video footage of uniformed and plainclothes police surrounding protesters and roughly bundling them away.

We also met a number of those the police had assaulted, including one woman sporting bandages where she had been hit. Most shrugged off their injuries as an unavoidable hazard of activism under Moroccan occupation.

The delegation, which included the MPs Jeremy Corbyn and Mark Williams and the co-ordinator of the Western Sahara Campaign John Gurr, was in the territory to witness the human rights situation facing the Saharawi people after 39 years of Moroccan occupation.

We too had a brief taste of police harassment when the car in which we were driving was pulled over and impounded on the pretext that its papers were not in order.

While we were remonstrating with the crowd of plainclothes policewho descended upon us, one reached into the car and snatched the camera with which we had been taking photos of the demonstration. We managed to retrieve it after making representations to the prefect of police, but all images of the rally had been wiped from its memory card.

In UN parlance, Western Sahara is officially a non-self-governing territory. This makes it Africa's last remaining colony, and no other country in the world recognises Morocco's sovereignty.

When Spanish colonial forces quit the area in 1975, the Moroccans moved in from the north and the Mauritanians from the south. Mauritania soon pulled its forces out again but Morocco stayed, launching successive waves of immigration into the territory that have turned the Saharawi people into a minority in their own land.

Any call