In mid-November we were shocked by the news coming from the territories of the Sahara. Morocco responded with a military attack to the peaceful initiative carried out by a group of Sahrawi people to make visible the right to a referendum on self-determination. In the face of these facts, the demands of the Sahara came from dozens of places in the Basque Country. It should be noted that this protection is not new; in the last four decades there have been various activities organized in defense of this country: solidarity caravans to bring food, medicines and other essential material, sports and cultural activities of collection... In 1976, with the abandonment of Western Sahara by Spanish soldiers, Spain ' s responsibility for the decolonization process was also abandoned. From then until 1991 the war between Morocco and the Polisario Front continued, and then solidarity with this people in the Basque Country was strengthened. At that time, initiatives were also initiated in favour of the Sandinista Nicaraguan revolution. Two that were so different

in the context of these processes is the creation of Basque cooperation for development. Several movements of solidarity that emerged from the people gradually received the support of public institutions of different levels.

Since then, a development cooperation policy has also been built in the municipalities, in the forced deputies, in the Basque Government and in the Government of Navarra, that is, strategic plans have been defined with the definition of priority sectors and geographical areas, laws of development cooperation have been approved, and in the case of the Basque Government, in 2011 the Basque Agency for Development Cooperation was launched. Since the creation of Basque development cooperation in the CAPV, more than 17,000 projects have been financed from the main administrations. The projects have been of all kinds. In 2019, for example, nearly 46% of the projects implemented were carried out in Latin American territories and almost 20% in Africa. The Basque Public Cooperation Portal provides a detailed overview of the characteristics of the projects financed from 2014 to the present day.

It should be noted that the development of cooperation has been irregular. As a consequence of the financial crisis of 2008, in addition to the CAV and Navarre, in the rest of the autonomous communities the funds dedicated to this policy experienced a collapse so that in some cases they remained at zero. In addition to the quantity, the limits of their efficiency have been mentioned in recent decades, since, globally, the impact of other financial and economic flows on the territories of the south can, in many cases, be greater than that of development cooperation flows. What is more, the amount of money that immigrants send to their territories has on many occasions been even greater.

However, the influence that different flows can have is as broad as complex. On the one hand, and in the absence of global taxation, development cooperation is one of the few instruments of global redistribution. On the other hand, the flows of cooperation from outside to different countries of the South sometimes represent an important part of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of the territory. For example, according to data from the World Bank, international aid flows in the Republic of Yemen accounted for 28% of the country’s GDP in 2018, while in the last ten years cooperation flows in the Central African Republic have translated into 20% of average GDP.

The best partnership seems to be the one that is not needed. But in the face of international institutions and in particular the lack of knowledge of the Spanish State, the protection of peoples has been a source of survival for a Sahrawi people who have been in exile for 40 years.