Ali Salem Tamek
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Ali Salem Tamek (b. 1973) is a Sahrawi independence activist and trade unionist.
While Ali Salem Tamek is originally from the town of Assa in southern Morocco, he supports Sahrawi self-determination in occupied Western Sahara, and has emerged as one of the most outspoken Sahrawi dissidents under Moroccan rule.
He has been jailed five times for nationalist activities, fired from his job, and for a long period of time had his passport confiscated. In 2003 he was sentenced to prison for "undermining the internal security of the state" as head of the Sahrawi branch of the human rights organization Forum for Truth and Justice. This led to him being adopted by Amnesty International as a prisoner of conscience. Morocco accuses him of being an agent for the Polisario Front, and he admits he supports the goal of the movement, of holding a United Nations backed referendum on independence in the occupied territory, to complete its decolonization. Tamek wishes Western Sahara to become an independent state under the auspices of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic, an exiled government functioning in Polisario-controlled areas of Western Sahara and in the Sahrawi refugee camps of Tindouf, Algeria.
While in prison he has been on numerous hunger strikes, and in 2003 came close to death before being released in a royal pardon. His health remains poor after this. He has been the target of a smear campaign in the Moroccan press, and he complains of politically motivated harassment and threats to his life and family. His wife, Aicha Chafia, reported in 2005 that she had been raped by five men she identified as security agents. The Moroccan authorities has refused to recognize the name the family has given to their first daughter, Thawra. The name means "revolution" in Arabic.
He is presently in jail in Morocco, accused of instigating demonstrations for independence in El-Aaiun in the summer of 2005. In prison he has once again gone on hunger strike, and managed to smuggle several defiant messages out for publication on the Internet. The European parliament called for his "immediate release" in a resolution in October 2005.
On December 14, 2005, Ali Salem Tamek was sentenced to 8 months in prison by a Moroccan court in El-Aaiún. Both before and after the trial, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch issued reports[1][2] with concerns that Ali Salem Tamek and other Sahrawi activists were not getting fair trials, and may be prisoners of conscience.
