Opinion: Silenced in the Sahara

"Saharawi Gandhi" was expelled from the Western Sahara and is now on hunger strike.

Timothy KustuschNovember 20, 2009 10:52Updated May 30, 2010 12:14

Prominent Western Sahara independence campaigner Aminatou Haidar speaks to the media while on a hunger strike at Guacimeta airport, on Spain's Canary island of Lanzarote, Nov. 17, 2009. Haidar, who was expelled by Moroccan authorities from the disputed territory, says she is being kept in Spain's Canary Islands against her will, according to rights groups. (Borja Suarez/Reuters)

WASHINGTON — Leading Saharawi human rights activist Aminatou Haidar is on a hunger strike after being detained by Moroccan authorities and flown to the Canary Islands.

Haidar was arrested in the El Aaiun airport of the Moroccan-controlled Western Sahara on Nov. 13. Within 48 hours, she was flown to the Canary Island of Lanzarote (Spain), where she immediately began a hunger strike to protest her treatment by Moroccan and Spanish officials.

The exact details of the expulsion are disputed. According to an initial report by the royally-mandated Moroccan Arab Press Agency, Haidar was arrested by security forces for “failing to abide by police formalities.” Later reports added that she voluntarily renounced her Moroccan identity, handed over her passport and flew to the Canary Islands.

Haidar — who spent seven months in the infamous “Black Prison” of El Aaiun in 2006 after participating in an independence demonstration — has been denied re-entry to the Western Sahara, where her two children live, on the pretense that she no longer has a travel document.

Haidar, however, tells a different story. According to her account, upon arriving in El Aaiun, she refused to cite her identity as “Moroccan” on the customs form required to enter the territory. She was in possession of a Moroccan passport and has used the document to travel abroad. The Western Sahara is not recognized as Moroccan territory by any international organization or country, besides the Kingdom itself.

Haidar was then detained, stripped of her passport, forced to board a plane against her will, and flown out of the country. In the Lanzarote airport, she began a hunger strike when she was informed that the Spanish government would not let her leave the island. She was removed from the airport twice by the Spanish Civil Guard, but re-entered both times. Her hunger strike is complicating a stomach condition.

“I am seriously anxious about the life of Aminatou,” said Malainin Lakhal, the director of the Saharawi Journalists and Writers Union (UPES), in an email. “Doctors have just found that she has an ulcer in her stomach. She is very weak because she has been alert since Friday and went through a 24-hour interrogation and struggle against the Moroccan police.”

Haidar — often referred to as “the Saharawi Gandhi” — has been awarded several prominent human and civil rights prizes, including the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award and the Train Foundation’s Civil Courage Prize. She was returning from her trip to New York to accept the latter when she was detained.

Haidar is one of Western Sahara's most prominent human rights defenders because she led campaigns for a referendum to determine Western Sahara's relationship to Morocco, which has occupied the territory since 1975 despite the International Court of Justice ruling denying its claims to sovereignty in the region. She has worked through non-violent means to organize peaceful demonstrations in support of the people of Western Sahara's right to self-determination and to denounce human rights abuses by the Moroccan government.