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Western Sahara protest camp tests Morocco's nerve
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Western Sahara protest camp tests Morocco's nerve
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By Lamine Ghanmi
AKDIM IZIK, Western Sahara (Reuters) - In the protest camp where 86-year-old Omar Harwache and his family have set up a makeshift home, the rows of khaki-colored tents flapping in the wind stretch as far as the horizon.
Harwache...
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Saharawi women stand near their tent at the protest camp on the outskirts of Western Sahara's main city Laayoune November 6, 2010.
Credit: Reuters/Youssef Boudlal
By Lamine Ghanmi
AKDIM IZIK, Western Sahara |
Sun Nov 7, 2010 2:59pm EST
AKDIM IZIK, Western Sahara (Reuters) - In the protest camp where 86-year-old Omar Harwache and his family have set up a makeshift home, the rows of khaki-colored tents flapping in the wind stretch as far as the horizon.
Harwache and the thousands of other people in this camp amount to be the biggest protest in three decades in Western Sahara, a former Spanish colony annexed by Morocco in 1975 and now the subject of Africa's longest-running territorial dispute.
Negotiators from the Moroccan government and the Polisario movement, which wants independence for Western Sahara, will meet near New York this week for talks mediated by the United Nations in the latest attempt to unblock the conflict.
Protesters at the camp, on the outskirts of Western Sahara's main city, Laayoune, steer clear of the status question and focus instead on bread-and-butter issues: they say they want the Moroccan government to provide more jobs and better housing.
"We have been patient for 35 years but we cannot wait any longer. We have seen nothing from the state," said Harwache, who chose to leave his home in Laayoune to come to the camp.
But while the demands are social, the scale of the protest -- the people in the tent camp represent a sizeable chunk of Western Sahara's native population -- is testing the Moroccan government's tolerance for dissent, and its nerve.
In the past, anti-government protests by indigenous Western Saharan people, known as Sahrawis, have been broken up by Moroccan security forces.
Dozens of Moroccan police and military vehicles are deployed around the camp, and it can only be reached by passing through at least four checkpoints. At night, a military helicopter flying overhead rattles the silence of the camp.
"They are taking aerial pictures of the camp to try to gauge the number of people in the tents," said Hamadi Khiya, a member of the camp's own security patrol.
There has been one violent incident in the month since the camp was set up, when a Sahrawi boy was shot dead at a checkpoint nearby.
Moroccan security forces said they came under fire from a car that the boy was traveling in, and shot back in self-defense. Sahrawi activists reject that account.
INVESTMENT
Nevertheless, supporters of the Moroccan government have praised its restraint.
"The state has been very responsible in dealing with the protest," said Hassan Maoulainine, head of the Rabat government's Regional Investment Center in Laayoune.
"They deployed security forces to guard against ill-intentioned types who might enter the camp by stealth and cause a fire or do some other harm and blame the state," said Maoulainine, who is Sahrawi but supports Moroccan rule.
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