By Rachid Khouya
By Rachid Khouya
Morocco World News
Smara, Morocco, October 26, 2012
Since 1970 there been a process of suffering. Families have been separated by borders. They took up arms against each other, fighting for a dream that turned out to be a nightmare. Innocent people have been paying the price for a game of ideologies and ideologues. The winner is Satan and those that stand on its line.
More than 30 years of waiting for whole families and tribes to be united and to meet around the same table. Fathers died without seeing their sons, and mothers died without seeing their daughters and grandchildren. Uncles do not know their cousins and cousins do not know their nephews and aunts. Damn the war and those who pour fuel on fire. Those who push brothers to shed each other’s blood and to decimate each other’s branches of their family trees. That was war. The war that caused the bleeding of Moroccans in the south and in the north.
I have spent more than 25 years in the Sahara, I know its tribes and its families the way I know my fingers and my toes. I have studied with the people of the Sahara and I have taught their children for more than a decade. I talked with the people in public and in private. I have always listened to their voices and breathe. When the feasts arrive, their pains and agonies revive.
It is natural and human. The Eids are not Eids and the celebrations are not celebrations. There is always a shortage of something, the feeling of missing some beloved ones whose memory dwells in hearts and causes the mind and the chest to ache and to burn with the fire of distance, both in terms of time and space.
There is always an act of waiting. Waiting for those who will come and those who died and will never come. Hope is always there and the eyes are on the skies with every sunset and sunrise. Prayers filling the wind and the storms, the peace and the noise of the desert and the dunes: prayers of love and hope to live till they see their beloved ones. “May God unite the divided families” and “May we see and hold each other before we die.”
With every meeting of negotiations between politicians from both sides, the families pray for a solution to come into life and for the day when they will hear that peace is the winner, that the people are the winners and that there is no loser and no victor. We are all winners and our enemies are the losers.
On the other side of the map, people are spending their seasons in the open horizons of nature. They suffer when it is cold, when it is hot , when it is stormy and when it is windy. In tents and bad housing, bad schools, bad hospitals. Imprisoned in the hands of some gangsters wearing the uniform of revolutionist and statesmen. They use them to beg from the international NGOs, they sell their food and clothes and they sell their days, years and dreams.
They deprive them of their rights to come back to their homeland, live their lives with their relatives, friends and acquaintances. They deprive them of enjoying their right to be with their loved ones, to share with them the sweetness and the bitterness of life, to celebrate with them marriages, birthdays and funerals.
The occasion of the Eid is a time to think about our lives and our deaths. Time to listen to our hearts and minds and think about the parents who died without seeing their children and about the kids who are still longing for feeling the warmth of being taken by bosom by their mothers and fathers.
The Eid is a time to think that this life is nothing and a short movie that will end sooner or later and that it is a crime to keep families separated by frontiers and borders. Time to answer the old men and old women’s prayers and give them the right to smell the breath of their kids and to hold them before they die. Sahrawis are suffering and many other Moroccans in the north are waiting to hear from their sons who are imprisoned in the jails of Tindouf and who are paying a high price for the dirty war of the Sahara.
A message from a teacher to forget the mentalities that created the problem of the Sahara. Today is another day, another reality and surely we need another way of solving the problem. Wisdom should be our leader not revenge. Time to free the prisoners of war from both sides and to free the sad birds in the hearts of all Moroccans. Tindouf is a cage and those free birds inside the cage must be freed as soon as possible. Tomorrow might be too late.
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