The valiant fisherman

In recent years Mohammed El Baykam has been helping his people to fight for their economic and political rights, mainly in the fishing sector that is controlled by the occupying state of Morocco. Dakhla city is considered to produce 64 percent of Morocco’s fishing output. El Baykam lobbies in the protection of the fishing resources that are being plundered by foreign owned fishing vessels and controlled by Moroccan businessmen and military generals in the monarchy’s circles. Because of his activities, he has been expelled and banned from accessing the fishing sector and local Moroccan administrators have put pressure on any company that attempts to employ him. Nevertheless, he continues to look for any means to communicate with international organizations to expose and document this plundering and illegal theft of Western Sahara’s fishing resources.

Mohammed El Baykam stresses the fact that the indigenous Western Sahara people have been divided into two parts for 38 years by the Moroccan invasion in 1975, and those like him who live in the Moroccan controlled zone are systematically impoverished by the monarchy’s authorities in an effort to politically control the Sahrawi and hamper them from exercising their rights to free speech. El Baykam, together with other Sahrawi activists, have been sending letters to the European Union for the annual Morocco and European Union fishing contracts, to demand the prevention of such agreements because it does not benefit the people of Western Sahara.

His lobbying activism calls on the world to help the Saharawi people to stop the illegal robbery of their natural resources as well as to stop the human rights abuses that are being committed on a regular basis inside the Occupied Territory. ‘We do not benefit from the resources that our country possesses’ he says. El Baykam is now 32 years old and still the Moroccan authorities refuse to employ him.

He says ‘we do not have many options here. You must shut up and pretend that you neither hear nor see what is happening, and you are supposed to accept living with the remaining bits of your country’s resources, or you give in to the politics of the occupier and you become the enemy of your own people. Here you cannot live a normal life for yourself or for your family because simply it is like living within a big prison. Your breath is watched and your steps are counted. Morocco runs our country like dealing with an animal farm – the Saharawi human beings are like an undesired species. The Saharawi element is targeted in its existence because the Moroccan occupation is based on settling the Moroccan people here, which means of course displacing us Saharawis. All the incentives that exist here are only to encourage these Moroccan settlers to move here and settle down while engaging with the authorities’ racist politics towards the Saharawis to push us to leave or disappear.’ Moroccans now constitute 60 percent of the population. The game is quite clear: change the demographic status and exterminate the people of occupied Western Sahara.

Extra links:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ThhqgcIeT0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJYmjYO4G5s
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8luURhFFx-I ">

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