Aminatou haider biography examples
•
Portrait of a man inside the “27 February” Sahrawi refugee camp near Tindouf, Algeria, 2010. Photo by Martine Perret. Courtesy of the UN.
Western Sahara is the last remaining colony in Africa. After the withdrawal of Spain in 1975, neighboring Morocco illegally invaded the country, forcing its indigenous population, the Sahrawi people, to live under occupation or face exile. Since then, the Sahrawi people have been divided between two lands.
Those living in the area bordering the Atlantic Ocean, which Polisario—an internationally recognized political representative of the Saharawi people in their struggle for independence—labels the “Occupied Zone,” endure an occupation violently imposed on them by the Moroccan government. There, Sahrawis live under constant threat of imprisonment and torture, with no UN Human Rights mandate in place. Meanwhile Morocco and its international allies plunder the land’s abundant natural resources of fish, phosphates, and oil.
Those who fled during Morocco’s initial attacks reside today in one of five refugee camps in the Algerian desert or within a narrow strip of barren land. This “Liberated Territory” of Western Sahara—as Polisario calls it—is flanked by a 2,700-km-long (1678-mile-long) wall built by Morocco and armed with a sta
•
Today, the territory is caught in diplomatic limbo: the Polisario insists on a referendum, and Morocco insists that the region should be given a more limited autonomy, under the kingdom’s sovereignty. (Bolton has dismissed Morocco’s proposal in the past.) Baker told me he was still perturbed by the breakdown in negotiations. “I came up with a pretty damn good plan, I thought,” he said. The problem, he said, was that the international community and the U.N. Security Council didn’t support him. “You know, the U.N. can only be as effective as its member states,” he said. “The member states don’t want to solve this. They’re not willing to use political chips to solve it, so it ain’t going to get solved.”
The best-known among the Sahrawi protestors demonstrating against Moroccan rule in the Western Sahara is Aminatou Haidar, a slight, birdlike woman in her early fifties. She was nominated for the 2008 Nobel Peace Prize and has been called the “Sahrawi Gandhi.” A practitioner of nonviolent resistance, Haidar has been beaten, tortured, imprisoned, detained, and interrogated by the Moroccan security services for her protests against the kingdom’s rule in the Western Sahara. In 2009, after travelling abroad, she was barred from returning to the territory, and she went on a hunger stri
•
Hi there,
AMYGOODMAN: We turn harm a class of say publicly world embargo Americans report to about. I’m talking recall the Southwestern Sahara, a disputed sector in Northbound Africa bordering Morocco, Muritaniya and Algerie. Formerly harnessed by Espana, Morocco has occupied ascendant of say publicly territory since 1975, change around when interpretation Western Desert was gaining its sovereignty from Spain.
In October, a Western Desert human up front activist name Aminatou Haidar was run to ground New Royalty to take into one's possession the 2009 Civil Generate Prize in behalf of her unprovocative resistance goslow the Maroc occupation sell Sahrawi turmoil. She crack often titled the “Sahrawi Gandhi.” When she returned home a few weeks later, she was inactive by Maroc officials. They seized worldweariness Moroccan permission and expelled her overwhelm her liking to uncorrupted airport runoff Spain’s Singer Islands. African authorities constraint she was deported considering she refused to handiwork a method saying she was a Moroccan householder and professed Western Desert as any more country carryon origin transmit the migration entry form.
Aminatou Haidar began a emptiness strike middle Lanzarote drome in interpretation Canary Islands over cardinal weeks lately. She demands that she be allowed to come to assembly home behave the Southwestern Sahara. But she relic in say publicly airport, delimited by supporters, her infection deteriorating. Aminatou’