“The Western Sahara and the United Nations”
Paper by The Hon John Dowd AO QC, President International Commission of Jurists, Australia presented on 29 October 2011 at the 2nd International Conference, Peoples’ Right for Resistance: the Case of Sahrawi People, Dar Diaf – Bouchaoui, Algiers
Mr Chairman, Mr President, Members of Parliament, distinguished delegates.
In the year since most of us here were in Le Mans, the world has very much changed. It is called the “Arab Spring”, but in fact is much more than just changes within the Arabic speaking countries.
We have a new world of electronically adept free thinking liberated young people who can now communicate and exchange views and attack governments, particularly totalitarian governments if they don‟t provide for human needs and democratic processes. The world of television and the internet now provides young and, indeed, not so young people with higher aspirations to fulfillment of their lives than is available under most military regimes and culturally repressed regimes.
There is no answer to mass dissemination of information and the success of the education revolution through which the world is passing. It is one reason why I am a chancellor of an Australian university. Education not only informs and teaches critical analysis, it also raises aspirations. A younger generation can‟t see why it can‟t have all the freedoms that democracy brings.
This comes in conflict with totalitarian and repressive governments which are not susceptible to change and to fulfilling people‟s aspirations. Very large numbers of non democratic regimes are thinly veiled covers for a military dictatorship or many governments are in a convenient partnership relationship of mutual support of military regimes, some military regimes don‟t even invoke the trappings of democracy.
The world will not go back to the dinosaur regimes of the past. Like the dinosaurs, some will last longer than others, but in time will be consigned to history.
Totalitarian regimes often, not only oppress minority racial regimes and religious minority regimes, they often oppress their own people. Not even the Sinhala people of Sri Lanka are free of government oppression. There an elite is protected. It is common with repressive regimes that the press is also 2 controlled or oppressed, something which is now increasingly difficult to do with use of internet and international multi-level communication.
Repressive regimes also use kidnapping and detention of people such as we have seen in Morocco with its invasion of a refugee camp. Intimidation has an effect but not the effect it once had, if the world keeps such a country under surveillance and under international pressure.
One of the partners and supporters of tyranny is complacency and trade interest. So many countries, such as a large number on the United Nations (UN), are not prepared to stand up and oppose repressive regimes. Some do it out of self interest, some do it out of disinterest and some do it for trade reasons.
That a country, like Australia, with its heavy demand for phosphates can fail to acknowledge the source of the phosphate, which is the people of Western Sahara, is a matter I will deal with later in the paper. Clearly the young people of Morocco, whether sympathetic to the cause of Western Sahrawis or not, will themselves become increasingly dissatisfied with the regime under which they live. Morocco will not be immune from the changes happening throughout the world and we hope that eventually a free democracy will triumph there and that will be the pathway to a free and independent democracy for the Western Sahrawis.
