Aminatou Haidar ”a triumph for justice, international law, human rights and the Saharawi cause”
On 17 December Aminatou Haidar who has been on a hunger strike for 32 days at the airport in Lanzarote, returned in triumph and dignity to her homeland in the western Sahara.
On her return to Laayoune Aminatou was greeted by more than 300 supporters with shouts of ”Viva Aminattou!”, ”Sahara libre!” and ”Victory!”
Sahrawi activist Aminatou Haidar, has managed a major propaganda coup with her hunger strike, she has captured the attention of the international community for her cause.
The Moroccan Government has had to concede in the face of intransigence from Aminatou Haidar, her courage has forced the international community to remember the illegal occupation of Western Sahara.
Haidar has returned to her land unconditionally without apologizing to King Mohammed VI of Morocco or publicly recognize Moroccan nationality as the Moroccan Government demanded during her 32 day hunger strike.
Haidar, was hospitalized this week after she suffered internal bleeding, this forced Morocco to concede out of fear that if she died she would have become a very prominent Sahrawi martyr.
Following the agreement, Haidar said her return to El-Ayoun is”a triumph for justice, international law, human rights and the Saharawi cause.”
On 13 November 2009, at 12.30 pm, human rights defender Aminatou Haidar was arbitrarily arrested by the Moroccan security at El Ayoun airport in Western Sahara just after getting off the plane coming from Las Palmas airport, Canary Islands.
Aminatou Haidar is a prominent human rights defender, the chairwoman of the Collectif des Défenseurs Sahraouis des Droits de l´Homme - CODESA (Collective of Sahrawi Human Rights Defenders), She was awarded the 2008 Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award, the Austrian, 2007 Silver Rose Award, the Spanish, 2006 Juan Maria Bandres Human Rights Award, and the 2009 Civil Courage Prize, she was also nominated for the European Parliament Sakharov Prize in 2005, for the Amnesty International USA’s Ginetta Sagan Fund Award, and for the 2008 Nobel Peace Prize.
On November 14th, on her way back from receiving the Civil Courage Prize from the Train Foundation in New York on Oct. 21, the Morrocan police detained Haidar for 12 hours of questioning at the El-Ayoun airport.
Haidar’s family were waiting for her outside the airport for about an hour after the plane had landed, the building was surrounded by police and intelligence agents, they were prevented from meeting or seeing her, and they were not informed of her whereabouts.
On her entry form, Haidar had left the citizenship line blank and listed her place of residence as “Western Sahara” rather than “Morocco” - which she says she has frequently done in the past without any problems, but this time the Moroccan authorities said she had waived her Moroccan citizenship, so they confiscated her passport and put her on a plane, back to Lanzarote in the Canary Islands, against her will and without any papers.
Aminatou Haidar has been on a hunger strike since November 16 at Lanzarote airport she has been demanding to be given back her passport and allowed to return to El-Ayoun.
The Spanish Foreign Ministry initially told Haidar she could not leave the country because she did not have a passport, but then changed their minds and offered her refugee status, then on November 28, the Minister personally telephoned to offer her Spanish nationality and a passport, as an “exceptional measure.” which she also rejected because she wanted to return to El-Ayoun, her homeland rather than to live in exile.
The Spanish Foreign Minister contacted the Moroccan authorities, and asked that they send Haidar a passport, “either her old one or a new one,” but Moroccan officials said Haidar must “apologise” before her passport would be returned.
In statements to Spain’s leading newspaper, El País, Haidar said that “from the very start, I saw there was complicity between the Spanish and Moroccan governments, and that my being sent back to Spain was a political matter, she added “The Spanish government must rectify this flagrant violation of human rights, of Spanish law, and of international treaties,” she aso said it is her convictions and conscience that tell her what she has to do, not those who support or oppose her, “neither the Polisario Front, nor Morocco, the United States, Moratinos or anyone else.”
El-Ayoun is the capital of Western Sahara, which Morocco annexed after Spain pulled out in 1975. Although fighting came to a halt in 1991 in the phosphate-rich disputed desert territory on the northwest coast of Africa bordered by Morocco, Algeria and Mauritania, the Polisario Front continues to demand independence, but Morocco has only offered “autonomy.”
Polisario says that Spain is complicit with Moroccan occupation of the Saharan territory, that for economic reasons the the Spanish government does not dare risk annoying the Moroccan government, and “is turning a blind eye to human rights violations and to that country’s rejection of the United Nations 1991 and 2003 plans.”
The 42-year-old Haidar, one of the leading activists for self-determination for Western Sahara, was forcibly disappeared, imprisoned and tortured for several years in Moroccan prisons along with hundreds of other Saharawi activists.
The diplomatic episode has refocussed international attention on the Western Sahara issue as the Spanish government even asked UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to help negotiate a solution.
In the UK, Members of Parliament from all three main political parties tabled a motion stating that “this House condemns the escalating wave of human rights violations against Saharawi human rights activists…(and) is dismayed over the expulsion of prominent Saharawi human rights activist and winner of the 2009 Civil Courage Award Aminatou Haidar from Western Sahara.”
Amnesty International declared that it “deplores the decision of the Moroccan authorities to expel human rights defender Aminatou Haidar from Western Sahara on 14 November, and urges the authorities to immediately allow her to return to her home in El-Ayoun. Amnesty International is concerned that she is being targeted because of her human rights work and her public stance in support of self-determination for the people of Western Sahara.”
Human Rights Watch Middle East and North Africa director Sarah Leah Whitson said “Morocco cannot summarily denaturalise and deport its own citizens because of the way they fill out entry forms at the airport. They must let Haidar return home and stop harassing her for peaceful advocacy of Sahrawi self-determination.”
The U.S. State Department said in a communiqué that “The United States remains concerned about the health and well-being of Saharawi activist Aminatou Haidar…We urge a speedy determination of her legal status and full respect for due process and human rights.”
Haidar’s supporters around the world include 87-year-old Portuguese Nobel Literature Laureate Jose Saramago - who visited her at the airport; East Timor President José Manuel Ramos-Horta, a Nobel Peace Prize-winner; Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodovar; Spanish Oscar-winning actor Javier Bardem; Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano; British filmmaker Ken Loach; and British actor and former Monty Python, Terry Jones.
The talks on Western Sahara remain at a standstill over non compliance with agreements which negotiated by the U.N. in 1991 and 2003.
In 1991, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan appointed former U.S. secretary of state James Baker as his special U.N. envoy to Western Sahara, and the U.N. Security Council established the U.N. Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara (MINURSO), which was to oversee the ceasefire that went into force that year, and to organise a referendum in which Sahrawis would choose between integration with Morocco and independence.
In 2003, the U.N. passed resolution 1495, known as the Baker Plan II, which proposed autonomy for a five-year period, followed by a referendum including the option of independence.
The current deadlock is based totally on the failure of Morocco to abide by the “mutually-acceptable solution” that was reached by Rabat and the Polisario in 1988, approved in its final form by the Security Council in 1991, and refined further by the Houston Accords signed by both parties in 1997.
In August 1988, both Polisario and Morocco declared that they accepted a UN proposal for a ceasefire, exchange of prisoners, repatriation of refugees and the withdrawal of Moroccan forces from the territory, to be followed by a referendum on self-determination, with the choice being between independence and integration into Morocco, the final version of the Settlement Plan, was approved by the UN Security Council in 1991.
Morocco and the Polisario Front had formally agreed in 1988 that the referendum should be based on the electorate as defined by the 1974 census of the territory….but in April 1991 King Hassan of Morocco insisted that the voter rolls be expanded well beyond what has previously been agreed and include people who had long been settled in Morocco.
When the process seemed in danger of coming to a stop, the personal envoy of UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, the former U.S. Secretary of State James A. Baker III, managed to rescue it through intensive diplomacy. In a series of meetings which he held with Morocco, Polisario and Algeria in April 1997, all three parties reaffirmed their commitment to the 1991 Settlement Plan. Further rounds in London and Lisbon paved the way for a final meeting in Houston on 14-16 September 1997, agreement was reached by the parties on all the issues blocking implementation of the Settlement Plan, including the key issue of voter identification.
MINURSO resumed the registration of voters. “In January 2000, MINURSO, after years of meticulous work, at last arrived at what it regarded as a fair determination of the valid electorate for the proposed referendum, namely a total electorate of 86,386.” At that point, once again the end of the crisis was in sight and the referendum could have been held in short order. But Rabat had other ideas. MINURSO was “promptly faced with no fewer than 131,038 appeals against its decisions…, the vast majority of these Moroccan-sponsored applicants.” The Settlement Plan was dead.
The Polisario Front signed up to the 1991 Settlement Plan and, having made a number of concessions on the voter identification issue and on certain secondary matters, was clearly prepared to abide by its outcome…. It cannot be said of Polisario that it went back on any of its undertakings.
Morocco has repeatedly rejected UN arbitration of important issues when the arbitration went against Moroccan interests, and demonstrated that they only want a referendum if the outcome could be guaranteed to be in their favour.
The so called autonomy initiative is nothing more than a cynical attempt by Morocco to leverage its friendship with the U.S. and France to prevent self-determination in occupied Western Sahara and to gain formal recognition of its illegal annexation.
The Moroccan Autonomy initiative is essentially a public elations exercise designed to give the impression that Morocco is a progressive nation seeking and end to a long-running conflict, up against an intractable enemy.
Morocco seeks to legitimize its occupation of Western Sahara for the benefit of the international community so that it can continue its conquest of Western Sahara and claim it is just dealing with an uprising by an Algerian proxy separatist group in Moroccan territory.
Morocco appears to have no intention of addressing the partition or refugee issues, in fact partition is denied, by Morocco which claims that the Polisario-controlled areas do not exist and of course that Polisario is an Algerian front organisation, their propaganda line is that these areas are in fact a “buffer zone” set up be Morocco for security purposes.
Morocco denies the existence of the Sahrawi refugee camps around Tindouf, claiming either that the refugees are Moroccans or a few Sahrawi held against their will, and that the majority are people from Sub Saharan Africa who fled drought in the Sahel in the 1990’s.
The autonomy plan cannot provide a solution to the conflict unless it addresses the status of the Polisario-controlled zone and the refugees in Algeria which it does not. Even if Morocco were to gain approval for the plan and somehow “normalise” its occupation, it would be left with a rump Sahrawi state in the Polisario controlled areas with angry refugee population.
Polisario will not surrender their “Free Zone” to Morocco willingly, and the Sahrawi refugees are unlikely to return voluntarily to live under Moroccan occupation so there will either be a continuation of the status quo or worse Morocco may attempt to expand their occupation of Western Sahara through military force.
Meanwhile, Aminatou Haidar has won a big propaganda victory by demonstrating to the world the status of Sahrawi’s under Moroccan occupation, under international law she is entitled to hold a Moroccan passport and Moroccan citizenship because Morocco occupies the territory where she lives, which is not Morocco, but is the non-self-governing territory of Western Sahara.