Ian Williams Not many people have heard of the Western Sahara dispute and most congressmen could not tell it from Freedonia - until the lobbyists came a-knocking.
Yesterday, the UN Security Council fought back a Franco-American effort to rewrite international law in favour of Morocco and against the people of Western Sahara. Morocco has offered dubious "autonomy" to Western Sahara, but is refusing to hold the referendum in the territory that the World Court and the UN Security Council have called for - and to which Morocco had agreed, until it became clear that it would lose.
Western Sahara In recent years, the Moroccan government has championed the idea of autonomy as a solution to its territorial dispute with pro-independence advocates over Western Sahara. Rabat has said it is willing to consider an autonomous, locally elected government in Western Sahara, which would have powers independent of the central government, albeit circumscribed by Morocco's ultimate sovereignty. The movement for Western Saharan statehood, on the other hand, has rejected autonomy.
The idea of letting African youth write their own film scripts to provide information about AIDS was born in 1997. Since then, 105,000 young Africans from 37 countries have participated in scenario contests.
In 2004 Danish PEN proposed an Algerian member in the board of International PEN, since the Arab world was very little represented. At that time PEN centres only existed in Egypt, Algeria and a very passive one in Libanon, besides Palestine and Morocco were about to start.