Western Sahara News

Moroccan security forces use heavy-handed tactics to repress Saharawi organisations and campaigns for independence Western Sahara can only be described as a police state. I was there recently with the first British parliamentary delegation to the occupied territory and everywhere we went we were closely shadowed by undercover agents. Wherever we were driven by our Saharawi hosts, we were tailed by Moroccan police. Most chilling of all was the heavy police intimidation of a peaceful Saharawi demonstration we witnessed in the capital, Laayoune, the day before we left.  The demonstration was the latest in a series of monthly protests called by human rights groups to demand the release of all Saharawi political prisoners being held in Moroccan jails, and an extension of the mandate of the UN monitoring body, Minurso , to include human rights . Saharawi human rights groups had duly informed the Moroccan authorities of the protest in advance, but because all Saha...

In a discussion with me last week about freedom of expression in his country, Moroccan Minister of Communication Moustapha Khalfi boasted that Sahrawi people living in Western Sahara who opposed Moroccan rule over the contested former Spanish colony are free to post whatever they want online without facing cybercensorship. Activists in El-Ayoun, the capital of Western Sahara – or the “southern provinces” as Khalfi prefers to call it -- confirm that Morocco does not block their online content. But the interference with activists’ work comes earlier. People caught filming police actions risk getting their equipment confiscated; bloggers have been threatened, demonstrations blocked or tightly controlled so as to limit the images that make it online. The police here systematically block public demonstrations called by associations that the authorities suspect of favoring self-determination for the territory, which Morocco has claimed since invading and annexing it in 1975. In...

Demonstrations were held in occupied cities of Smara, Dakhla and Boujdour for expanding the powers of MINURSO for the protection and monitoring of human rights. MINURSO is the only UN mission which does not have a mechanism to monitor human rights. The Polisario Front engages the battle to repair this injustice. Supporters showered. Following a meeting with Abbas Cheibani, the Saharawi Ambassador in Montevideo, the Foreign Minister of Uruguay, Luis Almagro, stressed the need to provide the United Nations Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara (MINURSO) a component to monitor human rights, says a dispatch from the official Sahrawi news agency SPS, dated February 15, while Spanish organizations of solidarity with the Saharawi people protested last Saturday as part of the international campaign for the expansion of the prerogatives of the UN Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara (MINURSO) for the protection and monitoring of human rights, the source added. Valuabl...

In June 2013,  Maghreb Page  co-editor,  Samia Errazzouki , and I produced an electronic roundtable of articles describing various historical and political contours of the Western Saharan conflict,  opening  with a brief summary of its history:  Beginning as a post-colonial dispute between regional powers in the 1970s, the conflict developed and was exacerbated as North Africa became an entangled site of Cold War rivalries. Following the 1975 Madrid Accords, in which Spain conceded on its promises to the Sahrawi people on honoring their right to self-determination through a referendum, Spain instead split the territory between Mauritania and Morocco. By then, the Polisario Front had grown as an armed struggle group, fighting for an independent Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR), first against Spanish colonization, then against Mauritanian and Moroccan military forces. By 1979, Mauritanian forces withdrew from the territory, leaving the conflict b...