
The Fading Dream to Liberate Africa’s Last Colony - pmcpinto
https://newrepublic.com/article/133561/fading-dream-liberate-africas-last-colony
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AtlasLion
People really need to read up about the alternative, The polisario Militia is
not exactly a step forward for the Saharan population.

Mohamed Abdelaziz their Secretary General, is in power since 1976 (when Gerald
Ford was US president). Pilsario has been sending kids for indoctrination to
Cuba for decades.

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pearjuice
The Sahara belongs to Morocco just as much as "Israel" belongs to Palestine
(which, according to the UN, is an actual occupied territory). Besides,
speaking of "Africa's Last Colony", when is Spain giving Ceuta and Melilla
back to Morocco?

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gorkamorka
Ceuta and Melilla were part of Spain lomg before Morocco even existed, so no.
There is nothing to return to Morocco.

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AtlasLion
Most of Spain was in Moroccan hands for even longer than Ceuta in Spanish
hands, should Morocco now ask for al andalous back?

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BurningFrog
These are all ancient Roman lands, by Caesar!

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smcl
"Last colony" in Africa is a strange way to describe it. what about Reunion
and Mayotte?

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newjersey
Don't know about these so this is an outsider's view: With the people
overwhelmingly voting to stay with France, Mayotte sounds less like a colony
of France than Scotland is a colony of England. The much larger Reunion with
no native population doesn't seem to have much of an independence movement
looking at the Wikipedia page. If they're colonies, maybe they'd be worse off
independent? I mean who'd really benefit from independence? I'm sure as soon
as they become independent, they'd get kicked out of the euro zone...

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saiya-jin
as my french friends told me, these places get tons of subsidies from France
for free (whatever reason there might be), they can come to work in France/EU
anytime. yet they live in their tiny little paradises, far from stressful
mainland. best of both worlds. why the hell would anybody want to leave? :)

~~~
Hasknewbie
A colony in the general sense is a territory that has been invaded and is
permanently occupied, and where the native population does not have equal
rights and cannot decide on their independence (or integration, since the idea
is that they should have a choice).

Although it once was the case, it is incorrect to refer to Mayotte and Reunion
as colonies. They are French departments. Their inhabitants are not "allowed
to work in France", they _are_ French, if they move to metropolitan France,
they're just changing department. Saying they're a colony would be like saying
Alaska or New Mexico are colonies. Moreover Mayotte did not vote to "stay" in
France, the referendum was about switching from one status to another
(essentially, from Oversea Department to 'normal' department) and they chose
the most convenient one (shocking, I know).

It is true that they receive some extra subsidies, mostly because of their
isolated location (which makes the cost of life higher). Due to the high level
of unemployment, they also receive social subsidies, but that's just like any
other department in France (but of course you won't hear a lot of complaints
about how the North-Eastern regions are costing the rest of the country a ton
of money...). Moreover they also receive less government investment when it
comes to infrastuctures, i.e. schools or hospitals (even though they have to
contend with tropical diseases and hurricanes).

The trope about "lazy black people under the tropics" (as opposed to Fench
citizens who happen to live in regions where the economy is bad) is a common
dog whistle in France. Much like with American nativists, there is this thing
with implying who is a 'real' French and who isn't, and it seems to upset a
number of white French that there are also black French who have been part of
France for longer than they themselves may have been, so depicting them as
remote people who are only in it to take money is quite convenient.

To get back to the main topic, it's true that "last colony" is a bit weird.
There are other more-or-less similar conflicts in Africa (Casamance, Cabinda,
Chagos) where the locals could refer to themselves as colonized.

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IkmoIkmo
This is a decent article but it's flawed in some ways.

Some of it is simply outright wrong:

> The narrative of return and independence also presents many practical
> challenges. In 1976, the Moroccan “Green March” sent 350,000 Moroccans into
> the Western Sahara to settle, massively altering the demographics in the
> sparsely populated region.

The Green March was a peaceful march of 350k unarmed Moroccans into the
region, that pushed out the Spaniards who had colonised it. Not a single
bullet was fired, and these 350k people didn't settle there at all, they went
straight back home.

On the other hand, in the past 40 years people have come to settle in the
region, mostly driven by business opportunities as it's being invested in by
Morocco. This is changing the demographics, but very much unrelated to the
Green March. It's these quite clear errors that show the author isn't doing
the proper research.

Anyway what bothers me the most is that it's so one-sided. I don't mind when
authors take up a position at all, and I too am empathetic with the plight of
the Sahrawi's, but it's a deeply complex issue with many facets left unspoken.
Like the role of Algeria, which has financed the military rebellion for
decades. And not for moral reasons, because they think it's the 'right thing
to do'. Morocco and Algeria had been in a cold war, one was allied to the
west/us, the other to the soviet union. Algeria also had no direct access to
the ocean outside of the med. sea, and wants to build a road through the
western sahara to get to a free standing port. None of this is mentioned at
all, we only hear of the poor human interest story of a refugee girl who's
described as a perfect western hollywood story: poor but desperate to go to
school etc, read it yourself it's a bit corny.

Fact is, Morocco's various dynasties have ruled over these lands a long time.
The Sahrawi's are berbers, just like Moroccans (and Algerians and Tunisians
btw, they're all very similar peoples). Morocco is willing to invest heavily
into the region, and is looking to give large degrees of autonomy, like has
been ongoing in Morocco itself (a country which has many different berber
groups, who've been getting increased autonomy, respect, special educational
programmes, cultural recognition etc). But Morocco is not looking to lose
territory to a few hundred thousand people under the influence of Algeria. The
notion that this vast piece of land, if left alone by Morocco, will be
independently and without other influences (e.g. Algeria) be ruled by a few
hundred thousand people, and run as a successful nation, more so than as a
part of Morocco, is I think naive.

So I fully support their right to self determination, but I'm also cognisant
that it's paired with a complex geopolitical story that's left unsaid in this
article, and honestly I think the best and most sensible outcome is an
autonomous region within Morocco.

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BurningFrog
How precisely were the Spaniards "pushed out"?

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IkmoIkmo
They left, because they didn't want to risk a colonial war.

See for example France and Algeria just a decade earlier, which cost between
350k and 1.5m lives depending on the estimate.

Around the 1970s essentially it was clear that everything would be decolonized
before the end of the 20th century, except places where you actually had
'your' people live a long time, like in Ceuta which is effectively Spanish.
The Western Sahara wasn't like that, Spaniards didn't live there, it was just
a military occupation for the resources there, so they knew eventually they'd
have to give it up. No reason to risk a bloodshed then.

In the 1950s or 1960s there was still a lot of resistance to various
independence movements, by mid 1970s there was no real question of if colonial
powers would have to withdraw, only when. It was a sensible Spanish decision,
only very poorly executed.

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BurningFrog
You wrote "The Green March was a peaceful march of 350k unarmed Moroccans into
the region, that pushed out the Spaniards who had colonised it"

That sounds like they were pushed out by the marching Moroccans during a few
day, not that they calmly decided it was time to move to Spain.

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IkmoIkmo
They were pushed out because if they didn't leave there'd be bloodshed. How
hard is that to imagine?

At the same time, they calmly left. These two things are not mutually
exclusive.

i.e. if a squatter goes to my house while I'm on vacation and lives there, for
personal safety reasons he has a gun as do I, and I come home and make it
clear it's not going to end well for either of us if he's going to stay, and
the squatter makes the sensible choice to leave behind what is not his
peacefully and go back to where he came from, you can say that he was pushed
out by my presence on the scene. After all, if I hadn't been there he'd likely
have stayed.

That's the best analogy I can think of to explain it to you.

Decolonisation was rarely peaceful, in this case it was. But even if it was
peaceful, it doesn't mean Spain left for no reason. They were pressured to
leave my hundreds of thousands of civilians descending on a piece of land that
wasn't theirs with the support of the country. That showed them, if they
wanted to keep the land, there'd be a colonial war. And if the 50s and 60s
taught the world anything, it's that colonial powers always lose their stake
in the end, but not before hundreds of thousands of unnecessary lives get
ruined. Further, it creates animosity that lasts for many decades. Algerians
and French for example still have deep wounds that need to heal, this was a
post WWII war that saw massive death, destruction, torture, assassinations
etc, it was quite brutal. Spain made a more sensible choice in this particular
territory.

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BurningFrog
You can think of eastern Ethiopia as the last African colonies, since the
Ethiopian Empire grabbed a lot of it during the "Scramble for Africa".

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ZenoArrow
This particular international dispute is news to me, but based on this article
I hope the Saharawi people will have their land returned to them without
having to rely on force. It's sad that diplomacy can result in stalemate for
so long and that conflict is the means by which we seem to have to fall back
on to inject some urgency into finding a resolution.

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saiya-jin
basically this is a single-hand decision of Moroccan royalty, they do it
because they can, and maybe also they don't want to lose their face while
losing half of Morocco territory. If you travel there, you'll clearly see even
people look completely different in those regions - Moroccans are arabs, these
people are africans. their cultures are worlds apart and they really have
little in common. one were conquered by the other, recently, and the world
just stood and didn't care (at least it didn't end up in usual african civil
war with hundreds of thousands dead and millions driven out).

this place is so far not worth any fight for anybody in the west and morocco
is playing nice & easy with europe/us.

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SRSposter
>Moroccans are arabs Thats a wide generalisation. There are Moroccans who
speak arabic and Moroccans who speak berber, just because they speak arabic
doesnt mean that they are Arabs.

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caf
"facts on the ground" \- that anodyne term that whitewashes over occupation,
dispossession and suppression the world over.

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ommunist
A pile of hypocricy. Why on Earth if you are so much about self-determination
of Saharawi, you force them to learn English in a soft game of neocolonialism,
instead of putting money into development of their local industry and culture?
Because you want these people to convert to mobile workforce, seduce them to
leave and get resources from their land.

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walrus01
Force them to learn English? It is the defacto language of science and
technology. For a population of less than 500,000 they're not going to develop
locally created curriculum for, for example, masters degrees in electrical
engineering and medical sciences in the Berber language.

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avar
Icelanders have both those things in their own language at a current
population of 350,000, and have had it since before they were less than
250,000.

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notahacker
Iceland has never consisted of 165000 people living in tents in a desert
refugee camp who never had a single culture or dialect in the first place, and
doesn't rely on dealing with foreign NGOs for things as basic as their water
supply.

As far as I'm aware, the indigenously-developed Icelandic curriculum also
teaches native Icelanders to speak English to a good standard, which they rely
on heavily when interacting with the outside world without consider having to
do so a terrible colonialist imposition.

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ommunist
it did. in the 12th century. but self esteem of the bonds was so hogh, that
they managed just ok.

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tiatia
Bullshit article.

How about Cabinda?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabinda_Province#Ethnic_ground...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabinda_Province#Ethnic_grounds_for_self-
determination)

