Tribune de Geneve: Swiss daily denounces deportation of sahrawi kids to Cuba by Polisario
Algeria-Cuba, Politics, 9/24/2003

The Swiss daily "Tribune de Geneve" denounced in an article published recently the deportation of thousands of Sahrawi children to Cuba by the Algeria-backed Polisario guerrilla movement that claims the independence of Moroccan southern provinces.

Under the title "from the desert to the Caribbean, the deported of the Sahara," the paper shed light on the tragedy of Sahrawi children who are deported in their early age from the Moroccan Sahara to Cuba in the name of a backward-looking and dual interest ideology.

Swiss journalist, Antoine Maurice, quotes the testimony of fatimatou Mansour, who was separated from her family when she was 12 years old together with 600 other Sahrawi children to Cuba onboard an old Soviet ship.

Polisario authorities tell the children they are going for holidays, hiding the real sufferings of separation, said the journalist, explaining that Fatimatou lived 12 years in exile in a boarding school in the Isle of Pines, currently called Isle of Youth. At the beginning they were hundreds of young children, as time went by they became thousands of girls and boys gathered in special institutions.

Actually, underlined the Swiss paper, the children were sequestered and isolated, in order to form a new generation of socialists, without having the right to leave the island. Food intakes varied according to the fluctuations of the US embargo, the paper reports.

"Tribune de Geneve" described how Fatimatou returned to Tindouf (southern Algeria) after twelve years of sequestration in the Cuban Island and how she fled to Morocco where she was "welcomed as a lost child."

The tragedy went as the world intellectuals kept silence and it was only in 1999, that the UNESCO mentioned the plight of these children in one of its reports, says the journalist, who hails the fact that many of those who escaped the Isle of Youth like Fatimatou are now allowed to recount their experience before the Human Rights Commission in Geneva, MAP reported.

Previous Stories:
  Algerian- Cuban bilateral relations   (3/6/2002)
  Algeria, Cuba for developing bilateral relations   (5/8/2001)
  Butaflika gets a message from Castro   (1/15/2001)

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