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Le Maroc opprime le peuple Saharaoui du Sahara Occidental

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  • Le Maroc opprime le peuple Saharaoui du Sahara Occidental

    Dans un très long article intitulé "Sahara Occidental - La prochaine tempête du desert" (extrait ci-dessous) publié cette semaine dans le magazine britannique "The New Statesman", le journaliste britannique Xan Rice affirme que l'Espagne a trahi le peuple Saharaoui du Sahara Occidental et le Maroc l'a opprimé. Les Saharaouis se comparent d'ailleurs aux Palestiniens et à la majorité noire en Afrique du Sud sous le régime raciste de l'apartheid.

    Il ne faut biensûr pas compter sur la MAP pour reprendre cet excellent article du reporter Xan Rice qui a été honoré pour ses excellents articles sur les droits de l'homme en Afrique.

    Western Sahara — the next desert storm
    Betrayed by Spain and oppressed by Morocco, the Saharawi people of Western Sahara compare themselves to the Palestinians or the black majority in apartheid South Africa. And they want the world to know their story.

    In the far western expanse of the Sahara is the world's longest continuous wall. It starts in Morocco and slithers down through the desert for 2,400 kilometres to the Atlantic Ocean. More than 130,000 soldiers line its perimeter. Made of sand and stone, it stands one and a half metres wide and between two and three metres tall, and has command posts every two miles. Motion sensors, barbed wire and several million landmines provide an extra layer of defence. For most of its course, it cuts across a sparsely populated region that Morocco regards as its southern provinces. On maps the area appears as Western Sahara. The UN calls it a "non-self-governing territory". It is Africa's last colony, where a near-forgotten liberation war lies dormant.

    The wall is sometimes referred to as Hassan's Wall, after King Hassan II of Morocco, who annexed most of what was then called Spanish Sahara when Spain pulled out in 1976. About half of the indigenous population, the Saha*rawis, who had been promised a vote on self-determination by Spain, fled across the desert to refugee camps in an inhospitable corner of Algeria in order to escape Moroccan rule.

    They were assisted by the Polisario Front, a poorly armed but fiercely determined nationalist movement. Unable to prevent attacks on his troops by Polisario guerrillas, King Hassan ordered a series of joined defensive walls to be built around the main cities and installations in Western Sahara. Bulldozers bullied the barrier into place, eventually enclosing about four-fifths of the territory. Forced ever deeper into the Sahara, the Polisario was left with a ribbon of desert that it called the Liberated Zone.

    The wall should have come down. In 1991, Morocco and the Polisario agreed to end their 16-year war. The UN was to oversee a referendum on independence for Western Sahara within nine months. Morocco first blocked the vote and then abandoned the poll altogether when it realised the result would not go its way. Eighteen years and nearly $1bn in UN expenditure later, the Polisario camps - and more than 100,000 refugees - are still there. So is the wall, though few outside the Maghreb know that it exists. I didn't until one day I saw it represented as a thick black line on a map of Africa I bought a few years ago. I was intrigued, and resolved to see the wall and hear the stories of the Saharawis living on both sides.

    As I drove through the flat desert plains in the Liberated Zone, the wall appeared to me as a caramel stripe on the horizon. Two Moroccan soldiers on lookout ducked out of sight when they saw the Polisario Land Cruiser approaching. "Rabbits! Cowards!" The man cursing was a 39-year-old Saharawi journalist and independence activist, Malainin Lakhal. He had unbrushed hair, a goatee and silver-rimmed glasses. "The wall of shame," he spat out. He knew all about the wall - he had crossed it one moonless night nine years earlier. Back then, he was running to escape the Moroccan secret police, leaving behind his relatives, his future wife and the intifada brewing in the "occupied territories". Which was where my journey began.

    On a cold and rainy night in January last year, I boarded a bus in the Moroccan seaside town of Agadir and headed down the coast. At dawn, we reached Tarfaya, a small settlement 60 miles across the water from the Canary Islands. Mist rolled in off the Atlantic. A few men ambled in the sand-dusted streets, ghostly in their thick, hooded djellabas. It was here, in late 1975, that 350,000 Moroccans gathered under the orders of King Hassan before setting off on the "Green March" into Western Sahara, in a show of intent during the last days of Spanish rule. In the afternoon, I caught another bus, following the marchers' route south through scrubland, crossing an invisible frontier. On the outskirts of Laayoune, the territory's capital, a policeman boarded the bus, checking the identity cards of all passengers. I handed over my passport, hoping he would not deduce my profession. Journalists are not welcome in Western Sahara; to question Morocco's "territorial integrity" is to break the law.

    A military base guarded the entrance to the city, whose desert-pink buildings rose up beyond a wide green river. I checked in at a cheap hotel. My room looked out on to a bank of radar dishes and seven military jeeps in a sandy lot.

    It was evening, and soldiers in peak caps and faded uniforms were cycling home. Moroccan flags flew on every block. The city had an orderly, if sterile, feel, different from the frenetic atmosphere of cities such as Fez and Marrakesh. There was another feeling, too. In the traffic and parked on the roadside was an inordinate number of police vehicles, mostly new sedans and minivans, painted white or dark blue, with metal grilles over the windows and headlights.

    The city had eyes, as Aminatou Haidar, a petite woman in her early forties with brown-tinted spectacles, knew only too well. The "Saharawi Gandhi" to her supporters - and a dangerous traitor, according to Morocco - Haidar has come to symbolise the non-violent struggle for Saharawi rights. One evening she picked me up in her old black Renault sedan and drove me to a friend's apartment, as hers is under constant surveillance. Once the translator arrived, she told me her story.

    Born in Laayoune, she was nine when Moroccan troops entered Western Sahara; relatives on both sides of her family fled to Algeria. Within months, hundreds of Saharawis with Polisario sympathies who stayed behind had been sent to clandestine prisons in Morocco. An uncle of Haidar's was one of the Disappeared. "My mother would often cry about her brother," she said. "My uncle had six daughters, and the strain on them was terrible. This made me understand that something was horribly wrong." In late 1987, while studying for her baccalaureate, Haidar was secretly involved in organising a pro-independence demonstration to coincide with a rare visit by a UN delegation to Western Sahara. At 3.30am on the morning before the UN mission landed, plain-clothes policemen swooped on her parents' house.

    Still in pyjamas, she was bundled her into a van and blindfolded. As many as 70 other young Saharawis were seized at the same time. They were taken to a secret prison in Laayoune, where she was strapped to a plank, face down, with her hands and feet tied. Officers kicked and slapped her, threatened her with rape and gave her electric shocks. "We tried to move our blindfolds a bit to allow us to see out the bottom. But the police would shine lights in our eyes; if we reacted they knew that they had to tighten the blindfold."

    Her "disappearance" lasted three years and seven months. She had been blindfolded most of the time. Years later she wrote in an online testimony: "19 June 1991 is the day of my liberation. The first day of summer and a music festival elsewhere. I am liberated, I was only a shadow of myself. A phantom, one of the living dead, a young girl out of a nameless hell."

    By then Western Sahara had changed. Morocco had spent many millions of dollars on infrastructure projects - though just a fraction of its earnings from selling the territory's phosphate and fishing rights - while using subsidies and promises of jobs to entice tens of thousands of its citizens to move in. According to King Hassan, this was only fair; he told his people that Morocco had exercised authority over Western Sahara before Spanish colonisation in 1884 and that most Saharawis favoured integration. It was a lie. In 1975 the UN, which for more than a decade had been pushing Spain to hold a referendum on self-determination, sent a fact-finding mission to Western Sahara. It concluded that the Frente Popular de Liberación de Saguía el Hamra y Río de Oro, or Polisario Front, formed two years earlier, represented the most significant expression of Saharawi opinion, and that "the majority of the population within the Spanish Sahara was manifestly in favour of independence".

    Morocco, meanwhile, had taken its case to the International Court of Justice. But, in a 14-2 ruling, the court found that the evidence did "not support Morocco's claim to have exercised territorial sovereignty over Western Sahara" before Spain arrived. A claim by Mauritania, made on similar grounds, was also rejected. Bizarrely, King Hassan interpreted the court's decision as a victory, and the next day announced plans for the Green March. Spain, in political disarray with General Franco on his deathbed, capitulated to Moroccan pressure; within a month a deal was struck to allow the king and the Mauritanian government to divide the colony between themselves.

    Today, there are about 200,000 people in Laayoune - nearly a tenfold increase since 1975 - and close to 400,000 across Western Sahara. Most are Moroccans. Many of the Saharawi activists I spoke to described this influx using the Middle East lexicon of "creating facts on the ground". But a genial Moroccan who owned a car hire firm and who, after some persuading, drove me to see the port one day, saw himself filling an employment gap. "The problem with the Saharawis is that they are lazy," he said. "They are like the Saudis who get poor people from Asia to do all their work for them. They just want money from the government, and then to sit at home."

  • #2
    Staying at home was the only option for Haidar after her release, because Morocco had refused her a passport and banned her from going to university. After numerous appeals, she was finally allowed to study philosophy in Rabat - the location and course were of Morocco's choosing. If the intention was to get Haidar to understand King Hassan's point of view, it failed. She began to document human rights abuses against the increasingly frustrated Saharawis. The promised referendum had raised hopes for many that they would at last be reunited with relatives on the other side of the wall. But dubious attempts by King Hassan to classify more than 120,000 people living in Morocco as eligible Saharawi voters - and his decision to launch appeals after almost all were rejected by the UN referendum team - had stalled the process. In 1999, the year Hassan died and his son assumed the throne as Mohammed VI, patience snapped. First Saharawi students in Morocco launched small protests for better conditions, and then demonstrations spread to Laayoune. After a fortnight, the police moved in, beating and detaining hundreds.

    The "first intifada" had begun. The taboo of public dissent had been broken for the first time since the occupation started. Six years later, when it became obvious that Mohammed had no intention of allowing the Saharawis a vote - autonomy is the best they can expect, he says - the second intifada erupted. Haidar, who by now had a young son and daughter, joined one of the demonstrations to show solidarity. A policeman attacked her with a truncheon. Blood streaming from her face, and with three broken ribs and a broken collarbone, she was rushed to hospital, where she was arrested.

    As Haidar was telling me her story, Ali Salem Tamek, a stocky 36-year-old with a goatee, dressed in the traditional blue draa robe, arrived at the apartment. Tamek has been to prison several times and is famed for his hunger strikes, which, on one occasion, took him to the verge of death. A Moroccan magazine once put his face on the cover under the headline "Public enemy number one".

    Shot glasses of tea and plates of dates were passed around, and Tamek nodded as Haidar continued her story. She went on hunger strike for 52 days in Laayoune's notorious Cárcel Negra ("black prison), losing 17 kilogrammes. Following pressure from the European Union and Amnesty International, she was released after seven months. "This time in jail was worse," she said. "Before, I had no children. It was just for myself. I had no feeling of motherhood. Now the suffering was double."

    To escape the creeping paranoia of Laayoune - a stranger at a café had casually mentioned that he knew where I was staying a few hours after I arrived - I hired a car and driver to take me to Smara. The third-biggest city in Western Sahara and the only one of any size not on the coast, Smara was also the closest I was likely to come to the wall, about 30 miles away. Beyond the police post on the edge of Laayoune, we were in the open desert. After two hours we reached Smara, where we were stopped and questioned at two further checkpoints. The main street had a few cafés. Virtually all the customers were soldiers. There were several billboards of King Mohammed, and numerous riot vans parked on the roadside.

    A policeman refused to give us permission to enter a poor and densely packed neighbourhood. "This is not a tourist town, it is a military area," he said.

    Back in Laayoune, I called Brahim Dahane, another activist and formerly one of the Disappeared. He told me to meet him outside a travel agency on a busy corner. When I reached there, I heard a voice behind me.

    “It's you?"

    “Yes."

    “Follow me."

    His apartment was nearby. Dahane hurried inside and walked over to the window, pulling the curtain back slightly to look down the street. Just a few days earlier, one of his colleagues in the Association of Saharawi Victims of Human Rights Abuses had been arrested for meeting a delegation from the European Parliament, which, having been blocked by Morocco from visiting Western Sahara since 2005, had been allowed in to Laayoune for a half-day visit.

    Dahane had opened a cybercafé at a prime location to serve as a kind of Saharawi cultural centre. But the police kept raiding it, customers stopped coming, and he was forced shut it down. Other activists had told me similar stories of harassment of anyone considered to have ideas of independence, no matter how young. While giving me a lift home late one night, Haidar pointed out a school that even had a permanent police presence to suppress any dissent. If people like her and Dahane were the second generation of Saharawis to strive for independence, there was now a third taking it on, spray-painting walls with the flag of the Saharawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR) - the state declared by the Polisario in 1976 - challenging teachers, shouting pro-independence slogans.

    “We have a guarantee in our children," said Mohamed Fadel Gaoudi, a former political prisoner who later invited me to his apartment for dinner with several others. "Kids of ten or 12 now participate in demonstrations, which we never did. They say that there is no alternative to self-determination."

    A note of dark humour drifted into the conversation. The Green March was the "Black March", the UN the "United Nothing": its mission in Western Sahara has an annual budget of $50m, but no mandate to monitor human rights. But when, at midnight, Haidar joined us, the mood lifted. I asked her if she had been tempted by offers of asylum in Europe. "I prefer to live in my home country, in effect in prison, but with dignity and determination. As long as Saharawis have not decided [their future] for themselves, we will not stop," she said.

    The next time I spoke to Haidar was by telephone many months later. She was on hunger strike at an airport in Lanzarote, Spain, having been expelled from Laayoune for refusing to state "Moroccan" as her nationality on the arrival form as she returned from United States, where she had been awarded the latest of several human rights prizes. Brahim Dahane and Ali Salem Tamek were in jail again in Morocco and facing a military tribunal, having been arrested with other Saharawi agitators after visiting the Polisario refugee camps in Algeria.

    If Western Sahara has a tourist draw, it is Dakhla, which sits on a finger of land pointing into the sea two-thirds of the way down the coast. In 1976, as part of the agreement with Morocco and Spain, Mauritania took over the city, but after three years of Polisario attacks it withdrew and renounced its territorial claim. Morocco moved in, and by September 1985 it had extended the wall from the north to protect the city. I caught the bus there one morning. A few camper vans passed us on the road.

    I was in Dakhla to meet a Saharawi civil servant whom, for his own safety, I'll call Mustafa. I wanted to find out what life was like for somebody not actively involved in the struggle. We met on a side street near a busy plaza perfumed with the smell of flame-grilled camel sandwiches and drove to his apartment. We made small talk for a while, until his room-mate Abdallahi emerged from a bedroom with his girlfriend, who said hello and left. Abdallahi was Saharawi; she was Moroccan. Mustafa had waited for her to leave before speaking freely. "There are informers everywhere, guards, shopkeepers . . ." he said.

    Mustafa had written a novel, which, if published, would be the first English-language novel written by a Saharawi, he said. I read the first few pages on his laptop; it was good, but it will never see print here. "Living in the occupied territories, when you are deprived of using the language that you want to give an opinion - not even a terrorist opinion - and to think freely, to write freely, you feel like you are living in internal exile," he said. A few nights later we sat watching television: al-Jazeera was reporting on the conflict in Palestine. "At least Israel allows Palestinians to publish their own books in Israel," Mustafa said. "It is better to be a Palestinian in Israel than a Saharawi here."

    To one side of a quadrangle lined with captured Moroccan tanks, armoured personnel carriers and cannon stood a set of heavy metal doors. Pulling them open, the curator of the Polisario military museum in south-western Algeria flipped a light switch to reveal a scale model of Western Sahara, with a string of red lights tracing the path of the wall. Malainin Lakhal, the secretary general of the Saharawi Journalists' and Writers' Union who was my guide in the camps, pointed to the southern section of the wall, bordering Mauritania. This was the least well-defended section and it was there that he had crossed from the occupied territories in early 2000.

    “It was a very difficult decision," he told me. "I had always been against people leaving the occupied territories to join the Polisario. I would say: 'They don't need you. They have fighters. We need you here.'"

    Commentaire


    • #3
      le journaliste britannique Xan Rice affirme que l'Espagne a trahi le peuple Saharaoui du Sahara Occidental et le Maroc l'a opprimé. Les Saharaouis se comparent d'ailleurs aux Palestiniens et à la majorité noire en Afrique du Sud sous le régime raciste de l'apartheid.
      1- Comparer le nombre de la Majorité noire ou le nombre de la Population Palestinienne à une poignée de personnes !!!!!

      2- Comparer les causes la ou il y'a vraiment une oppression des droits de l'homme qui font la une dans la presse internationale à celle du Sahara !!!!

      3- Comparer les causes la ou y'avait toujours des morts parmi les civiles à celle des sahraouis qui ne cessent de rejoindre la mère patrie !!!! .

      4- Comparer les Occupants racistes qui traitent jamais d'égal à égal sa population avec " La population occupée " avec la maniere dont le Maroc traite ses membres Sahraouis !!!!!

      Personnellement
      je trouve que c'est comparer l'incomparable !!!!!

      et avec tout mes respects à ce Monsieur , je trouve qu'il délire un peu .

      Commentaire


      • #4
        Les Saharaouis se comparent d'ailleurs aux Palestiniens et à la majorité noire en Afrique du Sud sous le régime raciste de l'apartheid.
        Eh bien c est les anglais qui le disent !!
        Qu est ce que vous exprimeriez , maintenant ce n est pas les Faistes algériens qui le disent !
        A qui sait comprendre , peu de mots suffisent

        Commentaire


        • #5
          Envoyé par kabalo
          je trouve qu'il délire un peu.
          Il ne délire pas, il rapporte objectivement les faits. Il rapporte les sentiments des Saharaouis qu'il a rencontré dans les territoires saharaouis occupés par le Maroc et dans les camps de Tindouf. Xan Rice fait partie de cette minorité de reporters occidentaux objectifs qui ne jurent que par les faits et la vérité.

          Commentaire


          • #6
            Personnellement je trouve que c'est comparer l'incomparable !!!!!
            @kabalo
            Tu ne veux pas voir la réalité en face ? le journaliste britannique Xan Rice , il est juste et très objectif …« l'Espagne a trahi le peuple Saharaoui du Sahara Occidental et le Maroc l'a opprimé. »
            Deux peuples opprimés qui combattent et aspirent à la liberté , il refusent le diktat du colonialismes barbares .
            L état palestinien déclaré à Alger
            L a Rasd déclaré à Alger


            *Ce n est pas un hasard ; la similitude des deux drapeaux .
            A qui sait comprendre , peu de mots suffisent

            Commentaire


            • #7
              Dans un très long article intitulé "Sahara Occidental - La prochaine tempête du desert" (extrait ci-dessous) publié cette semaine dans le magazine britannique "The New Statesman", le journaliste britannique Xan Rice affirme que l'Espagne a trahi le peuple Saharaoui du Sahara Occidental et le Maroc l'a opprimé. Les Saharaouis se comparent d'ailleurs aux Palestiniens et à la majorité noire en Afrique du Sud sous le régime raciste de l'apartheid.

              Il ne faut biensûr pas compter sur la MAP pour reprendre cet excellent article du reporter Xan Rice qui a été honoré pour ses excellents articles sur les droits de l'homme en Afrique.
              cette article est d'une banalité au regard des centaines d'autres articles publiées par les sympathisants du polisario.

              quasi le même argumentaire.

              quasi même récit de voyage.

              quasi même récit "historique" (très raccourci)

              quasi même amalgame:cause de la Palestine

              En fait les mêmes argumentaires que nos amis ici sur le forum a part qu'elle a reçu des gratifications qui lui donnerait un "un cautionnement "

              Commentaire


              • #8
                Envoyé par Nassim
                Il ne délire pas, il rapporte objectivement les faits.
                Le terme " Objectif " reste relatif , cela dépend de comment on lit l'article aussi .

                J'ai ben cité , plus haut , tout ce qui << Banalise >> son analyse et de sa comparaison du Maroc avec les occupants et les Sahraouis avec les palestiniens ou avec les Noirs de l'Afrique du sud .

                Généralement , une analyse qui se resume en : un Ange ( ou tout est blanc ) Face à un Diable ( ou tout est noir ) , je suis vraiment désolé , mais ça perd toute crédibilité .

                Commentaire


                • #9
                  Il ne délire pas, il rapporte objectivement les faits. Il rapporte les sentiments des Saharaouis qu'il a rencontré dans les territoires saharaouis occupés par le Maroc et dans les camps de Tindouf. Xan Rice fait partie de cette minorité de reporters occidentaux objectifs qui ne jurent que par les faits et la vérité.

                  ET la grande majorité silencieuse.???

                  ET l'oubli sur le millier de ralliés????

                  Au minimum,l'objectivité c'est de se pencher sur l'autre versant.

                  Commentaire


                  • #10
                    Tu ne veux pas voir la réalité en face ? le journaliste britannique Xan Rice , il est juste et très objectif …«
                    Heureusement qu'on sait lire les choses différemment .

                    Deux peuples opprimés qui combattent et aspirent à la liberté
                    l'un à partir se son territoire et l'autre à partir du Pays voisin !!! d'où la ressemblance . meme les noirs sud africains n'étaient pas installés au Zimbabwe.

                    L état palestinien déclaré à Alger
                    L a Rasd déclaré à Alger
                    Et le peuple Palestinien hébergeait ? la palestine

                    Mais le peuple RASDien , héberge ??? Tindouf .

                    C'est logique , quand on empreint une route à sens unique !!!!!

                    *Ce n est pas un hasard ; la similitude des deux drapeaux .
                    ca ressemble en aucun cas au drapeau Sud Africain

                    Commentaire


                    • #11
                      Personnellement je trouve que c'est comparer l'incomparable !!!!!
                      tu juges l'article à partir du titre seulement et seulement selon le formatage qui tu as subi avant, tu n'as pas lu l'article, ca se voit!

                      Commentaire


                      • #12
                        Tu ne veux pas voir la réalité en face ? le journaliste britannique Xan Rice , il est juste et très objectif …« l'Espagne a trahi le peuple Saharaoui du Sahara Occidental et le Maroc l'a opprimé. »
                        Deux peuples opprimés qui combattent et aspirent à la liberté , il refusent le diktat du colonialismes barbares .
                        L état palestinien déclaré à Alger
                        L a Rasd déclaré à Alger


                        *Ce n est pas un hasard ; la similitude des deux drapeaux .
                        1) une trahison qui dura 9 ans et plus si le Maroc ne les avait pas pousser à la sortie(ni polisario ,ni RASD,ni Algérie)

                        2)Pourquoi pas de RASD avant 1975(marche verte)??????????

                        3)Le clone du drapeau palestinien a été voulu pour en faire un amalgame
                        Et de nouveau pourquoi pas avant 1975??????????

                        Commentaire


                        • #13
                          Et comme par hasard il n'a interrogé que des indépendantistes on connait l'histoire, il n'a aucun interet a ce qu'il interroge un sahraoui marocain qui lui dirait que le polisario sont des traitres qui veulent diviser le pays, ca vend moins

                          Une chose est sure quel que soit les articles ou les péripéties ce sahara ne restera que marocain parce que c'est notre choix et celui d'une bonne partie des sahraoui.

                          Pourquoi des haut dirigants du polisario reviendraient-il vers le Maroc alors que le sahara n'est pas marocain ?!
                          Pourtant les haut dirigeants gagnent bien leur vie, ils n'ont besoin de rien
                          ...

                          Le clone du drapeau palestinien a été voulu pour en faire un amalgame
                          Ajouté a cela l'embléme ottoman qu'il y a sur le drapeau algerien et paf une imposture tente de voir le jour!

                          Commentaire


                          • #14
                            tu juges l'article à partir du titre seulement et seulement selon le formatage qui tu as subi avant, tu n'as pas lu l'article, ca se voit!
                            C'est clair que je me suis arreté la ou j'ai fini de lire , ce que j'ai cité était bel et bien le résumé ? n'est ce pas monsieur lit tout ?

                            Commentaire


                            • #15
                              Heureusement qu'on sait lire les choses différemment
                              @kabalo : Je réitères , tu ne veux voir la réalité en FACE , c est tout à fait normal , le Maroc colonise le Sahara occidental , et y est pas la force et la répression ..


                              Y a pas de différence entre la Palestine et le Sahara occidental , même combat .. !
                              SO : territoire à décoloniser , dossier à l ONU !
                              Palestine : territoire à décoloniser , dossier à l ONU !
                              A qui sait comprendre , peu de mots suffisent

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