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03-31-2008
Regarding a recent "UTube" footage on the slavery issue.
We have been contacted by several people about a recent footage on UTube by an anonymous source. Unfortunately, when we tried to look it up, it was not there anymore with a note that it had been removed due to copyright considerations.
Therefore we want to state that the Together Foundation was neither aware of, nor has it contributed in any way to that or any other online or otherwise publications of any slavery materials, nor has it authorized anybody to do so with marerials produced by or belonging to Together Foundation.
Our only and exclusive means of publication is this web site to all materials of which we own full copyright.
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03-30-2008
Meeting with alleged Sahrawi slaves in Mauritania.
We were contacted by two people who alleged that they were Sahrawi slaves from the refugee camps. Our president met them in Nouakchott, Mauritania, early February, received their statements and recorded the answers of one of them.
On the way back to New York the tape mysteriously disappeared from the luggage. Therefore the Foundation has a rather stunning report, which cannot be verified by direct testimony.
To establish the truth beyond doubt, an independent mission to the camps has to be funded, organized and fielded.
We are working on it. Sponsors are invited.
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10-26-2007
Another Meeting with Frente Polisario
The Frente Polisario officials deny fully the existence of slavery in the refugee camps under their management. Mr. Mhamed Khadad, Coordinator with Minurso met with us a second time confirming the agreement of the Frente to receive a group of independent journalists in the camps, as soon as possible. He reiterated that the two journalists had shot a totally fictional movie instead of what they present as a documentary relating actual facts.
We contacted the Australian journalists about it, who in response maintained that their allegations are pure facts, their film is documentary, and slavery does exist in the camps.
We are working on raising funds for sending a media team to investigate the issue.
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10-22-2007
Meeting with Frente Polisario
Together Foundation had a meeting with a senior official of Frente Polisario in New York. It was a constructive discussion which concluded in the agreement in principle that the Foundation will put together a media team to visit the Tindouf refugee camps. Polisario will host the team and let them explore the camps freely and come up with their independent findings and conclusions. Watch for further information on the developments.
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Polisario Tindouf Refugee Camps
Institutionalized widespread slavery
10-16-2007
Violeta Ayala and Daniel Fallshaw, two independent Australian journalists and documentarists have revealed last Thursday October 12, 2007, in New York that slavery was a widespread institutionalized practice in the more than 35 years old Sahrawi refugee camps of the Tindouf region.
The camps were established, at the end of a 15 years long war with Morocco, on a portion of the extreme south of the Algerian Saharan territory controlled by the Frente Polisario, to ensure visibility and some kind of refugees status to the Sahrawi nomadic population that would have otherwise continued to wander in the desert, following the customary grazing paths for their herds.
Violeta Ayala, speaking to a large group of media and press representatives at UN headquarters underlined how widespread was the slavery reality in those camps of misery. her and her partner had uncovered this terrible reality during one of their many trips to the area, this time to shoot a film on the “exchange of family visits” programme of the UN refugees organization by which a handful of families visit their relatives on both sides of the Moroccan wall of defence separating them.
It is then, explains Violeta, that they became the witnesses of open manifestations of the slavery practices, confirming the large scale of this phenomenon practiced for decades by “white” Sahrawis, the masters, over their black fellow refugees. “How could such an unimaginable situation happen in these camps, exclaimed Violeta Ayala, and how could a so-called “liberation movement” as the Polisario claim,support and protect such a phenomenon?”
The prevalent skepticism of the attending journalists transpired through their many questions and interrogations, to which Ayala and Fallshaw responded by showing a 3 minutes trailers where black slaves themselves relate their condition and denounce the yoke of slavery they are constrained in. The slaves explain clearly that they do not have any rights, are not allowed to possess anything or to decide on their own fate. They are simply considered as the property of their masters and are part of the “furniture”. But, pursues Violeta Ayala, “the worst of all, slavery is regulated and protected by the law. It goes beyond social and cultural customs”.
The two Australian journalists, sponsored by the US based Together Foundation that organized this press conference in collaboration with the UN Correspondents Association, informed their audience that they were preparing a feature documentary on the subject to be showed in mid-2008 in various festivals. Meanwhile they intend to address the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights at Geneva with their sponsors.
Earlier this year, in May, Repoters without Borders had reported that Violeta Ayala and Daniel Fallshaw had been detained by the Polisario Front Security Forces and under the pretext that they “were looking into the fate of the black Sahrawi population”. They had been freed thanks to the voluntary intervention of two Russian UN Peacekeepers. Eventually, the Australian government intervened and arranged for them to return safely, as the journalists explained.
More on the sublect
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