"I feel like I have been on a hybrid between the Roskilde Festival, a survival trip and Dancing with the Stars". Paid by the organisers, a Danish journalist travelled to occupied Western Sahara on business class for the 2015 edition of the controversial Crans Montana Forum.
The Danish daily Information on 9 april 2015 published a beautifully written reportage on how their reporter experienced the participation in the Crans Montana Forum in occupied Western Sahara in 2015.
The story takes the reader through the bizarre experience of travelling to the occupied territory - on business class. It also presents the logistics, the security, the statement of the King and of organiser Jean-Claude Carteron.
It also interviews the Danish researcher Kristoffer Nilaus Tarp from the Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS), who participated in the event, but only days before the conference realised that it did not in fact take place in Morocco, but in Western Sahara.
“I thought there would be professional substance. But with a few exceptions, it was a waste of time”, Kristoffer Nilaus Tarp told the journalist. He qualified the conference "one of the most bizarre experiences" he had ever had.
“After talking for three minutes, I was rushed off stage, before they began handing out awards to all sorts of dubious personalities. It just made it even more clear that it was simply a political statement and nothing else. It dawned on me that the absurd spectacle that I had become a part of, was just about that Morocco is trying to buy itself goodwill”, Tarp wrote. A must read!
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