Polisario threatens to quit Western Sahara talks

2009-10-28

Western Sahara's independence movement wants its activists freed from Moroccan jails.

ALGIERS - Western Sahara's Polisario Front independence movement on Tuesday threatened to pull out of negotiations with Morocco unless seven detained activists were freed, its Algiers representative said.

"The detention of the seven Sahrawi activists and human rights abuses in the occupied Sahrawi territories are a threat to peace and to the negotiations with Morocco," Ibrahim Ghali told a press conference.

Morocco "has since the start of October been waging a campaign of arrests of Sahrawi activists" in the Western Sahara, according to Ghali. The territory was annexed by Morocco after Spanish settlers left in 1975.

Seven Sahrawi human rights activists were arrested on October 8 when they got off a plane at Casablanca airport in western Morocco, coming from the Sahrawi refugee camps at Tindouf in southeast Algeria.

The prosecutor in Casablanca said that during their visit to Tindouf, the seven "made contact with parties hostile to Morocco, thus threatening the best interests of the nation" and ordered that they face legal proceedings.

UN-backed talks on the future of the Western Sahara are currently stalled. Four rounds of negotiations on the territory held in Manhasset, a suburb of New York, could not bridge the gap between Morocco, which claims sovereignty over the Western Sahara, and the separatist Polisario Front.

An informal bid to unblock negotiations took place on August 10 in Vienna.

Morocco offers considerable autonomy to the Sahrawi people. The Polisario Front wants a referendum on self-determination, with independence as one of the options.

Source: Middle East Online.
Link: http://www.middle-east-online.com/english/?id=35315.