THE SPANISH TV AND RADIO BEAMS, AND THE WESTERN SAHARA

As much as RTVE denies it, the facts are stubborn, and there is not the slightest doubt that it has been the political pressure emanating from the government, which has forced the leadership of the national radio and television to veto the sending of a team to the Sahrawi refugee camps set up in the Algerian region of Tindouf.

A trip organized, but in no way paid for, by the Polisario Front. RTVE is also lying when it affirms that it was the Saharawi independence movement that bore all the expenses. False, since each guest journalist has paid for their trip.

RTVE has been on this occasion the transmission belt of the will of Pedro Sánchez and his government not to provoke the bad mood of Morocco. Professionally, the trip is very interesting because it allows you to attend a press conference of the Saharawi leader, Brahim Ghali.

Nobody criticizes that Spain has good relations with Morocco. But no one can admit that, based on international law, United Nations resolutions and the historical relationship between Spain and the Sahrawis, Rabat's great lie can be admitted when he claims that Western Sahara belongs to him.

The former Spanish colony is a territory to be decolonized, whose future could have been resolved with an electoral consultation controlled by the United Nations. Morocco does not want to know anything about a referendum and brings out the absurd and crazy decision of former President Trump to recognize that the territory belongs to the Alawite kingdom.

Since Trump committed this indelicateness with international law, Rabat has only pressured Pedro Sánchez to imitate the former American president. If the Spanish government did, it would be the biggest betrayal of an executive with his colonial past. Fortunately, such a betrayal is not to be expected, but what does exist is a constant homage to a regime as corrupt as the Moroccan. The Spanish people defend the right of the Sahrawis to be independent. It is a decolonization problem. And this has nothing to do with Catalonia because this autonomy is not and has never been a colony. We do not co-found.

I know the Sahrawis and Ghali well because while I was a correspondent in Algiers I visited Tindouf fifteen times. The Saharawi forces under the command of Ghali caused serious defeats to the Moroccan army, taking more than two hundred prisoners, capturing military vehicles and shooting down at least one aircraft of the Mirage F1 type. When Morocco built the so-called defensive walls, those battles that seemed decisive ceased to exist.