I SEEM THAT we haven't paid enough attention to truly atrocious news: the insufferable Trump has just said that the United States will use antipersonnel mines again. You see, these mines are an invention of creepy perversity; they have very small explosive charges because their purpose is not to kill, but to mutilate, burst bellies or tear off legs and arms, to weaken the opponent by forcing him to care for and carry his wounded. They are cruel artifacts that are fattened in the civilian population. Therefore, when the Ottawa Convention was held in 1997 to ban the use of these mines, humanity took a giant step. Getting out of the agreement, as Trump has done, is an infamy.
But since I talk about mines and political indecency, I want to talk about the Saharawis. Yes, from that town that we Spaniards betrayed and sold as sheep to Moroccans 45 years ago. Yes, those same Sahrawis who have justice and the UN agreements in their favor, but not even manage to recover their land. In fact, every day we forget a little more about them.
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The Polisario Front, which abides by the Ottawa and Oslo convention (against cluster bombs), has made an enormous effort to clean its explosive devices and destroyed its entire arsenal of antipersonnel mines (20,493 units) and cluster munitions ( 24,107). Morocco, meanwhile, still does not join Ottawa or Oslo. Worse, it happens that after the precarious 1991 peace agreement between Morocco and the Polisario, a five-kilometer-wide strip of exclusion was created east of the wall, where neither personnel nor military equipment can enter, but civilians can.
This area, which offers water reserves because rafts are formed by cutting the river bed, is crossed all the time by nomadic shepherds and their cattle, and that is where most of the mines are. Between 2014 and 2019 there have been 186 victims; One of them spent 10 hours bleeding at the helpless look of the soldiers, who could not enter the exclusion zone to rescue him (civilians were finally taken out and his leg had to be cut off). In addition, there are more and more animals injured or killed by explosions, which ruins the lives of shepherds.
And being all this horrible, the worst part is that this catastrophic situation that I just told does not officially exist. Although we have already said that Western Sahara may be the most contaminated inhabited territory by antipersonnel mines of the entire planet, it is not in the focus of areas to be cleared by the Ottawa Convention, since it does not have independent country status.
Moreover, they do not officially let Saharawi delegates intervene in anti-mining conferences. Ottawa has set itself the goal of achieving a world without antipersonnel mines in 2025 (a goal that Trump has made very difficult), and I wonder how they even dare to raise such an achievement if they do not take into account the millions of lethal artifacts that irrigate the Sahara. Here is a good metaphor for the Saharawi cause: it is an injustice indecently silenced, buried, explosive.
