Vol. 73/No. 47      December 7, 2009

Aminatou Haidar was arrested November 13 at the Moroccan-controlled airport in El Aaiún, the capital of Western Sahara. She was returning from an awards ceremony in New York.

Haidar was held for 24 hours, her passport was confiscated, and she was finally forced onto a flight to Lanzarote, Canary Islands, a Spanish possession.

“They wanted to force me to recognize that Western Sahara belongs to Morocco,” she told the Spanish daily El País.

After arriving at the Canary Islands airport, Haidar tried to immediately return to Western Sahara, where she lives. At first she was told there were no available seats on the next flight. Then the police told her she could not leave Spain without a passport.

Inés Miranda, who is Haidar’s lawyer, pointed out the hypocrisy of the Spanish government, which refuses to grant asylum to many immigrants seeking to come to Spain, “while Haidar, who is not asking for it, is forced to stay here.”

Morocco’s regime has occupied Western Sahara, a former Spanish colony with large phosphate and iron ore deposits, since 1975. The pro-independence Polisario Front fought a war against the Moroccan regime from 1976 until 1991.

In 1991 both sides agreed to a UN-sponsored referendum on self-determination for the Sahrawi people, but the Moroccan government has consistently blocked a vote.

Since September the Moroccan government has stepped up actions against supporters of the Sahrawi struggle. In October seven Sahrawi independence supporters were arrested at the airport in Casablanca, Morocco. They were returning from a trip to western Algeria where they spent nine days at Sahrawi refugee camps in Tinduf that are run by the Polisario Front.

On November 6 King Mohammed VI gave a speech commemorating the 34th anniversary of the “Green March,” the Moroccan invasion of Western Sahara.

“Contact with the enemy is treason,” he said, calling on the security forces to act more forcefully against “the adversaries of the territorial integrity of Morocco.”

In 1987 at the age of 20, Haidar was disappeared and tortured by the Moroccan secret police for more than three years. In 2005 she was jailed for seven months after being beaten by police during a demonstration protesting the occupation of Western Sahara.

This is the first time the Moroccan government has tried to force a Sahrawi activist into exile in Spain, El País said.

“I’ve seen many things in my life, but I never imagined that degree of complicity of the Spanish state with Morocco would go so far,” Haidar said. “I prefer a jail in the Sahara to being detained in Spain.”

On November 21 several hundred people joined a demonstration outside the airport in Lanzarote to support Haidar’s right to return.  
 
 
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