The University of Miami's Institute for Cuban and Cuban American Studies, led by Prof. Jaime Suchlicki, claims that Cuba may have ties to Al Qaeda through the disputed North African territory of Western Sahara.
I wrote a story two years ago about Cuba's involvement in Western Sahara, and their forced education of Polisario children in Cuban boarding schools.
This is from my clip, dated Sept.19, 2005:
Saadani Ma Oulainie's first memory from childhood is seeing her father tortured publicly in front of her by the Polisario Front in North Africa when she was five.
After that, her memories of youth are a blur of forced separation, a flight to Cuba, sugar cane cutting, and an unending campaign by Cuban teachers to convince her that Allah was a farce and that Fidel Castro was the only person that mattered to her now.
As Ma Oulainie recalled her itinerant adolescence Saturday in Miami Beach as part of an effort by the Moroccan government to discredit the Polisario Front, she broke down crying, stopping just short of saying exactly how Castro-allied soldiers tortured her late father, who they had accused of being a Moroccan spy.
``We were stripped of our traditions, of our religion, they made us eat lots of pork,'' Oulainie said of her 15 years in Cuba, during which she never communicated with her parents. ``When I went back to Sahara, my father had died. Hundreds of Saharan children have been orphaned while they were forced to study in Cuba.''
Oulainie, one of thousands of children shipped to Cuba by the leftist Polisario for communist indoctrination, is in Miami this week along with several other Western Saharans, or Sahawaris, who have passed through the Polisario's refugee camps and prisons in the last 32 years. They hope their firsthand accusations of human-rights abuses and corruption will help bring attention to the plight of Western Saharans.
But like everything else in the post-9/11 world, the story of the the Sahawari plight is complex. Both the Polisario and Morocco, who are at odds over control of Western Sahara, have been accused of human-rights abuses against Sahawaris by Amnesty International, a respected human-rights organization."
According to an ICCAS staff report from this week:
"As the U.S. military offensive in Iraq intensifies, al-Qaeda affiliates are reportedly moving westward across North Africa. With the bulk of American combat forces locked down in Iraq for the foreseeable future, the desolate sands of the Sahara offer an environment from which terrorist cells could conceivably coordinate an offensive against U.S. interests and allied governments in the region. Like Taliban controlled Afghanistan, the disputed desert territory of Western Sahara may be emerging as a new haven for al-Qaeda and its proxies. Cuban influence in there has been strong for decades."
These are some photos of the people I interviewed for that article. See above posts for more info.
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