Hunger-striking W.Sahara activist in intensive care

(LANZAROTE) - Western Sahara independence activist Aminatou Haidar refused Thursday to abandon her month-long hunger strike despite being rushed into intensive care, colleagues and medical sources said.

The 42-year-old mother-of-two agreed to be treated after her condition deteriorated overnight and was taken to a hospital in Lanzarote in the Canary Islands just after midnight, said her spokewoman Edi Escobar.

Haidar remained conscious but was suffering from stomach pain and severe nausea, she added. A hospital official said she had vomited blood and was severely dehydrated, although staff were not trying to force-feed her.

But she does not intend to give up her hunger strike, Fernando Peraita, of Haidar's support campaign, told Spanish radio station RNE on Thursday.

"She won't do that until she had returned home to Laayoune," the main town in the disputed Western Sahara territories, he said.

"The doctors told us that her condition was stable and that they had given her sedatives to ease the severe pains that she had felt all day," he added.

Haidar was hospitalised hours after her sister Laila arrived to visit her.

She launched the protest in Lanzarote airport in Spain's Canary Islands on November 16 after Rabat denied her entry to her native Western Sahara, a disputed territory annexed by Morocco in 1975.

She was turned back as she tried to return home after a trip to the United States, where she had recently received a prize for her human rights work from the RFK Center for Justice and Human Rights.

Morocco says it will not allow Haidar to return, saying she had renounced her Moroccan nationality and passport, an account she has denied.

Haidar has already turned down a Spanish offer of citizenship or political asylum, vowing to return to Western Sahara "dead or alive, with or without my passport."

On Wednesday, Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero told parliament the government "has worked and is working every hour, every minute to resolve this situation. We hope it can be resolved quickly and favourably."

Thursday's edition of the Spanish daily El Pais said King Mohammed VI of Morocco had sent two senior aides to Washington, to try to find an "imaginative formula" that would allow Haidar home without Rabat having to lose face.

One of the aides was the country's intelligence chief, the paper reported.

Morocco's Economy Minister Salaheddine Mezouar put the blame at Haidar's feet in comments Thursday while attending an economics forum in Madrid.

"She is the one who provoked this problem and she has to help find a solution," he said.

Haidar had already refused solutions proposed by Spain and other proposals from Morocco, he added.

Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos is due to address parliament Thursday afternoon to update deputies on the situation.

On Tuesday, Spain's parliament passed a motion calling for Haidar's case to be managed "at the highest level".

At the European Parliament in Strasbourg, eastern France, meanwhile, deputies stepped back from voting on a resolution condemning Morocco over the affair, so as not to undermine diplomatic efforts to end the impasse.

The scheduled vote was postponed at the last moment on the initiative of the two main political groups, the socialists and the conservatives.

Morocco annexed the Western Sahara following the withdrawal of colonial power Spain in the dying days of the regime of right-wing dictator Francisco Franco, sparking a war with the Algeria-backed Polisario Front movement.

The two sides agreed a ceasefire in 1991, but UN-sponsored talks on its future have since made no headway.

Morocco has pledged to grant the phosphate-rich territory widespread autonomy, but rules out independence.