OCTOBER 12, SAHARAWI NATIONAL UNIT DAY

PUSL.- On October 12, 1975, the Saharawi National Unity was proclaimed in the Ain Bentili region. Day in which all the Saharawis announced their adherence to the principles of the Polisario Front and their total willingness to sacrifice and to embrace the armed struggle for the liberation and independence of Western Sahara from colonialism and subsequently against the Mauritanian and Moroccan occupiers.

Forty-five years later this spirit of sacrifice and struggle remains intact.

On this date the Saharawi people claim their legitimate right to be recognized as a people and defend their territory.

Today, Morocco continues to illegally occupy Western Sahara and implement a policy of repression and torture against the legitimate owners of this territory. Tortures, imprisonment and disappearances fail to overcome the strong will of the Saharawis to recover what belongs to them by justice.

This genocide practiced by Morocco against the Saharawi population is carried out with complicity and shameful silence on the part of the international community and mainly the Spanish governments that continue to avoid their moral and legal responsibility with that people. We cannot forget that Spain is still the administering power of this territory. Not only do they do nothing to prevent this crime but they finance it by signing illegal economic agreements with the Moroccan occupier.

The Saharawi people respond with an unshakable and exemplary peaceful struggle against the brutality of the occupier. Young and old, women and men take to the streets to protest against the occupation, against the violation of rights, against the unjust conditions to which they are forced to live, against the plundering of their natural resources. They are grouped into associations from which they denounce this situation. They maintain continuous contacts with international human rights organizations. All this being aware of the terrible consequences that these activities can mean for their own lives, as the continuous imprisonment of Sahrawi activists, who are serving sentences in Moroccan prisons under the most inhuman conditions, violates the different conventions that regulate the treatment that must be given to prisoners.

In the words of the late Saharawi leader Mahfud Ali Beiba “The Saharawis use the force of law and Morocco relies on the right to force”