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MOROCCO - Freedom for Saharawi Political Prisoners

Since 2 years the "Saharawi Political Prisoners" are imprisoned in Morocco. The trial was again postponed on 14th of march to start at the 10th of April. Since their imprisonment in the beginning of 2016, because of protesting for equal rights and independence of saharawi people in the Western Sahara, the trial was postponed several times.

Now Saharawi Political Prisoners started a hunger strike to protest against the detention conditions and the right of self-determination. Naama Asfari began hunger strike at 27th of February, at the 9th of arch eight more political prisoners joined the hunger strike, even thought the Moroccan state brought them to isolation cells in different prisons and they are not allowed to see relatives or their lawyers. The Moroccan authorities try to break their resistance with physical and mental torture.

The campaign for the immediate release of the Saharawi political prisoners accuses the Moroccan state for suppressing the Saharawi people and demands freedom and self-determination of Western Sahara. The protests of Sharawi people have a long history, the first „Saharawi Intifada“ started in 1999, against the occupation. With 2010 is considered the 3rd Sharawi Intifada, many young people gave their life for the struggle of independence. The struggle for self-determination against imperialism an their lakies in the suppressed nation is justified. It is a part of struggle against world imperialism, so we want to share an important analysis of W.I. Lenin on the question of Self-Determination of Nations:

“The Proletarian-Revolutionary Presentation of the Question of the Self-Determination of Nations Not only the demand for the self-determination of nations but all the items of our democratic minimum programme were advanced before us, as far back as the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, by the petty bourgeoisie. And the petty bourgeoisie, believing in “peaceful” capitalism, continues to this day to advance all these demands in a utopian way, without seeing the class struggle and the fact that it has become intensified under democracy. The idea of a peaceful union of equal nations under imperialism, which deceives the people, and which the Kautskyists advocate, is precisely of this nature. As against this philistine, opportunist utopia, the programme of Social-Democracy must point out that under imperialism the division of nations into oppressing and oppressed ones is a fundamental, most important and inevitable fact. The proletariat of the oppressing nations cannot confine itself to the general hackneyed phrases against annexations and for the equal rights of nations in general, that may be repeated by any pacifist bourgeois. The proletariat cannot evade the question that is particularly “unpleasant” for the imperialist bourgeoisie, namely, the question of the frontiers of a state that is based on national oppression. The proletariat cannot but fight against the forcible retention of the oppressed nations within the boundaries of a given state, and this is exactly what the struggle for the right of self-determination means. The proletariat must demand the right of political secession for the colonies and for the nations that “its own” nation oppresses. Unless it does this, proletarian internationalism will remain a meaningless phrase; mutual confidence and class solidarity between the workers of the oppressing and oppressed nations will be impossible; the hypocrisy of the reformist and Kautskyan advocates of self-determination who maintain silence about the nations which are oppressed by “their” nation and forcibly retained within “their” state will remain unexposed. The Socialists of the oppressed nations, on the other hand, must particularly fight for and maintain complete, absolute unity (also organizational) between the workers of the oppressed nation and the workers of the oppressing nation. Without such unity it will be impossible to maintain an independent proletarian policy and class solidarity with the proletariat of other countries in the face of all the subterfuge, treachery and trickery of the bourgeoisie; for the bourgeoisie of the oppressed nations always converts the slogan of national liberation into a means for deceiving the workers; in internal politics it utilizes these slogans as a means for conduding reactionary agreements with the bourgeoisie of the ruling nation (for instance, the Poles in Austria and Russia, who entered into pacts with reaction in order to oppress the Jews and the Ukrainians); in the realm of foreign politics it strives to enter into pacts with one of the rival imperialist powers for the purpose of achieving its own predatory aims (the policies of the small states in the Balkans, etc.). The fact that the struggle for national liberation against one imperialist power may, under certain circumstances, be utilized by another “Great” Power in its equally imperialist interests should have no more weight in inducing Social Democracy to renounce its recognition of the right of nations to self-determination than the numerous case of the bourgeoisie utilizing republican slogans for the purpose of political deception and financial robbery, for example, in the Latin countries, have had in inducing them to renounce republicanism.” Read the whole document here: marxist.org

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