This is a question that anyone uninformed about toponymy or geography can ask, and which may seem naive to an Arabic speaker who does not know the political, geographical and linguistic dimension that similar terms can take on.
Once, in Andalusia, a French guide who spoke perfect Spanish accompanied us on a tour and showed us a bridge saying: “this bridge dates from the Arab era and is called The Alcántara Bridge »
This phrase provoked slight smiles from the tourists, almost all from Morocco, and one of us pointed out that the word Alcántara in Arabic means bridge, and the guide thanked him for the information.
And we return to our first question.
The person who asked this question did not know that the word Sahara in Arabic means desert. A simple involuntary pleonasm. This is what happens when many refer to the territorial question of the Moroccan Sahara, unfortunately, as an area with political significance only and not as an indication with territorial geographical significance.
This geographical area in the south of Morocco, officially called the Southern Provinces of Moroccobelonged administratively and territorially to Morocco for centuries, before being occupied by Spain and recovered by Morocco after the peaceful epic of the Green March in 1975.
A march which took place after the Hague Tribunal confirmed in a judgment (in 1975) that it had always existed a relationship of self-sacrifice, belonging and dependence between the tribes of the Sahara (Southern Provinces) and the Moroccan Throne (Sultans).
TheSame thing happened when Morocco was negotiating its independence with France (in 1955), when the tribes and inhabitants of the Eastern Sahara (west of present-day Algeria, which at the time was called the French province, where Tindouf is located, where the Polisario is located), did not want not remain under French sovereignty and declared that they wanted to return – emphasizing the word return – to their original homeland (document in the French archives of the referendum carried out by France in this area).
Morocco, in this case King Mohamed V, did not want to negotiate this issue with the French because he also defended the independence of his brothers in Algeria (Independent in 1962) to whom he then provided financial, military and politics within the UN.
This is what is today called the Eastern Sahara, which historically and geographically was Moroccan, including the areas where the Polisario (Tindouf) currently survives, because it does not live.
Geography hides truths that history often reveals, and place names confirm it. The Desert exists in the Sahara, in the real Sahara, in the south of Morocco, with real place names and not the names put forward in the farce of the Republic of Tindouf, with its mirage names.
In the Moroccan Sahara, there is the desert and in the desert, there are dunes, and more than the dunes, there is also an Atlantic sea.
Abdelali Barouki. Moroccan MP and academic
