Ali Salem Tamek
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Ali Salem Tamek (b. 1973) is a Moroccan Sahrawi independence activist and trade unionist.
While Ali Salem Tamek is from the town of Assa in southern Morocco, he supports Sahrawi self-determination in the Moroccan administered Western Sahara, and has emerged as one of the most outspoken Sahrawi dissidents under Moroccan rule. He was active in Moroccan trade unions and leftist Moroccan spheres.
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. Tamek wishes Western Sahara to become an independent state under the auspices of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic, the self-declared republic by the Algeria-backed Polisario front, based 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[citation needed]. The Moroccan authorities has refused to recognize the name the family has given to their first daughter, Thawra. The name means "revolution" in Arabic.
On December 14, 2005, Ali Salem Tamek was sentenced to 8 months in prison by a Moroccan court in El-Aaiún, on accusation of incitement to trouble the public order during violent riots in May 2005. 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. The European parliament called for his "immediate release" in a resolution in October 2005. He was released by royal pardon.
The Polisario front denied Ali Salem Tamek the status of Sahrawi when he applied for registration to the voters list on a referendum on Western Sahara's future. After showing support for independence he was adopted as one of the main Sahrawi human rights figures.
