The Saharawi Movement for Peace (MSP) continues to gain space and credibility with the Saharawis of Tindouf who were once seduced by the separatist theses of the Polisario militia. The political party was created by former members of the separatist militia and intends to organize a congress in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria in the Canary Islands to make its program better known.
Without a political program and without a breakthrough, an entrenchment on unchanged and unachievable positions and with the violence of terrorist enterprises, the Polisario rushed in and dragged with it thousands of people who are now blocked in the Tindouf camps in Algeria. .
The separatist movement created and sponsored by Algeria fueled for 50 years the idea of a separation between Morocco and its Sahara when the kingdom recovered its lands occupied by Spain. He raised entire generations in exile in dehumanizing conditions, which he attributed to Morocco.
If rare people have managed to get out of the nets of the camps with their lives saved, it is at the cost of great physical sacrifices, sufferings characterized by torture exercised by the leaders of the Polisario.
Today these survivors have been able to reach Morocco, Spain or Mauritania, from where they have lodged a complaint and denounce at each opportunity, the abuse and the operating methods of the armed militia. Among them are Sahrawis who have given their support to the MSP, a political party which wants to impose itself as a third way, which advocates negotiation and peace and above all the end of the dispute.
This is how the political movement born from the bowels of the polisario in 2020, will organize a congress in the Canary Islands with the support of several Canarian and Spanish personalities including the former Spanish Prime Minister, José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, the former ministers Defense, José Bono, and Foreign Affairs, Miguel Moratinos.
The event will see the participation of 200 people, including former members of the Polisario, to talk about their experience, the reasons why they left the militia, and why today they are betting on the MSP rather than the Polisario.
However, the new political party is not starting out winning to impose itself against an organization which has been fighting for its survival for almost 5 decades, and its ambitions and its project are not clear. Already, accusations of links with Morocco, Spain have been issued by the leaders of the Polisario to discredit him after his defection to the separatist militia.
In June 2022, the leader of this political movement, Hach Ahmed, published a column in the Spanish press in which he explained why the Polisario had lost and why he is waging a fierce fight against the MSP.
‘The nervousness and concern within the Polisario leadership and its resort to a dirty war against the MSP is understandable, as it is the first time in fifty years that it feels its legitimacy and representativeness are seriously threatened by a more democratic and tolerant political project which, in addition to being composed of authentic Sahrawis, bears no trace of war crimes and human rights violations and is capable of putting the Sahrawi people on the path to ‘a future of peace and prosperity,’ he wrote on Atalayar.
Regarding the fall of the Polisario movement, “time and events have shown that the Polisario has ended up deviating towards a kind of irrational social political model that combines tribal loyalties and the most perverse methods of political and ideological totalitarianism”, a- he indicated.
“The truth is that the current Polisario leadership has gone astray since the emergence of the MSP. This is what led him to make his most serious mistake in recent times: the unilateral breaking of the ceasefire on November 13, 2020, a decision that made him abandon strategic positions on the ground and provoked the positioning of influential countries, including Spain, who interpreted this gesture as a declaration of war on the peace efforts of the UN”, continued the one whose party welcomed Spain’s new position on the Sahara. in support of the solution based on the compromise submitted by Morocco.
“The leadership of the old armed movement, born in the heat of the Cold War, could not digest, because of its sectarian nature, that from its entrails emerged an opposition movement which knew how to impose itself, in less than two years, as an alternative through a moderate, viable political project capable of getting the Sahrawis out of the tunnel,” Hach Ahmed continued.
The secretary general of the party asked the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs for Sahrawis who do not have Spanish nationality, residing in Morocco or Mauritania, to be able to travel to the Canary Islands to attend the Congress.
This event does not yet have a precise date, but it should be organized either before or after the meeting of the Security Council on 30 October.
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