Luis Ayllón
Leaders of Sumar and Podemos, among them the second vice-president of the acting government, Yolanda Díaz, took part yesterday in a pro-Saharawi demonstration in Madrid in which the head of the Executive, Pedro Sánchez, was criticised for his alignment with Morocco.
The demonstration was called by the organisations Coordinadora estatal de Asociaciones Solidarias con el Sáhara (CEAS-Sáhara) and Diáspora Saharaui, in defence of the Sahara’s right to self-determination and independence from Morocco.
The march, organised under the slogan ‘Western Sahara. International law the way; independence the destiny’, some 2,500 people took part and slogans such as ‘Morocco, murderer’, ‘Where are human rights’, ‘Sánchez, pay attention, the Sahara is not for sale’ and ‘Sahara freedom, the Polisario will win’ were chanted.
Yolanda Díaz expressed her support for the Saharawi people and noted the “discrepancy” she maintains with the PSOE, despite being part of Pedro Sánchez’s government.
This is not the first time that the vice-president has expressed her opposition to Sánchez’s reversal of Spain’s position on the Sahara in April last year, when he supported Morocco’s autonomy proposal for the former Spanish territory.
Despite this discrepancy, Sumar, the party led by Yolanda Díaz, has signed a pact to support Sánchez in his investiture as prime minister. The current vice-president has been careful, however, not to include any reference to Western Sahara in the text of the pact so as not to make Morocco uncomfortable.
To compensate for this absence, according to El Confidencial, Díaz has reached an informal eleven-point agreement with the Polisario Front, in which she pledges to promote the demands of the Sahrawi representatives during the next legislature.
For this reason, yesterday the vice-president was at the forefront of the demonstration of pro-Saharawi organisations in Madrid, expressing her disagreement with her own government’s policy on Western Sahara. Several people rebuked Díaz, accusing the government of which she is a member of of abandoning the Saharawis. “If you are here, you have to face up to us. It’s no good being here one day and then turning your back on us”. We are fed up”, a woman shouted.
Díaz remarked to journalists that “there is no relativism in human rights or in the defence and application of international law”. She also took the opportunity to express her solidarity with the civilian population of Gaza, whose “children – she said – are being massacred, murdered and are victims of absolute impunity and with the consent and silence of the international community”.
At the same march, the Sumar member of the Spanish parliament Tesh Sidi, of Saharawi origin, said: “We demand today in this demonstration that the Spanish state decolonise and assume responsibility towards the Saharawi people”,
For her part, Podemos leader Isa Serra pointed out that they do not agree either with Sánchez’s diplomatic turnaround or with the “blackmail of the Moroccan people”. “It is essential that in the next government there is coordination in foreign policy and that it has a clear position in defence of human rights”, she said.
The Polisario Front representative in Spain, Abdulah Arabi, denounced the Madrid Tripartite Agreements of 1975, considering them to be the “cause of the long and inhuman suffering of the Saharawi people”. For this reason, he demanded that Spain “fulfil its responsibilities and, above all, its commitment to the United Nations to complete the decolonisation process”, reports Europa Press.
The solution, according to the Polisario representative, lies in the application of international law “which allows the Saharawi people to decide by means of a referendum of self-determination stipulated and included in the resolutions of the United Nations”.
