers who proclaim the goodness of the revolution everywhere, but deep down are nothing more than murderers without principles or scruples and care very little about the fate of the people. 

Once the act had been consummated, Tauri's surprise fall, having become a corpse, provoked a dust storm, a storm of suspended dust, which dusted all of us who were waiting there, without knowing the reasons for the wait. Lacking any will of our own, firm and unyielding, weak and worn out by torture and misery, not only because of the macabre situation in which we found ourselves, but also because of the unreasonableness of our former comrades who were holding us hostage, considered a Maghrebi replica of Che, communists and fundamentalists. 

With that first corpse, killed deliberately and without a second thought, the pedagogy of terror had just been born there, a pedagogy that many still do not denounce or believe to be real. Obsessed by the radical ideology and the emotions provoked by the trained masses flying flags everywhere, they continue to support a cause that has been distorted of its own meaning and turned into a means of enrichment for a few heads gathered from all the Maghreb countries.

When Tauri is mowed down by Salem Rubai, a smuggler of all that is evil, turned into an unredeemed revolutionary, exalted, who makes murdering innocent people his raison d'être for his miserable existence, he turns to any useful means, no matter how barbaric. He was satisfied by killing or making people suffer under his domination. 

I have never met anyone so thirsty to make the blood of innocents flow, and to delight in the suffering of others, as this group of people born and raised in squalor, on the periphery, in a forgotten slum in the desert, and by civilisation. Consumed by hatred and rancour against us who "ate Spanish bananas", natives of the territory, which they said was theirs and their grandparents'. They exuded hatred from every pore of their miserable bodies, which have never known a better day.  

One of them once told me, boasting of his wickedness, that, before leaving his hometown of Tan-Tan, he asked a colleague of his to accompany him to say goodbye to his maths teacher. Once there, they knocked on the door, and the professor came out, inquiring about the reasons for their presence at his house, then the executioner, without saying a word, stepped back and struck the professor in the mouth and nose with his foot, leaving him dripping with blood. When he finished the macabre tale, he passionately concluded that he had beaten up a "chelh" (Berber). This was his way of proving his manhood and his militancy.  In other words, apart from being a torturer, he is a racist and ill-educated. 

These are the kind of people who order the death of innocent people, whether in the name of the cause, the revolution, religion, the so-called homeland or whatever.

The fall of the young man, as if it were an elephant, the roar it caused, made us more anxious and uncertain, and we were already thinking about who would be the next prey of these murderers, who had us cornered in dens lost in the middle of nowhere. By dint of forced labour, bread and water. We didn't even have the right to raise our heads or to look at the faces of our guards, nor were we allowed to walk, only to trot whenever they let us out of those holes that suffocated us because of the lack of space, and because we were underground, covered with zinc sheets that turned us into fried sardines every time the day got hot.  

Poor Tauri was the youngest; in life, he was very quiet and observant, but sparing in words and movements. He only dreamed of acquiring a Mauritanian passport to emigrate to Paris. He wanted to live like most mortals, in peace and by his own efforts.  

Once the shot embraces the dust in his involuntary fall and loses his last breath, the killer, half-mad, shouts: Bachir, Ahmed, Darmuz, Gay, bury the dog! The four of us were the closest to the murdered man. We immediately set out to carry out the order, without any hesitation or delay, out of fear and uncertainty of what might come. We were literally terrified, on the one hand because we did not know our immediate fate, far from our land and our families (this was happening in Algerian territory), and on the other because of the horror of seeing firsthand the ease with which an innocent human being was killed in front of all of us. The murderer was not disturbed and did not give a damn about what might come next, as if he had all the guarantees in the world to live free and without reprimand or possible punishment. The man's hands were free and he was sure of himself. He was in his element and in his homeland.

The four of us tried to lift the body of the murdered man, but we could hardly do it, it weighed so much, as if it were a ton. Even so, for fear of being riddled with bullets, we too made an effort to carry the body and carry it a hundred metres away from the place of his murder, and we dropped it in a small ditch, already dug before the grim event of that day from hell, which could never be forgotten. We buried him with everything he was carrying, and the only thing that moved from that lifeless body, at that moment, were the almost dried traces of blood that emerged from the wounds that pierced his beautiful body, and our feverish hands to quickly cover his body with the brown earth of the Hamada. With the hole closed as a tomb, Tauri thus became a corpse without name, religion or grave. In time, no traces of any kind remained, except those planted in our hearts as almost children who had never seen a corpse, let alone that of a fellow soldier who had been shot. 

I have since learned that no one knows what a dead body really weighs³ unless he had actually carried it or seen it in its collapse caused by an unjust blast from a criminal.

Tauri will remain alive and remembered in our hearts forever, and his killers will never be forgiven for the wounds, outrages and murders, and their accomplices, which will never heal.

References:

1 Redeemers Passage, Enrique Krauze https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewBook?id=0

2 Passage of Redeemers, Enrique Krauze

3 A Passage of Redeemers, Enrique Krauze https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewBook?id=0