Kiosk360. With the approach of their congress, the leaders of the Separatist Front multiply the media outlets, or rather the clichés and the selfies, so as not to be forgotten by the population of the camps. This article is a press review from the daily Assabah.
The Polisario is getting ready to hold its 16th congress in the Tindouf camps. In the camps, it is an air of “electoral campaign” which reigns. A sham electoral campaign to tell the truth, since for half a century, we have witnessed a permutation of the same faces on different command posts of the Front and its puppet republic, as the daily underlines Assabah in its delivery of Monday, September 26.
Thus, explains the daily, by resorting to new communication technologies, each official is surrounded by his own electronic militia which is responsible for restoring his image with the population. Social networks have therefore been infested for some time with images and clichés of Front leaders busy showing off their prowess and achievements, or what they believe to be such. Often, the Algerian official media, called in for reinforcement, do not need to be asked and play the game willingly, continues the daily.
Obviously, the sequestered population in the Tindouf camps is not fooled. She knows that, for a long time, the leaders of the Polisario armed militia have been reduced to mere puppets. It is diplomacy and the Algerian military who have always led the game, and today more and more openly. The leaders of the Polisario are relegated to the background, when they are not simply pushed aside. They have also become more and more cumbersome in view of the scandals in which they are involved and the pans they drag around.
But now the front congress is approaching, and so we have to play the same comedy again. And by a stroke of magic, the leaders of the Front become more and more visible. It is undoubtedly the pseudo foreign minister, Salem Ould Salek, who marks one of the most noticed comebacks. Here he is taking a picture with the leaders of Peru and then, right after, in a so-called meeting with the officials of South Sudan and then another with the leaders of the same country in New York. This is where he even took one of the most expensive shots with the head of Algerian diplomacy. The two men flew from Algiers to take pictures together in New York.
In short, explains the daily, it is not by shelling clichés here and there that this leader, in office since 1998, will abuse the populations of the camps. There, as elsewhere, everyone knows that he has just paid, with the money from the humanitarian aid intended for the camps, for a medical center for his offspring in Écuanteur where he stays regularly to take care of his other investments in this country. Everyone also knows that in addition to the accounts opened in his name in Panama, he also holds shares in an Algerian bank.
According to the daily, the leader of the Polisario, Brahim Ghali, has also recently stood out for the frequency of his appearances on social networks and the Algerian media. From the Ticad summit in Tunisia to the inauguration of the new president of Angola, including the inauguration ceremony of that of Kenya, the leader of the armed militia continues to strut in front of the media cameras that are totally acquired and to multiply the “selfies” which he ordered to be displayed everywhere in the camps.
Of course, this is all just comedy. The inhabitants of the camps, notes the daily, know very well how the leaders of the Front lead the good life in Algiers, or in other countries, while pushing the youth of the camps to launch provocations against the FAR, in suicide operations carried out in the buffer zone, beyond the security system.
Everyone in the camps, Assabah continues, also knows, or at least expects, that the next congress will be a real “political massacre”. It no longer escapes anyone that Brahim Ghali has the firm intention of politically liquidating his adversaries in order to definitively establish his hold on all the cogs of the Front.
We already know, underlines the daily, that leaders like Bachir Mustapha Sayed, Mustapha Mohamed Ali Sid El Bachir or even Mohamed Lamine El Bouhali have been banned from any activity related to the preparations for the congress.