Dear Ralph
How are you? How's the hotel business? I told someone the other day to get a bright orange Opel, they didnt understand, but i figure that you would ;)
In respect to the Morroco / Western Sahara indaba... may i say that i initially asked bcos i though it would be interesting to see what celebrations are held in Western Sahara to mark their independence day, each year.
After all i live on the south south-east of Africa and Western Sahara is on the north north-west of Africa; and since i know what we do to mark our independence - i figured it would be good to find out what they do... u know the Americans have fireworks and professional sports contests, the South African we tend to sing and dance a lot - and every five years we throw in an election.
However I am concerned that Western Sahara doesnt seemt to have such a day. from what you have said it seems like Western Sahara is some part of Morroco? that cant be right, because Morroco is NOT a member of the African Union, while Western Sahara is a founding member.
You speak of the need for peace in Western Sahara, but surely this means that if somebody was attacking Western Sahara, from outside of the African Union, then that attack would be an attack on the AU as a whole, by a foreign enemy?
I understand that enlargement of the EU has led to the North African Mediteranean countries losing their "first choice sweatshop" status for the European economy, which has led to unemployment in North Africa; and further that these economies had previously competed with Spain and Portugal (among others) for the right to supply agricultural produce to the EU, and that when Spain and Portugal became members of the EC in the mid 1980's things started to slide, since Portugal and Spain could now supply goods tarriff free in the EC.
But why should Western Sahara suffer because Morroco couldn't follow the example of countries like Algeria in respect of job creation and poverty alleviation? Why, because theres easy money to made form the oil or gas or something in the Western Saharan sands?
Lets arm the Western Saharans - give them tanks, planes, ships, trains, trucks, armoured personnel carriers, attack helicopters, ground to air missiles, bombs and maybe some automatic rifles and tonnes of munitions, explosives and other such military hardware... after all we make all this stuff in Africa anyway. lets train their national army, deploy an AU peacekeeping force to improve the capacity of the Western Saharan armed forces and then...
Should anyone attack them - then at least by the time the AU launches its response to this foreign attack- at least the Western Saharans will be able to defend themselves - in pursuit of their god given right to self determination.
By the way... 29 Feb (1976) is independence day in Western Sahara... thats like next week sometime... Happy Independence Day from the people of the African Union... ;)
Avishkar Govender
eThekwini-Durban
KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa
SADC - AU