|
The Polisario: An indigestible hastily prepared meal |
|
|
|
Written by Ali Haidar
|
|
Wednesday, 11 February 2009 05:10 |
 Throughout its long and tireless fight for the Western Sahara decolonization, Morocco has asserted its rights as well as geographic, historical, political, legal and ethnical titles and even the simple logic that each of the Maghreb countries has the right to its Saharan extension. The Kingdom was convinced that it was not wrong unless it should reexamine all the frontiers and accept the creation of a State less peopled and too extended stretching from the Atlantic to the Red Sea. The Saharan space, as for its historical vocation, has never been a divisor, but rather the fosterer of a civilization source of unity inspiration. The Spanish-Moroccan dispute over the Sahara decolonization, which would have been solved in the 1960’s, has been drawn in many endless negotiations after the discovery of phosphate deposits. Madrid government has simultaneously practiced pressure over the Jmaa members and the National Sahrawi Party in order to mobilize around its independent cause, but unsuccessfully, while starting an anti-Moroccan propaganda campaign directed by Laâyun Radio and Realidad Newspapers. All these tactics were foiled. |
|
Read more...
|
|
Morocco-Spain: Shady relations |
|
|
|
Written by Ali Haidar
|
|
Wednesday, 28 January 2009 02:05 |
 Between the southern and northern shores of the Mediterranean, there are no people belonging to two different cultural spheres, nevertheless, sharing as much historical, cultural and economic interference as the Moroccan and Spanish peoples. Despite this interference, Morocco and Spain neighborhood has been often characterized with tensions. Spain’s foreign policy vis-à-vis Morocco is often changeable, changes being the result of the Spanish domestic policy data variation, as well as the two major issues opposing for a long time the governments of both countries. For Morocco, the way in which the Spanish government deals with the Western Sahara conflict and the Moroccan territorial claims relating to the enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla and the neighboring islands reflects that there is an obvious difference between the declared objectives of the Spanish foreign policy with respect to Morocco and its practice in reality. |
|
Read more...
|
|
Sahara autonomy, a solution depending on the local democratic guarantees |
|
|
|
Written by Ali Haidar
|
|
Monday, 19 January 2009 03:08 |
A whole process, the countdown relating to the professional local elections and one third of the Chamber of Counselors was started upon a timetable to begin on June 12th and end on October 2nd, 2009. These consultations will take place within a democratic perspective promoted to the rank of a real strategic priority. The main aim should be the establishment of the basis required for an effective decentralization developed as far as possible. The constitutions adopted since Morocco’s independence, (1962-1970-1972-1992), comprise clauses relating to the management of the local democracy. With the completion of the territorial integrity, and the Sahara being recovered by the Kingdom in 1975, the region has been automatically integrated within the constitutional framework of the decentralization promulgated in 1976, and modified to respond to the happening development, and which can be adapted not only to a developed centralization situation but also to a more decentralizing legislative regime as well. If the Saharan regions’ integration in Morocco has been carried out without any difficulties despite the colonial division and the separatist movement, this is mainly due to the allegiance to the King of Morocco, to the strong social link uniting all the elements as well as to the intensity and density of the mutual social relationships between the Southern Sahrawi Moroccans among themselves and with the other Northern Moroccans. |
|
Read more...
|
|
Morocco-South Africa: For the record. |
|
|
|
Written by Ali Haidar
|
|
Wednesday, 17 December 2008 07:59 |
 The ethnic disparity, or more precisely the apartheid, which has been rampant in South Africa, much more than anywhere, viewed as an original and the most complicated political and social situation in the world, has been consistently condemned by Morocco before all the international authorities since the independence of the Kingdom in 1956. Since 1948, the Pretoria government has adopted the apartheid policy. This term, in the minds of the whites, means a separate development and a complete spatial separation of ethnic communities. A system identified with the strict racial segregation. Long before the A.N.C., led by O. Tambo, launched the armed struggle in 1966, when Nelson Mandela was imprisoned, Morocco has been one of the most effective supporters of the South African people’s struggle. A support represented by a major figure of the Moroccan, North African and African militancy, the late Abdelkarim El Khatib, during the "Chahid" program, broadcasted posthumously by the first Moroccan television on the 4th April, 2008, in an undoubtedly certain and credible testimony, owing to the morality and intellectual as well as political honesty of the deceased. |
|
Read more...
|
|
Morocco-Algeria: moderation, a message worth a call for good neighbourhood. |
|
|
|
Written by Ali Haidar
|
|
Wednesday, 03 December 2008 16:00 |
 If we believe the daily Arabic newspapers “Al Quds Al Arabi”, in an article published on the 17th November, 2008 (N0. 6052), the Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika has dismissed Mr. Abderrachid Boukerzaza, Minister of Communication, and Mr. Hamraoui Habib, Director General of the Algerian Television, following a television program during which a professor in political sciences has pronounced insulting words while talking about the King Mohammed VI of Morocco. If the source is credible, the measure taken by the Algerian President, even if it is in relation with the current situation, should be perceived as premonitory. Messages exchanged between the two Chiefs of State have always been mutually respectful and have always given off this conviction that the destiny of the two countries is the same, and that they are condemned to share the same objectives, because the two peoples have suffered a great deal from a shared history. But if the Algero-Moroccan trouble is the result of geopolitics created out of “colonial partition as compensation”, Moroccans and Algerians need first of all some peace, as there is no development without peace and we can not guarantee prosperity and well-being with cynicism, neither extinguish fire with fuel. |
|
Read more...
|
|
|