Dancing Transitional Justice: Truth, Justice and Redress for Sahrawi victims of enforce disappearance

The IER (Equity and Reconciliation Instance) process in Morocco has been considered a pioneering initiative of Transitional Justice in the Arab World. Many of the victims of human rights violations during the “years of lead”, the period this truth commission dealt with, were Saharawi victims. In addition to being invisible in the process, Saharawi victims had to face the difficult decision of whether to participate in it, despite the persistence of the conflict and consequently of human rights violations and the inaction of international community. Despite an exhaustive analysis of the response provided by the IER in terms of truth, justice and reparation to the Sahrawi victims, many of the victims were not aware of the response given by the body, and neither was the general public aware of the magnitude of the human rights violations against the Sahrawi population. This is due, on the one hand, to the media blockade of everything related to the Western Sahara conflict, but on the other hand, to the late entry of human rights into the agenda of the conflict. Faced with this situation I wondered how I could transcend this blockade and bring the process of the Sahrawi victims before the IER to the Sahrawi society, and to society as a whole. Dance, besides being my personal hobby, plays an important role in the Saharawi culture for the transmission of knowledge and information, and given the opportunity offered by the "Dance your PhD" contest of the “Science” journal, I decided to translate the findings of my thesis in dance choreography. This paper aims to analyze the potential of dance to transmit and narrate transitional justice processes, but also as a healing tool for wounds and traumas derived from serious human rights violations. I will address the process of converting an academic analysis of a transitional justice process into a dance choreography, the tools used to ensure that the victims could feel owners of the process, and the perception that the protagonists (the dancers), the audience, and the victims themselves have of the result. To this end, I have employed a qualitative analysis through in-depth interviews with the three groups (victims, dancers and the public). The results of this research point to dance, and art in general, as a useful and innovative tool to face the challenges of the discipline of transitional justice.