After more than thirty years stranded in one of the most inhospitable areas of desert on earth, refugees from Western Sahara are using the arts to highlight their plight. Peter Culshaw met Manu Chao and Javier Bardem at the Sahara Film Festival. How do you get attention for your cause if you are a marginalised people, ignored for thirty years in the desert? When I spoke to several Saharawi refugees in a camp this month in Southern Algeria they felt they had two options. One: violence – freedom fighting, from their point of view; terrorism, according to their enemies – or two: hosting an arts festival and getting some celebrities along to garner some media attention.
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The mile high club…. from Guardian.co.uk blog
The in-flight entertainment on the Air Algeria flight from Algiers to Madrid was first class: as the flight took off, world music stalwart Manu Chao and his sidekick Madjid were strumming their guitars and despite discussion among the air stewards, they then simply carried on playing. A friend of Manu’s – a musician, philosopher and bar-owner called Johnny MacLoud – announced with a megaphone that appeared from nowhere that everyone could smoke as well (although no-one did). Half-way across the Med, people were dancing in the aisles.

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The representative of the Polisario in Australia Mr. Kamal Fadel was invited by the Politics Society at the University of Sydney on 5 May 2008 to give a talk on Western Sahara: The talk was attended by a large group of students and the Australian public.

The talk was under the title: Western Sahara: The last colony in Africa, the role of the UN in decolonisation and conflict resolution.

The Saharawi representative gave an overview of the process of decolonisation in Western Sahara which begun during the Spanish period when the UN put the Territory on its list of Non-Self-Governing Territories in 1963. Continue reading →