Western Sahara News

Rabat — The UN's Western Sahara envoy met Morocco's foreign minister Monday, official media reported, during a new tour of the region to push for a peaceful resolution to the frozen conflict. Christopher Ross was received by Salaheddine Mezouar and his deputy Mbarka Bouaida, Morocco's MAP new agency said, without giving further details of the meeting. Last week he visited Algeria, the main backer of the pro-independence Polisario Front, where he met Prime Minister Abdelmalek Sellal, and then travelled to the Sahrawi refugees camps in Tindouf, in western Algeria, where he held talks with Polisario leader Mohamed Abdelaziz. Appointed in 2009 as the personal envoy to the Western Sahara of UN chief Ban Ki-moon, Ross said after his last regional tour in October that there was still no hope of convening face-to-face talks between Morocco, which occupies the disputed territory, and the Polisario Front. "He will convene another round of face-to-face negotia...

Exploring the decades of secret ties between Jerusalem and Rabat. Soon after independence, Israel began following a "periphery doctrine" in its foreign affairs: seeking ties with Arab countries on the margins of the ongoing conflict in the Middle East. No example has illustrated the wisdom of that strategy more than links with the kingdom of Morocco.  Many factors explain this special relationship. In the years following their independence, both Israel and Morocco needed Western assistance to deal with domestic challenges and foreign threats, especially communism and pan-Arabism. "When Morocco became independent, its borders were wide open to hostile elements, especially Egyptian spies, who sought to build a secret infrastructure, in an effort to facilitate the Soviet penetration of North Africa," explains Shmuel Segev, former Military Intelligence officer and author of The Moroccan Connection: The Secret Relations between Israel and Morocco.  ...

By Kerry Kennedy, Special to CNN Editor’s note: Kerry Kennedy is the president of the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights. The views expressed are her own. Aminatou Haidar was pulled from her vehicle by a mob, shoved to the ground and repeatedly assaulted in a four hour public attack that left her severely beaten. Inside her car, destroyed during the November 2012 incident, sat her teenage daughter and her sister. Haidar, a Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award laureate, was heading home from a meeting with United Nations officials in Western Sahara. Sadly, this wasn’t the first time her family had been attacked. Months earlier, a group of men on a bus recognized her son and daughter and attacked the children, sending them home bloody and bruised as a message to their mother. Before that, she says a thug snarled at her teenage son: “I will rape you 'til you're paralyzed.” The most troubling aspect of all this? In all three cases, the attacke...

by Khalil Asmar Starting from US/Morocco joint statement on November 22nd, 2013 that comprised a whole paragraph on Western Sahara till the 2014 appropriation bill signed into law by president Obama on January 17th and passed by congress, Rabat regime’s lobbyist doesn’t seem to swallow the hard blows every time the US administration stresses on international legality on the decades long procrastinated struggle between Morocco and Western Sahara republic’s sole representative the Polisario Front, and desperately endeavoring to search for the slightest hint to market fancy stories fearing the disappointment of a generous regime ready to pay for any comforting lies.  First, in the joint statement, the US administration considered Morocco plan of autonomy an option among others to resolve the Western Sahara issue and not the only valid and viable solution as channeled by Morocco corrupt US-based lobbyist and state propaganda media and press. The paragraph in the joint state...

New document provided by WSHRW as an exclusive worldwide presentation. A new exclusive world first revelation by WSHRW. For the first time is published the opinion of the Legal Service of the European Parliament on the so-called “Agricultural Agreement”, the new Association Agreement between the EU and Morocco signed at the end of 2009, at the time that Morocco illegally deported Aminatu Haidar. Said Agreement was finally published in 2012 in the Official Journal of the European Union. The Trade Committee of the European Parliament requested an opinion of this Institution’s Legal Service on the legality of the agreement. The opinion issued by the Legal Service, which is very negative for Moroccan interests, was kept secret. The European Commission and the European Council themselves have not ventured to invoke it to address the action brought before the European Court of Justice by Frente Polisario against this Agreement. The opinion establishes in two key paragraphs ...

by Khalil Asmar Just few years after Morocco took its independence from France in 1956, the ruling monarchy found itself in palpable tension with the Moroccan national movement, resulting in the assassination of its high-profile political leader El Mahdi Ben Barka in 1965. This incident generated a legacy of bitterness and uncompromising mistrust, not only between the monarchy and the Moroccan national movement, but extended to the international level. In the 70s of the last century, the monarchy reached its peak status of isolation both nationally and internationally, and what remained of the political parties descended from the national movement stood obstinately resolute against any participation or power sharing with a corrupt monarchy, which in any case was about to be wrecked by two coups d’état. Since then, Morocco entered what became known as “the leaden years,” and the yelling of the democratic voices rose up, denouncing the grave human rights situation that spread a...

SALE (MOROCCO)- The Saharawi political prisoners, "Gdeim Izik" group, jailed in the Moroccan prison of Salé, stressed Tuesday that MINURSO is the only UN mission which does not have a mechanism of human rights monitoring. These prisoners, cited by the Sahrawi news agency (SPS) recalled "the incessant calls from international human rights defending organizations and the UN Secretary General’s call in his latest report for the implementation of a UN mechanism to monitor human rights in Western Sahara." They expressed the "full and complete compliance with national and international campaigns for the protection of human rights in Western Sahara", calling on all Sahrawi people to spare no effort to ensure the success of these campaigns initiated by coordination of human rights defending organizations in Western Sahara." In addition, Moroccan policemen brutally tortured on Sunday Saharawi citizen, Lala Lhatra Aram before setting her hous...