Nos amis dans le désert

[TAGHITI]

Les Américains aiment à croire que la plupart des conflits sont menées par les bons contre les méchants et de répondre à déclencher mots de décider qui tombe dans quel camp. Relier ses adversaires au terrorisme, l'extrémisme Oussama ben Laden ou musulman est un moyen sûr de gagner la sympathie et le soutien de beaucoup de ceux qui restent réticents ou incapables de regarder au-delà de la complexité d'un match de football de haute école.

Les Nations et ceux qui cherchent une oreille attentive ont toujours su ce sujet des Américains et agissent en conséquence pour s'assurer que ce que nous savons qu'ils n'aiment pas ceux livré avec la pente qu'ils recherchent. Ainsi, la première chose que les Britanniques ont fait pour obtenir un avantage sur leurs ennemis à l'été 1914, que la guerre en Europe menacée, a été de couper le câble trans-atlantique entre les États-Unis et l'Europe continentale, en garantissant que nos nouvelles auraient à l'écoulement en passant par Londres.

Un récit moins-que-précis est vendable aussi longtemps que ceux à qui il est vendu ne découvre pas qu'il est un peu plus que la fiction.

Contrôle de la narration devient encore plus important lorsque les Américains sont peu familiers avec les faits. Cela a certainement été le cas d'une lutte qui dure depuis dans le désert d'Afrique du Nord depuis le milieu des années 70.

Jusque-là, l'administration coloniale du Sahara occidental était une partie de ce qui était connu comme le Sahara espagnol; les Espagnols abandonné le territoire, qui a été aussitôt envahi, occupé et annexé par le Maroc.

Les plusieurs centaines de milliers d'habitants ont mené une guerre de guérilla contre le roi du Maroc considérablement armée supérieure, qui avait le soutien de la plupart des pays arabes et les anciennes puissances coloniales. L'indépendance d'esprit sahraouis, comme on les appelait, ont été bombardés, napalm et finalement franchir la frontière dans l'Algérie voisine, où plusieurs centaines de milliers vivent encore dans des camps administrés par l'ONU aux réfugiés.

Dirigée par Mohamed Abdelaziz, les Sahraouis ont réalisé qu'ils ne pouvaient pas gagner une guerre ouverte avec les Marocains et les aider au lieu demandé à l'Organisation des Nations Unies et la Cour internationale de justice.

La Cour internationale de justice a constaté que leur revendication sur les terres saisies par le Maroc sont légitimes, et l'ONU face à la demande des Sahraouis pour un référendum sur la question, ils les gens qui vivent sur l'indépendance des terres privilégiées ou l'administration marocaine. Le roi du Maroc a déclaré en substance l'ONU, la Cour internationale de justice et les Sahraouis à la livre de sable.

Pourtant, Abdelaziz a estimé que le droit finira par l'emporter et a commencé à préparer son peuple à l'autonomie gouvernementale. En conséquence, les réfugiés vivant dans les camps - que j'ai visités et où ma fille a servi comme volontaire il ya quelques années - sont bien éduqués et vivent dans une constitution écrite presque unique parmi les nations musulmanes en ce qu'il garantit les habitants de la vote et des droits égaux pour les femmes. Les habitants ont également tendance à être fortement pro-américain.

Abdelaziz et ses partisans ont gagné le soutien de nombreuses Eglises chrétiennes des Etats-Unis que de compléter l'approvisionnement diminution de l'ONU avec la nourriture et autres denrées de base. Leur sort a été généralement ignorée aux États-Unis, mais ils jouissent d'un soutien bipartisan au Congrès, avec le sénateur Inhofe Oklahoma James comme peut-être leur champion républicain principal.

Au début, les Marocains ignoraient simplement l'opinion mondiale, mais ont finalement décidé d'un référendum aussi longtemps que les Marocains qui ont déménagé ou ont été installés dans la région depuis les années 70 pourrait participer.

Ancien secrétaire d'Etat américain James A. Baker a accepté un poste à l'ONU comme un négociateur spécial pour arriver à un plan pour le référendum. Le Plan Baker a été rejeté du revers de la main en 2003 par le roi, qui a commencé à dépenser des millions pour convaincre le monde que les Sahraouis sont un peu plus d'émules d'Al-Qaïda et en faisant valoir que la plupart des Sahraouis veulent vivre sous la domination éclairée du Maroc.

Ce mythe est mort avec un certain nombre de manifestants et forces de sécurité marocaines le mois dernier lorsque les forces marocaines a démantelé un campement pacifique des Sahraouis à l'intérieur du territoire marocain occupés par des centaines d'arrestations et a déménagé à couper les communications et l'accès à la zone de presse.

Comme la manifestation a commencé, les Sahraouis craint juste une telle réaction et demandé à l'ONU pour la protection. Le 18 octobre, un porte-parole du gouvernement marocain a déclaré à Reuters qu'il n'y avait pas besoin de protection parce que "le Maroc tolère manifestations ... et [il] ne sera pas une intervention policière contre les manifestants."

Trois semaines plus tard, avec coups de feu, l'intervention est devenue une réalité et le récit s'est effondré.
David Keene

[TAGHITI]

Our friends in the desert


By David Keene - 12/06/10 05:40 PM ET
Americans like to imagine that most conflicts are waged by good guys against bad guys and respond to trigger words to decide who falls into which camp. Linking one’s opponents to terrorism, Osama bin Laden or Muslim extremism is a sure way to win the sympathy and support of many who remain unwilling or unable to look beyond the complexities of a high-school football game.
Nations and people seeking a sympathetic hearing have always known this about Americans and acted accordingly to make sure that what we know about those they dislike comes with the slant they seek. Thus, the first thing the British did to get an edge on their enemies in the summer of 1914, as war in Europe threatened, was to cut the trans-Atlantic cable between the U.S. and continental Europe, guaranteeing that our news would have to flow through London.




A less-than-accurate narrative is saleable as long as those to whom it is sold don’t discover that it is little more than fiction.
Controlling the narrative becomes even more important when few Americans are familiar with the facts. This has certainly been true of a struggle that’s been going on in the North African desert since the mid-’70s.

Until then the colonial Western Sahara was a part of what was known as the Spanish Sahara; the Spanish abandoned the territory, which was immediately invaded, occupied and annexed by Morocco.

The several hundred thousand inhabitants waged a guerrilla war against the Moroccan king’s vastly superior army, which had the backing of most of the Arab world and the former colonial powers. The independence-minded Sahrawi, as they were known, were bombed, napalmed and eventually driven across the border into neighboring Algeria, where several hundred thousand still live in U.N.-administered refugee camps.

Led by Mohamed Abdelaziz, the Sahrawi realized they couldn’t win a shooting war with the Moroccans and instead sought help from the United Nations and the World Court.

The World Court found that their claim to the lands seized by Morocco were legitimate, and the U.N. sided with the Sahrawi’s demand for a referendum on whether they the people living on the land preferred independence or Moroccan rule. The Moroccan king essentially told the U.N., the World Court and the Sahrawi to pound sand.

Still, Abdelaziz believed that right would eventually prevail and began preparing his people for self-government. As a result, the refugees living in the camps — which I have visited and in which my daughter served as a volunteer a few years ago — are well-educated and live under a written constitution almost unique among Muslim nations in that it guarantees residents the vote and provides equal rights for women. The inhabitants also tend to be strongly pro-American.

Abdelaziz and his followers have won the support of many U.S. Christian churches that supplement the dwindling supplies from the U.N. with food and other staples. Their plight has been generally ignored in the U.S., but they do enjoy bipartisan support in Congress, with Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe as perhaps their principal Republican champion.

At first the Moroccans simply ignored world opinion but eventually agreed to a referendum as long as the Moroccans who had moved or been moved into the area since the ’70s could participate.

Former U.S. Secretary of State James A. Baker accepted a U.N. appointment as a special negotiator to come up with a plan for the referendum. The Baker Plan was rejected out of hand in 2003 by the king, who began spending millions to convince the world that the Western Saharans are little more than al Qaeda wannabes and arguing that most Sahrawi want to live under Morocco’s enlightened rule.

That myth died along with a number of protesters and Moroccan security officials last month when Moroccan forces broke up a peaceful encampment of Western Saharans inside Moroccan-occupied territory, arrested hundreds and moved to cut off communications and press access to the area.

As the protest began, the Sahrawi feared just such a reaction and asked the U.N. for protection. On Oct. 18, a spokesman for the Moroccan government told Reuters that there was no need for such protection because “Morocco tolerates protests … and [there] will not be police intervention against those protesters.”

Three weeks later, with guns blazing, the intervention became a reality and the narrative collapsed.

Keene is chairman of the American Conservative Union and a managing associate with the Carmen Group, a Washington-based governmental consulting firm.

[ouldabbas]

Torchon. Tres one-sided.
Faut trouver meilleurs consultants.
La vous gaspillez votre argent.

[bonsai]

Deux reponses a Mr. Keene (et egalement sa reponse aux repliques) apres son article, publié sur le site du meme journal americain thehill.com.

Mr. Keene s´est grillé sur le coté lucratif de sa societe de consulting concernant ses activité de lobbying pour l´Algerie et le Polisario aux USA!

Keene’s column seriously distorts truth on Morocco


By Robert M. Holley, executive director of the Moroccan American Center for Policy - 12/08/10 07:09 PM ET


The Dec. 7 commentary, “Our friends in the desert” by David Keene, distorts the history and current realities of the Western Sahara conflict.
It is also important to know that, according to the U.S. Department of Justice, Mr. Keene and his consulting firm received tens of thousands of dollars in lobbying fees from Algeria, the Polisario Front’s ideological and financial supporter — a fact Mr. Keene fails to disclose.


Mr. Keene seriously misrepresents the position of the United Nations on the Western Sahara conflict. The U.N. Security Council has repeatedly called on Morocco and the Polisario Front to seek a mutually acceptable political solution to resolve the dispute. In 2007, Morocco responded with a compromise autonomy proposal which was deemed “serious and credible” by the U.N. Security Council, including the U.S., and many others in the international community. To date, the Polisario Front has rejected the call for compromise, stalling the U.N.-led negotiations process.

As well, Mr. Keene egregiously mischaracterizes the position of the U.S. government in the Western Sahara conflict. The Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations, and bipartisan majorities of the U.S. House and Senate, support a resolution of the conflict based on autonomy under Moroccan sovereignty.
Furthermore, the author’s description of life in the Polisario-run refugee camps in Algeria is the writer’s fantasy. In the tightly controlled camps — where the refugees are denied the most basic freedoms — there is only one permitted political party, the Polisario Front. Its appointed “president” for more than three decades hails from a dubious class of Cold War leaders including their continuing ally, Fidel Castro.
Mr. Keene’s distortions dishonor the lives of the 11 Moroccan police officers savagely killed by violent, pro-Polisario militants who infiltrated what began as a peaceful social protest over economic issues near Laayoune. These police officers were armed only with non-lethal weapons — no “guns blazing,” another of Mr. Keene’s allegations that have been repeatedly denounced by the international human rights community.
Washington


Columnist merely parrots propaganda of Polisario
From Hassan El Farissi, American Council for Moroccan POWs
It is incredible that a respectable publication such as The Hill would let Mr. David Keene spread so many falsehoods about a conflict he seems to know near nothing about except for Polisario propaganda (“Our friends in the desert” Dec. 7).
The article sweeps under the rug the Moroccan efforts to regain their Spain-colonized territory since the 1950s and the Madrid tripartite accord of 1975. As soon as Morocco won parts of its independence from France, it started its efforts to gain back the other territories from Spain and for the international zone in Tangiers.
Mr. Keene advances the figure of several hundred thousand people who still live in “U.N.-administered refugee camps.” Nobody in the U.N. or any of its agencies knows how many people live in the camps, let alone administer those same camps where more than 2,000 Moroccan POWs were held against Geneva conventions and where they were tortured and where some of them were murdered in cold blood.
Mr. Keene seems to be enamored of the “constitution” that Polisario has given to its people and that gave equal rights to Sahrawi women. Yes, the right to have their young children yanked away from them and sent to Cuba for “education.”
Mr. Keene writes about the victims of the recent Layoune camp riots without any proof of those claims. Human Rights Watch said the Moroccan authorities’ figures of casualties of mostly security and paramedics are more realistic and reliable than the highly inflated claims made by Algerian-controlled Polisario propagandists which Mr. Keene is blindly parroting in his article.
Redondo Beach, Calif.


David Keene replies

Critics of my recent column on the Western Sahara’s ongoing dispute with Morocco are apparently convinced that I am somehow being paid to propagandize on behalf of the Western Saharans by Algeria and cite as evidence of this that the Carmen Group represented Algeria some years ago.
To set the record straight: I have never been paid to represent, advise or lobby on behalf of the Western Sahara or the Polisario, which is the political arm of the Western Saharans.
The Carmen Group, of which I was a managing associate at the time, did represent and advise the Embassy of Algeria on numerous issues, and I worked on the account at the time. During that period, neither the Carmen Group nor I advocated on behalf of the Western Sahara and were asked specifically not to by the Algerian ambassador.
The Carmen Group no longer represents Algeria, and while I continue to have an “Of Counsel” relationship with the firm, I am no longer active as a full-time employee or lobbyist on behalf of Carmen’s clients.
The Algerians and the Moroccans obviously differ on the merits of the Western Saharan’s claim to the lands occupied by the Moroccan army in the ’70s. The World Court and the United Nations agree with Algeria and the Western Saharan position on this question.
The Western Saharan refugee camps to which I refer in my column are within Algeria’s borders and are under U.N. administration.
Critics of my position are welcome to differ with me as I knew they would when I wrote my column, but I must say that I am offended by the contention that anyone who disagrees with them must of necessity be in someone’s pay.

David Keene is a columnist for The Hill 
whose columns appear Tuesday.