In October 2021, I, along with a small delegation of government officials and journalists, landed at Tindouf airport to be sent to the Saharan refugee camps in Algeria.

Before leaving, I felt that this would be one of those experiences that leave scars that do not disappear even after the most difficult operation. And I still feel the dust of the desert in my tears. It was October and it was hard to breathe, I don’t want to imagine what will happen on an August afternoon. We traveled to different camps, we listened a lot, we were touched, we were surprised by their resilience.

This was the first international visit even before the outbreak of Covid 19, that global pandemic, from which, by the way, the “GovernmentRead more …” did not send a single vaccine to the thousands of people who survived for decades in these camps, where most of the population in this harsh exile did not know otherwise a life other than this, among substandard housing made of sand bricks, tents and excess water.

International law has always made it clear that Morocco has no right to the Sahara.

We have gone from successive victories in international courts to European Union fisheries agreements with Morocco to deplete fish resources stolen from the Saharawi people. And that, despite this, the EU insists on resorting to and supporting this robbery, so that a significant part of the fish that you can buy today in the supermarket of the person who finances FAES Aznar, or in any large store, is fish stolen from the Saharawi people who survive thousands of miles from their sea.

They greatly valued our symbolic visit. We met Brahim Ghali fully recovered from covid 19 which left him one step away from extinction and from whom he was saved thanks to emergency treatment in Zaragoza, a fact that cost the Minister of Foreign Affairs his job because despite his Spanish nationality we have seen the first steps of how far espionage has come Pegasusmore than supposedly in charge of Morocco.

The people of the Sahara knew that part of their lifeblood was linked to international solidarity and especially to Spain as the administering power for the effective decolonization of the Sahara. They have always felt the support of a significant part of the citizens, but they made it clear to us that they are very sorry for the betrayal they represented, especially in Felipe Gonzalez and Zapatero, the presidents under the initials PSOE, who were the ones who made the most promises to the cause, and those who gave the most. They were horribly deceived when they came to power to do exactly the opposite of what they had promised.

In those days of October 2021, the Polisario Front wanted to explain to the world that they had returned to arms, after years of truce, and took journalists to the front of the war (we politicians were not allowed), to the area controlled by Western Sahara. them. The rockets returned to Moroccan bases and military posts near the great wall of sand that separates the occupied zone from the liberated zone. Morocco responded with state-of-the-art drones that continue to kill civilians to this day. All this was a silent war, which was not and is not occupied by either a news release or a column in any newspaper.

A return to arms was a strategy after decades of keeping Morocco out of a self-determination referendum that was the UN’s final solution to the conflict in the 1990s. Since then, representatives of the United Nations Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara (MINURSO) have been dispatched, always ending in complete failure and replacement of representatives.

International law has always made it clear that Morocco has no right to the Sahara, but the situation was blocked for decades and David continued to beat Goliath in international courts before the EU handed over power to the Moroccan regime. Later, we witnessed scandals related to the extent to which corruption emanating from Qatar or Morocco has penetrated the European elite.

In March 2022, the nth betrayal of the PSOE government took place, despite the fact that the executive branch was involved in Izquierda Unida and Podemos. Sánchez, without any justification, qualifies the “Moroccan proposal for autonomy” as “the most serious, realistic and credible” solution to the “conflict”. In other words, a kick under the nose of international legitimacy.

All this comes after months of tension with Morocco playing with the lives of migrants both on the border of the cities of Ceuta and Melilla and in the Canary Islands.

This treacherous, unjustified change of the scenario, when all the Cortes Generales opposed it, was supposed to theoretically establish a new neighborhood and stop suffering from constant blackmail by migrations. The first episode of this new relationship was the massacre at the Melilla Falls, of which we will never know how many sub-Saharan Africans were killed by the Moroccan gendarmerie and Spanish troops.

The first episode of this new relationship was the massacre at the Melilla Falls, of which we will never know how many sub-Saharan people were killed by the Moroccan gendarmerie and Spanish troops.

Since then, we have not seen any progress. The customs of the autonomous cities are still closed by Morocco, which plays with the times and dedicates itself to daily humiliation of the Spanish government with every possible gesture. A government that yields to everything that is asked of it in exchange for who knows what. What’s next, the cession of airspace over Western Sahara?

I do not know if we will ever know the reason for such reverence, shame and embarrassment, such disrespect for international legitimacy.

After the betrayal of Sanchez, we are worse on all fronts, and if not, then tell the ceramic sector, which accounts for 25% of my province’s GDP, is on the verge of collapse due to the shutdown of Algerian gas.

I do not know if we will ever know the reason for such reverence, shame and embarrassment, such disrespect for international legitimacy, betrayal of people who still, many of them, have Spanish identity cards, as they were before they were abandoned. in 1975. And so they continue.

I hope that if one day I can shake off that desert dust that I still wear on my skin, it will be on the Atlantic beaches of Western Sahara, handed over to their rightful owners. In the meantime, we will not drop their case in the Upper House, despite the fact that the government shows us disrespect in every response.


Carlos Mulet He’s a senator for the Compromise.