Erik German's Notebook:

Western Sahara activist ends hunger strike, returns home

In a stare-down between a starving lady and a king, the long odds won.

The Kingdom of Morocco agreed to return the passport of human rights activist Aminatou Haidar, after she staged a month-long hunger strike to protest her expulsion. She arrived home late Thursday.

Morocco deported Haidar, 42, on Nov. 13 upon her return from collecting a human rights award in New York City. She ran into trouble with authorities while filling out airport entry paperwork in Layounne, the main city in the disputed Western Sahara territory. Haidar gave her address as being in “Western Sahara,” an entity Morocco has refused to recognize since it annexed the region in 1975.

Haidar — who has been jailed several times for her advocacy of Western Sahara independence — says Moroccan authorities then confiscated her passport and ordered her expelled.

Morocco insisted she voluntarily renounced her citizenship.

It’s still unclear what precisely broke the impasse, but an official in Morocco’s foreign ministry said Friday Haidar agreed to forgo any mention of Western Sahara in her entry documents.

Morocco had also been under increasing pressure from Spain, France and the United States to resolve the matter.

Morocco’s often-secretive Interior Ministry acknowledged as much in a rare statement issued via the state-run wire service, saying, “Haidar's return followed repeated calls made, particularly by friendly countries, to find, from a humanitarian perspective, a solution to the situation."

Iran election: The view from Morocco

The old journalists’ saw that dogfights on Main Street play bigger than wars in Asia is holding true on the newsstands of Morocco.

If you want the latest on the crisis in Iran, you’ll need to dig deep into the foreign sections of Moroccan papers or simply read ones published abroad. I couldn’t find a single domestic publication in French or Arabic that judged Iran’s electoral crisis to be front-page news Tuesday.

Yesterday’s top story on 2M, the flagship broadcast outlet here, was a press conference on local ports featuring a rare appearance by the king.

The Iran coverage you do see has been minimal, and for the most part down the middle.

The government-run Le Matin contained nothing on Iran at all. The Socialist party paper, Liberation, ran a foreign wire story (Agence France Press) summing up Ayatollah Khamenei’s reversal, alongside pictures of police beating unarmed youths in the streets of Tehran. But this played on the page well below a piece on Palestine’s reaction to Israel’s reaction to a speech President Obama gave earlier this month.

One independent daily, Le Soir, did devote a full page to Iran’s tribulations, comparing Iranian riot police to “Robocop” and headlining the piece with quotes from tear-gassed youths calling the election results a “masquerade.” But this story ran deep inside the paper, several layers beneath a feature on the rising popularity of Shisha pipes here — and well beneath yesterday’s “photo du jour,” which captured a woman walking her pet goat downtown.

So it goes without saying that there’ve been no rallies or vigils or events suggesting a Moroccan public riveted by news from Iran.

Perhaps it’s the 3,200 miles separating Rabat from Tehran; perhaps there’s a culture gap between francophone, largely Sunni Morocco and the mostly Shiite Persian-speakers to the east.

But it’s also true that the latest Moroccan dogfight – nationwide local elections in which a brand new party swept into power – have sucked up much of the journalistic oxygen, and ink.

The significance of a new party running cities and villages across Morocco; the effects of 3,000 newly-elected female council members on the political landscape; the votes these newcomers might cast for upper parliament – this is what’s filling front pages here.

“They haven’t even been covering the Air France crash,” said Houssain Bais, 22, a newsstand manager in Rabat describing the papers he sells. “It’s all just stuff about the elections, stuff about Morocco.”

See here for an overview of local reaction around the world.

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