THE WASHINGTON POST: SAHARAWI WOMEN PLAY AN IMPORTANT ROLE IN THE STRUGGLE FOR INDEPENDENCE

The famous american newspaper The Washington Post has recently published an interesting article on the forgotten conflicto in Western Sahara. The american journalist Loveday Morris has visited the occupied Saharawi capital, Laayoune, and has written the following article in which has underlined the important role are playing the saharawi women in the struggle for freedom and justice in what is known as the Africa´s last colony: Western Sahara.

      

LAAYOUNE, Western Sahara — As dusk enveloped the salmon-pink houses of this capital city, the brightly colored robes of women stood out in a mass of protesters chanting for independence from Moroccan rule.

While other colonies in Africa threw off occupiers one by one, this rocky desert expanse on the continent’s northwestern coast remains a disputed territory controlled primarily by next-door Morocco and locked in a nearly 40-year-old forgotten struggle for the right to choose its fate. And in a Muslim-majority region where women are often marginalized from politics, women have taken an unusually prominent role in Western Sahara’s independence movement.

 

  Their involvement has spanned a guerrilla war with Morocco and, for the past two decades, a mostly peaceful protest movement. Female activists in the former Spanish colony attribute the phenomenon to a combination of the indigenous Sahrawi population’s moderate interpretation of Islam and the freedom they derived from their nomadic roots — but also, perhaps counterintuitively, to the prevalence of traditional gender roles, which they say give women the time to demonstrate.

“This is a pride for us, that this is led by women,” said Aminatou Haidar, a Nobel Peace Prize nominee and the most recognizable face of Western Sahara’s nationalist movement.
But as its duration shows, the campaign is an uphill battle that has so far been won by Morocco, which annexed most of Western Sahara after the Spanish withdrawal in 1976. Morocco argues that Western Sahara — home to abundant fishing grounds, lucrative phosphate mines and offshore oil — is an integral part of its territory and that separatists represent just a fraction of the population of about 500,000.
That is now probably the case, because Moroccan citizens — whom the Moroccan government entices to the area with tax breaks — are thought to outnumber the remaining 150,000 or so Sahrawis inside the territory by at least two to one.
The United States, like most nations, does not recognize Morocco’s sovereignty over Western Sahara, but calls by the Sahrawi people for a referendum on independence have made little headway. Experts attribute that to a combination of Moroccan lobbying against the proposal, lack of international will to upset one of the region’s most stable countries and arguments between Morocco and the Sahrawis’ rebel-movement-turned-government-in-exile, the Polisario Front, over who should vote.
Moroccan officials argue that an independent Western Sahara is not viable and that longtime enemy Algeria is backing the cause to stir problems.
“There is no room for a failed state in the region,” Moroccan Deputy Foreign Minister Youssef Amrani told reporters in May. “It will fall into the hands of extremists.”
Despite the independence movement’s regular protests, the victories are small. Still, it appears to have brought about a shift in Moroccan government policy, which now officially supports making Western Sahara an autonomous region within the Moroccan state.
“Even if I don’t reach that day when the Sahara is independent, I am completely convinced that the next generation is going to live the day of independence,” Haidar said.  

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/africa/in-western-sahara-women-play-large-role-in-forgotten-struggle-for-independence/2013/07/07/f46f23ec-dd06-11e2-85de-c03ca84cb4ef_story.html