Skip to main content

HUNDREDS MARCH IN TENERIFE FOR A FREE SAHARA

SANTA CRUZ DE TENERIFE, Saturday July 10 2010
HUNDREDS marched through Tenerife's capital Santa Cruz on Saturday in support of Western Sahara's struggle for national liberation.
by JAMES TWEEDIE
The demonstration, organised by the Tenerife Platform in Support of the Referendum, called on the kingdom of Morocco to honour its pledge to hold a vote on the independence of the north-west African nation less than 100 miles from the Canaries.
Protesters also demanded the release of Sahrawi political prisoners in Moroccan jails, a moratorium on arms sales to the kingdom and a halt to fishing in Sahrawi waters by Spanish trawler fleets Рa concession negotiated by the current Socialist Workers' Party government of prime minister Jos̩ Luis Zapatero.
Members of Sahrawi national liberation movement POLISARIO Front were joined by trade unionists the United Left (IU) party, the Canarian Committee for Solidarity with the Peoples (CCSP) and campaign umbrella group Assembly for Tenerife (AXT).
Many protesters waved the flag of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR). A group of Sahrawi children bore a giant flag between them. The shrill ululating cries of Sahrawi women mixed with the staccato beating of drums
The march paused briefly outside the national government's sub-delegation on its route from Plaza Weyler to the dockside Plaza Candelaria, where POLISARIO delegate to Tenerife Hamdi Mansur thanked the Canarian people for their “support, solidarity and good wishes.”
He vowed to continue the struggle until the “peace, liberty and justice” were won for the Western Sahara.
The SADR declared its independence in 1976 and controls a quarter of the country along its western border. Some Sahrawi 300,000 refugees languish in five camps around Tindouf in south-west Algeria.
There are about 7,000 Sahrawis in Spain, of which 300 live in the Canaries, 200 of them in Tenerife. They were joined temporarily by 157 7-12 year-old children from the Tindouf camps on July 6th as part of the Holidays in Peace initiative.
Sahrawi resident Andalla Labed said: “We live in different countries but we are all one family and one tribe.
“We all all for one thing – the right to a referendum on self-determination.”
The independence struggle was highlighted late last year when Collective Of Sahrawi Human Rights Defenders president Aminatou Haidar spent 32 days on hunger strike at Lanzarote airport, after being denied readmission to her native country and deported on return from a trip to the US.
Western Sahara was invaded and annexed from the north by Morocco and south by Mauritania in 1975, by agreement with colonial power Spain on its withdrawal.
POLISARIO had already begun its independence struggle in 1973, and it continued to wage a guerilla war against the new occupying nations.
Mauritania withdrew from the south and recognized Sahrawi independence in August 1979, but Morocco immediately annexed the liberated territory.
A UN-brokered ceasefire between Morocco and POLISARIO in 1991 rested on the condition that Morocco hold a referendum on independence the next year.
Morocco has never honoured that agreement, and under present king Mohammed VI has instead offered only limited autonomy under Moroccan rule.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A warm welcome

. Why blog on ARS NOTORIA? I have set up this website,  ARS NOTORIA ,  (the notable art) as an opportunity for like-minded people like you to jot down your thoughts and share them with us on what I hope will be a high profile blog. . ARS NOTORIA is conceived as an outlet: a way for you to get things off your chest, shake those bees out of your bonnet and scratch that itch. The idea is that you do so in a companionable blogging environment, one that that is less structured - freer. Every article you care to write or photograph or picture you care to post will appear on its own page and you are pretty much guaranteed that people will read with interest what you produce and take time to look at what you post. Personal blogs are OK, but what we long for, if we can admit it, are easy-going, loose knit communities: blogging hubs where we can share ideas and pop in and out as frequently, or as seldom, as we like. You will be able to moderate and delete any of the comments made on 
6 comments
Read more

Phil Hall: The Taleban are a drug cartel disguised as an Islamist movement

Truly the Taleban could have arranged as many bombings and terrorists acts as they liked in the UK. There are many Pashtun young men and women in cities in the UK who still have large extended families back in Afghanistan and who could be forced into doing something they should not. But guess what. So far there have been no attacks by Afghans on British soil. Why? It is a mystery. News comes from Afghanistan and the recent UN report that the Taleban and the drug trade are intertwined and that now the Taleban, who are mainly Pashtun, are officially in command of an international drug cartel.  News comes from Afghanistan that Taleban drug lords go to Dubai to live high on the hog and gamble and sleep with women and luxuriate in all the that the freedom to consume has to offer, while their footsoldiers, peasant fighters, are deluded and told that they are fighting a patriotic religious war.  And though they are told they are fighting a religious war what really matters to them in tr
21 comments
Read more

Our Collective Caliban

At the risk of seeming digitally provincial, I’m going to illustrate my point with an example from a recent Guardian blog. Michel Ruse, who is apparently a philosopher, suggested that, whilst disagreeing with creationists on all points, and agreeing with Dawkins et al on both their science and philosophy, it might be wiser and more humane (humanist, even) not to vilify the religious as cretinous and incapable of reason. Which seems reasonable, to me. According to many below-the-line responses he is a ‘half-baked’ atheist, ‘one of the more strident and shrill New Apologists’ and, apparently, “needs to get a pair’. And that’s just from the first twenty comments. A recent article by a screenwriter at a US site was titled ‘Why I Won’t Read Your Fucking Screenplay.’ Tough guy. I wonder how his Christmas cards read. I’m going to sound like a maiden aunt dismayed by an unsporting bridge play and can perhaps be accused of needing to ‘get a pair’ myself (although, before you
14 comments
Read more