Extract from President Obama speech before the UN General Assembly 2009

...This Assembly’s Charter commits each of us -- and I quote -- "to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women." Among those rights is the freedom to speak your mind and worship as you please; the promise of equality of the races, and the opportunity for women and girls to pursue their own potential; the ability of citizens to have a say in how you are governed, and to have confidence in the administration of justice. For just as no nation should be forced to accept the tyranny of another nation, no individual should be forced to accept the tyranny of their own people. (Applause.)

As an African American, I will never forget that I would not be here today without the steady pursuit of a more perfect union in my country. And that guides my belief that no matter how dark the day may seem, transformative change can be forged by those who choose to side with justice. And I pledge that America will always stand with those who stand up for their dignity and their rights -- for the student who seeks to learn; the voter who demands to be heard; the innocent who longs to be free; the oppressed who yearns to be equal.

Democracy cannot be imposed on any nation from the outside. Each society must search for its own path, and no path is perfect. Each country will pursue a path rooted in the culture of its people and in its past traditions. And I admit that America has too often been selective in its promotion of democracy. But that does not weaken our commitment; it only reinforces it. There are basic principles that are universal; there are certain truths which are self-evident -- and the United States of America will never waver in our efforts to stand up for the right of people everywhere to determine their own destiny. (Applause.)

Philippe Mora opens his diary

I was in Sydney’s Chinatown, enjoying delicious steamed lobster with ginger and attending the recent Film Festival, when I got a dramatic phone call. An old friend and cameraman for three of my films, Carlos Gonzalez, was calling from Los Angeles to say that a West Saharan woman, Fetim, from Tindouf refugee camp in Algeria, was flying in to Sydney to denounce a film portraying her as a slave. Carlos was a friend of Fetim, and he asked me would I meet her at the airport. He said the family was very distressed at the allegations and felt betrayed by the Australian film-makers who had lived with them on the pretext they were making a documentary about a family reunion.

Frankly, after decades of battles I have issue fatigue. But I knew Carlos had impeccable credentials on this issue, known as the Forgotten Conflict. He had risked his life in 2006 to go into occupied Western Sahara to film interviews with indigenous children who had been allegedly tortured by the Moroccan occupiers. (Morocco had invaded in 1975.) He was arrested and interrogated for eight hours on 3 June 2006 by Moroccan police and intelligence officers, including the notorious alleged torturer Mohammed El Hassouni, known as ‘Moustache’. He was then promptly deported and denounced in the Moroccan press, to our great amusement, but not to his, as being a spy for Hugo Chavez and Mossad. Since I knew he was neither but a director of children’s shows for Nickelodeon in Hollywood and a generally standup fellow, I agreed to help his incoming ‘slave’ friends.

Fetim and her husband Baba arrived chainless early in the morning and I greeted them with Kamal Fadel, the Australian representative of the Polisario, the political organisation that had flown them out. Charismatic, smart and open, I immediately liked Kamal and his two guests. Slaves with passports! They headed for friends in Glebe, where all slaves hang out when they’re in Sydney.

Then the whole thing blew up. Fetim’s dramatic denunciation of the film Stolen that night at the festival ended up on the front page of the Sydney Morning Herald. The ABC’s 7.30 Report went after the flaws in the film. Stolen received a barrage of blistering criticism for mistranslations, re-enactments, lack of releases from leading participants, Mondo Cane-type sensationalism, blurring of facts, maps and history. One of the film-makers’ aunts vigorously defended the film on blogs. Meanwhile I had re-connected with old mate, wit, great writer and political connoisseur, Bob Ellis, and as an unlikely Poirot and Sherlock Holmes duo we made some inquiries. An angry UN interviewee cried foul at the film, as did a key translator. Ellis and I exchanged opinions on the film way too rude, if not obscene, for publication in this august magazine. The Morocco-Polisario conflict underlying the debate was not a left-right debate as the film-maker’s aunt tried to make out. In fact, James Baker, no pinko, had tried to help the Polisario with vigour in the Nineties.

Producer Tom Zubrycki announced people were trying to ‘do a job’ on the film. He backed out of an interview with me. We met tyro filmmakers Dan Fallshaw and Violeta Ayala in a bar and complained the problem was that people were jealous of them, that Ellis had fought with his wife (sic), that slavery is a state of mind, and other irrelevant inanities. Ellis, like a cultural Grim Reaper, said to Fallshaw, who blanched: ‘You are going to jail, son.’

The story continued last week when a revamped version, with piquant deletions, was shown at the Melbourne International Film Festival with a disclaimer belatedly added by co-financier Screen Australia. Questions about whether Polisario-haters in Morocco contributed funding to the film remain unanswered.

Other serious queries remain about this film, and as a sometime documentary film-maker I maintain that fakery and fraud, if that is what this is, hurts us all as film-makers, journalists and film-goers. It’s my opinion, for example, that it is either dishonesty, negligence or incompetence not to get releases from people one is portraying in a film making such grave allegations. I am no saint, but certain standards should be de rigueur. Perhaps there was acute First World arrogance in this situation. A few Australians pontificating about alleged slavery and really hurting people in the guise of helping them is a bit rich. An Italian NGO in the camp described Ayala as a ‘mythomaniac’.

By contrast, a recent positive highlight was vicariously going into orbit and repairing the Hubble telescope. My wife Pamela and I met six of the astronauts who fixed it in May at a special event at the Academy in Beverly Hills. The astronaut film-makers took up 30 cameras including an IMAX 3D camera that could only film for eight minutes. At a mission cost of US$1.1 billion to fix the Hubble, the eight-minute film element must be the most expensive movie ever made. The bemused astronauts, dressed in Jetsons-style retro blue overalls, mingled with us Hollywood types over drinks and snacks. We watched extraordinary footage of the mission with the jubilation of being in space popping out of the screen.

I am working on a 3D film about the life of Salvador Dali with producer Fred Bestall of Delux Films in Luxembourg, so I am immersed in notions of surrealism. I don’t think one needs to contrive surrealism because arguably life itself is often surreal. A Daliesque thought: perhaps molecules from the hands of refugees on my hand rubbed off on the Hubble mission astronaut’s hand? The Hubble is searching for the origin of the universe, the refugees search for justice and food for their children. Do these connections mean anything or are they random events? Is all this surreal? Dali himself said: ‘I don’t do drugs. I am drugs!’
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Source: http://www.spectator.co.uk/australia/5289343/diary.thtml

Western Sahara’s "Wall of Shame"

How the longest active military wall continues to divide the Saharawi people
By Timothy Kustusch — Special to GlobalPost
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ARABUNI CAMP, Algeria — It is almost half the size of the Great Wall of China, four times the length of the wall in the West Bank, and 16 times longer than the Berlin Wall ever was, but few have heard of the 1,600-mile-long Moroccan military wall that divides the Western Sahara.

On the western side of the wall, Morocco exerts de facto control over what the Saharawis call the “Occupied Territories.” On the eastern side, the Saharawis’ Polisario Front governs and maintains its military forces.

The Saharawis refer to the Moroccan barrier as the “Wall of Shame,” not only because it divides the 160,000 Saharawi refugees in Algeria from their families and friends in the Moroccan held territory, but also because it threatens the lives and livelihoods of the thousands of Saharawi nomads that still wander through the Western Sahara’s deserts.

Construction of the wall began in 1980. Since 1975, the Saharawi People’s Liberation Army (ALPS) had been battling the Moroccan and Mauritanian armies (until the latter’s defeat in 1979), using lightning-strike guerrilla tactics that exhausted their adversaries’ traditional armies.

In the face of ALPS victories, the Royal Moroccan Army (RMA) began work on a long barrier of simple sand embankments meant to slow down the fast-moving Saharawi soldiers. Between 1980 and 1987, five heavily fortified walls were added to the east and south, completely cutting off the Saharawi soldiers and refugees from their home cities, such as Layoune and Smara.

A desert party near Timbuktu Today, despite a ceasefire signed in 1991, both parties actively patrol their respective sides of the wall. Along the western side, Morocco maintains about 160,000 troops, reinforced by heavy military installations every seven miles, which include radar, artillery and tanks.

The Polisario refuses to cite the number of units that patrol its seven military regions on the eastern side of the wall, claiming that if war is resumed, all Saharawis will come to the front lines to fight.

From afar, the Moroccan military wall appears to be a sandy hill with a few helmeted soldiers peering over the top. A more accurate depiction, however, is given by Hamdi, a 24-year-old Saharawi from Layoune who crossed the wall on foot in 2007 to escape imprisonment by Moroccan police for his pro-independence activities:

"First, I cross a small ditch, about one meter deep and one meter across. Then I arrive at a low wall of rocks. These rocks are loose, so when you try cross the berm, they fall and make noise, so the soldiers come. Then there is other, much bigger trench. When I climb out of that, I cross last wall of sand and rock, which is more than two meters up. I pull myself over, jump down to other side, jump over big barbed wire fence, and run across live field of mines in black of night. I am very afraid of step on mines, but I think, ‘If I make it this far, I have to trust Allah that I make it through the field of mines alive.’”

Hamdi is one of thousands of Saharawis who have crossed the wall to flee the Moroccan police and escape to the refugee camps outside of Tindouf, Algeria. Most cross the wall at night with a handful of belongings, a bag of dates, and a few liters of water. After traversing the barrier, they often must spend days walking through the desert before reaching a group of nomads or a Saharawi military company that will take them to the camps.

Of course, that is only if they survive the nighttime trek across the field of anti-tank and anti-personnel landmines. Though the exact number of mines on the eastern side of the wall is unknown, estimates range from one million to over 10 million, and the U.N. consistently ranks the Western Sahara as one of the top 10 territories most contaminated by landmines and unexploded ordinances (UXOs).

In April, the true threat of these mines became very real for more than 1,200 international visitors who were participating in an annual protest march in front of the berm. During the protest, a group of young Saharawis charged towards the Moroccan soldiers on the other side of the wall, hurling both rocks and insults. A 19-year-old charged forward, and although others tried to restrain the youth, he stepped on a mine and blew off his right foot, injuring four others.

A desert party near Timbuktu “You have all seen in a very tangible way how easily Morocco’s wall can convert human life into death,” said Abdelkadar Taleb Omar, a senior member of the Polisario, the following day.

Muhamed Abdelaziz, the secretary general of the Polisario Front, expressed his desire for U.S. President Barack Obama to press Morocco to dismantle its wall, calling it a “grave violation of human rights.”

For the Saharawi people, however, the Western Saharan conflict is shrouded by another wall — what they refer to as “a media blockade.” The Saharawis insist that their decades-old conflict is painfully underreported in the international media. They say that until this media wall is torn down and the international community becomes interested in the Western Saharan conflict, it is likely that Morocco’s 1,600-mile berm will remain standing.

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Source: http://mobile.globalpost.com/dispatch/africa/090808/western-saharas-wall-shame