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...

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...