Monday, December 21, 2009

Free Sahara


These signs are all over Spain. In Barcelona I saw a protest in front of the city hall and in Seville a girl was on hunger strike also in front of city hall to support Aminetu Haidar. This is what I gather of the situation:

-The girl's name is not Sahara like I thought at first, it's Aminetu Haidar.
-She is not a girl, like the poster seems, she's in her forties and a mother of 2.
-She is a western sahara separtist activist-so she wants western sahara to be independent of Morocco because of human rights and displacement concerns.
-She flew to the US to recieve a human rights award, and was denied re-entry into her hometown by Morocco because on her passport she wrote “Sahrawi” as her nationality and “Western Sahara” as her country of origin.
-However, Spain would not receive her either, and she spent over a month in the airport of Lanzarote in the Canry Islands (this is Spain) staging a hunger strike, wanting to re-enter her hometown.
-A few days ago she had to go to the hospital, clearly after not eating for more than a month.
-Now Morocco allowed her to re-enter, and no one has apologized or admitted wrong doing.

She definately drew a lot of attention to her cause, at least in Spain, I'm not sure internationally. Is this news in the US and the rest of Europe?


   

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