At a time when most of our leadership’s discourse is sinking into the language of justification, flattery, and the beautification of reality, the latest article by adviser Bachir Ould Sayed (Negotiations Underwater) proves that he possesses a sharp foresight lacking in many at the top of the power hierarchy. Whether one agrees or disagrees with him, no fair-minded person can fail to bow before his unique ability to dissect reality with the boldness of a scalpel that knows no evasion.
Bachir did not write a passing article; he presented a bitter reckoning. He described the internal front as being in a state of clinical death, and acknowledged that the living forces of our youth have been lost in the labyrinths of self-searching, outside any organizational framework. He put his finger squarely on the wound when he likened our condition to a “servant’s scream at the bottom of a well,” warning that a policy of pitch darkness and unforgiving international slippery slopes led by major powers has placed us between the hammer of autonomy and the anvil of being branded as terrorists.
What distinguishes Bachir here is not only that he is one of the founders, but that he has the courage to admit that MINURSO has become a tool in the hands of the adversary, and that betting on international legitimacy in the age of Trump is nothing more than a bet on a mirage.
Today, we need this kind of shocking truth-telling. Our need for leaders who possess Bachir’s vision and his ability to anticipate dangers far outweighs our need for leaders skilled in the art of silence or fleeing forward.
If we fail to grasp the lesson of “swimming in dark water” that Bachir has put forward, we will remain stuck in place while the world around us changes violently.
Negotiations Underwater and in Pitch Darkness
The Bedouin, in general, hates swimming because his parents never threw him into the water, nor did he throw himself into it when he was young. He therefore hates it just as he hates the forest in broad daylight—so what about a pitch-dark night!
Water and night here are metaphors for the fog that envelops the current circumstances and the slippery paths that cover the road. Yet, forced against his will and no hero, he must cross the water while avoiding slips and falls.
If the fronts were alive, active, and driving forward, the task would be easier. But they are dead, motionless: the internal front “digs and exhausts itself cracking prickly pears,” the occupied cities mostly produce the sounds of thuggery and profiteering, the army is fragmented into camps, and the living forces—youth of Mercedes cars, drug traffickers, shop owners, garage operators, fuel-station owners, butchers and parking-lot operators— all these surplus forces unable to emigrate are outside organization and exposed to recruitment by the enemy and to use in any fitna or unrest that would fill the enemy’s media.
In such a reality, our speeches resemble a kind of scream of the servant, made famous when her criminal, cowardly masters forced her to descend into a well to clear the dirt from the eyes or pores of its water. And once her feet reached the bottom of the well, she swore “by her master’s navel” that she would never go down again.
The Sword of Pressure and the Gun of Blackmail
The one who carries the pen—now turned into an axe to impose what the pen has written—threatens with a second option or a “Plan B” if the first does not pass, namely autonomy.
The sword is composed of accumulating the MINURSO file and its withdrawal, and the gun is labeling the Front as terrorist.
The Hour has not come and will not come except by the will of our Creator and with our own consent, if we have been sincere in our worship, truthful in our faith, diligent and perseverant, and if we have sacrificed for our sacred goals.
The danger of autonomy threatens the Sahrawis, but also all the peoples of the region.
The Moroccan occupier drags his tail, digs in his heels, stalls, procrastinates, and delays presenting a “convincing detailed plan,” because his American friends have “entered the house of his thefts.” In their haste and recklessness to add our cause—already cooked—to increase Trump’s points by the number of “cooked or burned” cases in order to obtain the “Prize of the Maker of Peace, Stability, and Prosperity,” they have put an end to the occupier’s manipulation and maneuvering around what is called autonomy, and placed him before the frightening truth against which we were warned in the 1990s by Crown Prince Hassan II and his Minister of the Interior: treating the Sahrawi issue as an internal matter and a Moroccan region is a folly that would explode the situation throughout Morocco in a domino process, pushing all its regions to demand the same treatment.
Today, autonomy is feared not only for the Kingdom of Morocco, but for all the states of the region, as the American-Israeli strategy is to weaken states by awakening ethnic identities and mobilizing minorities.
As for MINURSO, the Sahrawis have not recorded a single positive act since the resignation of Johannes Manz and the withdrawal of the Swiss medical mission and the British and Canadian observers, which makes us lament—or even mourn—the turning of its page. It did not fulfill its promise, did not honor its commitment, did not accomplish its mission, did not assume its responsibility, and did not protect a single Sahrawi who sought refuge with it. Its hiding under the flag of occupation and inside air-conditioned vehicles bearing Moroccan license plates produced no difference, no atmosphere of freedom, democracy, or security. It was a tool in Morocco’s hands.
Perhaps we are alarmed by claims that its withdrawal would encourage Morocco to occupy the entire Sahrawi territory. But history has recorded and taught that the countdown to the demise of great empires accelerates as they expand and multiply their bites of vast lands belonging to others—so what about dwarf empires?
Perhaps they also claim that its departure would be a setback for the flag of legality and the United Nations. But in the world of Trump, there is no longer room for such meanings, concepts, values, or ethics, after he urinated on its charter and legitimacy, and after von der Leyen trampled with her heel on the decisions of the European Court.
As for branding us as terrorists—us who have fought for more than fifty years colonial and expansionist armies across hundreds of thousands of square kilometers, without targeting civilians, uprooting a tree, exterminating livestock, poisoning wells, or destroying civilian infrastructure, and who removed every mine we planted—while the enemy still squats on large parts of our land and threatens to swallow more… you deliberately force us to choose between smothering our dreams, burying our objectives, squandering our gains, betraying our sacrifices, and surrendering to the fait accompli imposed by Moroccan occupation, or being labeled terrorists.
Our choice is known: to continue defending ourselves, defending our land, terrorizing the occupier, and frightening the interests that support him.
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