Readers' corner
Sahara slips
Sir-- 'Remembering the forgotten war' ( Al-Ahram Weekly, 28 April-4 May) discusses the Western Sahara issue, citing remarks by the American linguist and thinker Noam Chomsky posted on YouTube. In his remarks, Chomsky speaks about the spring of Arab revolutions for just under 15 minutes, of which he gives less than two minutes to the Western Sahara.
First of all, concerning the illegal annexation of the Sahara, this is totally untrue, as the American thinker hasn't familiarised himself adequately with the history of the Maghreb area before the advent of French colonialism. Before Morocco was divided between two imperialist powers, France and Spain, with British blessing, the Sahara was part of Morocco. The International Court of Justice in The Hague concluded as much in 1975, and it was upon its ruling that imperialism was brought to an end in this region and that the Sahara returned to the mother country.
The interpretation of the American thinker was unfortunately erroneous when he described what happened in the Moroccan city of Laayoune in November as the real trigger of the Arab revolutions, whereas what happened was no more than protests against the unsatisfactory social conditions of a group of several hundred inhabitants of the southern Moroccan area. Dialogue has started with the people in question with a view to meeting their demands for better living conditions and jobs. Agreement was reached to end the sit-in as soon as a solution is reached with the local authorities in the area. All this took place under the supervision of local and international human rights organisations as well as the UN Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara (Minurso). Therefore, the incidents in Gdeim Izik Camp in Laayoune cannot be in any way linked with the recent wave of revolutions that brought down some regimes and destabilised others.
As for human rights monitoring by Minurso, I should mention that human rights in Morocco has undergone unprecedented improvement over the past two decades. Accordingly, the respect of human rights on Morocco's soil is guaranteed by the law and the constitution. This is a fact that is well known to the UN and other international organisations involved in human rights. This is also the reason the UN Security Council, in its recent resolution No 1979, passed less than two weeks ago, kept the Minurso mandate, as the international force monitoring the 1991 ceasefire agreement, unchanged.
The inaccurate information contained in your article with regard to the Western Sahara issue, coupled with the fact that he failed to mention that thousands of Moroccans are being held in detention camps in Tindouf, Algeria, and that their plight is being used for propaganda by the Polisario and others, in addition to the need to keep Egyptian public opinion well informed of the nature of the situation in the Western Sahara, away from narrow-minded political calculations which have brought havoc to the Maghreb area, impoverished its people, and impeded its progress, make me count on your publishing this letter.
I have full of confidence in you and in your venerable establishment which has been, and will always be, a supporter of Arab unity.
Amb Mohamed Farag Al-Dokali
Ambassador of Morocco to Egypt
Not what you say
Sir-- Re 'Defusing another UN time bomb', ( Al-Ahram Weekly, 31 March-6 April) I am not a "Libyan-American". My mother was a citizen of Egypt. She was Miss AUC and a well-known personality in Cairo in the 1930s, then in Iraq in the 1940s. I did grow up in Libya. I do not relate to hyphenated designations. I am many things, including American, but the "L-A" designation is factually incorrect. Also, the Libyan socialist experiment is called "Jamahiriya" not "Jumhuriya". The former is a new term designated for the Libyan system, denoting "state of the emergent masses". The latter simply means "republic" as used by various other Arab states.
Husayn Al-Kurdi
Cairo
Egypt
After Bin Laden
Sir-- Now if we can just get the same results with the economy.
Bret Fields
New York
USA
Like the Taliban
Sir-- I cannot count how many times I visited Egypt in the past 40 years. The past years I noticed intolerance among uneducated Muslims towards their Coptic fellow Egyptians. I think they do not realise that they are playing with fire. Tourism is delivering jobs just for these people. If the situation becomes unacceptable, the Copts can easily integrate into the West due to their education and modest number of children. Then, tourism which is extremely fragile at the moment, will collapse. This would really be a big disaster and lead Egyptians to poverty. I wonder if the leaders of these fanatic movements realise this fully. It would be a disaster for Egypt and a free way for those fanatics to destroy first (their own) Christian culture and after that the ancient monuments in the Valley of the Kings, the same what the Taliban did with the ancient Buddhist monuments in Afghanistan.
Peter de Hoo
Leeuwarden
The Netherlands
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