Gloria Muñoz Ramírez, columnist for the Mexican left-leaning daily La Jornada, reports back April 8 from Tifariti, Western Sahara, where the Polisario Front resistance movement recently held its fifth national congress. Tifariti is the principal town in the Morocco-occupied territory controlled by the Polisario Front, whose exile government is recognized by the African Union. Ramírez writes that this year Polisario's national congress was occassioned by the emergence of a "struggle within the struggle"—that of women demanding their right to an equal place within the movement to liberate their homeland.

Ramírez quotes Fatma, secretary general of the National Union of Sahrawi Women: "It is clear that the principal struggle is for liberation, but we must also combine this with the struggle for men and women to have the same opportunites. We are Arabs and Muslims, but this is not a synonym for discrimination; Sahrawi women are a concrete example of this other reality."

See our last posts on Western Sahara and the struggle within Islam.