NationStates Jolt Archive

In my usual web browsing, I came across some information about the Western Sahara. You know, that place on the map everyone usually overlooks. Well, the more I read, the angrier I got.
Morocco, a relatively nice country, is repressing the people of the Western Sahara. Their claims to freedom are being ignored, and Morocco is trying to take over.
Read this, and look at some of its news articles.

Freedom for the Western Sahara (www.wsahara.net/polisario.html)

The UN oughta(hillbilly moment) step in and do what they said they would: hold free elections for the people to decide their own national fate.

As usual, we ignore Africa unless we want unless they want to steal, plunder and pilage it.

The UN can't do anything because its member states, as always, decide what it does. And in this case it will do nothing because Morocco has enough supporters and is an ally to the US in the "war on terror." (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/3776413.stm)

It's as it has always been - as long as you play nice with the West, we don't really care about you oppressing or killing people, even with the guns we happily sell you. It's only when you stop playing nice that we'll use it as an excuse to replace you with someone who will.

There are no countries or civilization in Africa. People there eat each other.

I may have just given this thread new life by accident.

As a native Cuban American, while I can simphatize with any people's freedoms, this is a concern.

While I have not followed this story closely, I have known some about the Western Sahara, and I seem to recall reading that at one time there were as many as 10,000 Western Saharan's being trained and indoctrinated in Cuba.

Posted on Mon, Sep. 19, 2005
Miami Beach



R E L A T E D C O N T E N T

BARBARA P. FERNANDEZ/HERALD STAFF
STORYTELLING: Former Saharan refugees, Saadani Ma Oulainie, center, and Ghali Bentaleb, discuss their experiences alongside Bentaleb's father, Hossein Taleb, left.


Saharan refugees discuss perils

Several former Western Saharan refugees say they were separated from their families against their will by a leftist group in Algeria and sent to Cuba for forced communist indoctrination.

BY OSCAR CORRAL

ocorral@herald.com


Saadani Ma Oulainie's first memory from childhood is seeing her father tortured publicly in front of her by the Polisario Front in North Africa when she was five.

After that, her memories of youth are a blur of forced separation, a flight to Cuba, sugar cane cutting, and an unending campaign by Cuban teachers to convince her that Allah was a farce and that Fidel Castro was the only person that mattered to her now.

As Ma Oulainie recalled her itinerant adolescence Saturday in Miami Beach as part of an effort by the Moroccan government to discredit the Polisario Front, she broke down crying, stopping just short of saying exactly how Castro-allied soldiers tortured her late father, who they had accused of being a Moroccan spy.

''We were stripped of our traditions, of our religion, they made us eat lots of pork,'' Oulainie said of her 15 years in Cuba, during which she never communicated with her parents. ``When I went back to Sahara, my father had died. Hundreds of Saharan children have been orphaned while they were forced to study in Cuba.''

Oulainie, one of thousands of children shipped to Cuba by the leftist Polisario for communist indoctrination, is in Miami this week along with several other Western Saharans, or Sahawaris, who have passed through the Polisario's refugee camps and prisons in the last 32 years. They hope their firsthand accusations of human-rights abuses and corruption will help bring attention to the plight of Western Saharans.

But like everything else in the post-9/11 world, the story of the the Sahawari plight is complex. Both the Polisario and Morocco, who are at odds over control of Western Sahara, have been accused of human-rights abuses against Sahawaris by Amnesty International, a respected human-rights organization.

From 1884 to 1975, Spain controlled Western Sahara, a dry, sandy patch of dessert south of Morocco populated by tight-knit nomadic tribes. In 1975, after the death of Spanish leader Francisco Franco, Morocco annexed it, triggering an uprising by a group of left-leaning Arab students who called themselves the Polisario Front and were backed by Cuba, Lybia and Algeria. Polisario is a partial Spanish-language acronym for Frente Popular de Liberación de Saguía el Hamra y Río de Oro or People's Liberation Front of Saguía el-Hamra and Rio de Oro.

More than 100,000 Sahawaris fled to southwestern Algeria, where they settled in refugee camps controlled by the Polisario in the Tindouf region.

The guerrilla war went on until 1991, when Morocco, which claims sovereignty over Western Sahara and the Polisario, which wants an independent state there, agreed to a cease-fire.

The two sides are still wrangling over a referendum to allow a democratic solution. A United Nations peacekeeping force has been overseeing the cease-fire since 1991.

''Freedom of expression and freedom of peaceful assembly and association remain very restricted in the [Morocco-controlled] Western Sahara,'' said a U.S. State Department report from 2002. And, likewise, ``The Polisario reportedly restricts freedom of expression, peaceful assembly, association, and movement in its camps near Tindouf in southwestern Algeria.''

Oulainie, one of many who was caught in the middle, believes the human-rights abuses should be dealt with separately from the political solution.

Many of the people who fled to the Polisario camps were once sympathetic to their cause. One of them is Bachir Edkhil, 51, who once ran the Polisario program to send children to Cuba. He now has turned against them.

''The Polisarios destroyed the elemental values of family,'' Edkhil said.

Hossein Taleb knows this first hand. His daughter, Ghali Bentaleb, 27, spent 13 years in Cuba, from 1988 to 2001. When Taleb went to Cuba to try to get her back in 1999, he was turned around at the airport and immediately deported. Bentaleb eventually made it back to her family. But Taleb's son was shipped to Cuba's Isle of Youth in 2001, and has had no communication with his father since, Taleb said.

''I don't want other kids to go through what I went through,'' said Bentaleb, who was sitting near her father in a Miami Beach restaurant Saturday. ``They tried to tell us that there was no religion, only Castro. In Cuba, they kept us confined to the buildings. We were their prisoners.''

Robert Holley, executive director of the Moroccan American Center for policy, which is sponsored by the Moroccan government, estimates that there are 3,000 Western Saharan children still in Cuba, and 350 to 400 more are shipped there every year. The Moroccan government, through Holley's organization, sponsored the Sahawaris' trip to Miami and Washington, where they met last week with several U.S. leaders.

Today, the Sahawaris are scheduled to hold a news conference in Miami with U.S. representatives Lincoln Díaz-Balart, Mario Díaz-Balart and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, to denounce Polisario-controlled refugee camps in Algeria and the practice of sending children to Cuba. To their credit, the Polisario freed more than 400 Moroccan prisoners in August.

But some U.S. leaders feel more needs to be done.

''There is still a close relationship between the Castro regime and the Polisario Front,'' said U.S. Rep. Lincoln Díaz-Balart. ``The fact that there is an armed group such as the Polisario Front seeking power as an independent nation state in the Western Sahara, supported by terrorist regimes such as the Cuban regime is a concern.''
Posted on Mon, Sep. 19, 2005

CIA The World Factbook
Africa
Area:
total: 266,000 sq km
land: 266,000 sq km
( 102,703 square Miles)
water: 0 sq km
Area - comparative:
about the size of Colorado.



























People of Western Sahara
Population:
273,008 (July 2005 est.)