sahara-news.org

The attempt made last month by the American diplomat Susan Rice to table a resolution seeking to expand the MINURSO mandate to the issue of human rights in Western Sahara has exposed the real challenges of this regional conflict, commented French weekly Le Point.
It took the personal intervention of King Mohammed VI and the cancellation of planned joint Moroccan-US military exercises to defuse the crisis. Faced with the Moroccan determination, the other members of the Group of Friends of the Sahara (Russia, France, Spain and the UK) have quickly distanced themselves from the U.S. initiative.
Seemingly, the initiative had not been the subject of prior consultations within the U.S. administration, which eventually corrected the error, and the world powers refused to destabilize a region already weakened somewhat by the pressure of terrorist and separatist groups and where "Morocco stands out as an island of stability," said Le Point.

Hundreds of children from the Polisario-controlled Tindouf camps are deported every year to Cuba. These children are forcibly separated from their parents and shipped manu-military to Cuba where they undergo communist indoctrination at a time the international community and NGOs, which have their eyes riveted on human rights in Western Sahara, are showing total indifference to their fate.
Details of this appalling adventure were revealed by a Sahrawi from the Rguibet tribe who managed to escape the hell of the Tindouf camps upon return from Havana. Hamoudi Al Bihi, 26, was part of a contingent of hundreds of Sahrawi children conveyed to Cuba in 1989. He was then 9 year old.
He spent there nearly 15 years before being repatriated back to the Aousserd camp where his family lives. Right after his return from Cuba, he managed to escape from the Tindouf camps, crossed the northern border of Mauritania and arrived in Morocco.
“We were sent to Cuba at a very early age. We were just kids but we were used as a means to keep our families hostages in Tindouf and prevent them from returning to Morocco," said Al Bihi in an interview with "The Economist" daily.

The United States and Europe should worry that the conflict over the Western Sahara is souring relations between Morocco and Algeria and preventing them from joining forces to work together against Islamist violence and extremism, says three western pundits in a newly released report. In the report entitled "United States' U.N. Proposal and Policy on Western Sahara: A Dead-End?” the three experts recall that U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has recently warned that the ongoing conflict in Mali threatens to spill over into the Western Sahara. Ban Ki-moon has also warned that there is a possibility of infiltration by foreign militant groups in this region, says the international expert team comprising Dustin Dehez (Global Governance Institute), Dr. Alex MacKenzie (University of Salford) and Dr. Daniel Novotny (Global Europe). The briefing paper was published by Global Europe, an independent, not-for-profit think tank seeking to stimulate independent thinking on European Union's external affairs.

The chairwoman of the American "RFK Center", Kerry Kennedy, has committed a blatant blunder while seeking to defend at all costs the Polisario separatists’ schemes in the southern provinces of Morocco.
In a video posted on her website and on YouTube, Kerry Kennnedy is talking about “torture and repression” perpetrated by Moroccan law enforcement agents against Sahrawi civilians in Laayoune. Her remarks are illustrated with two videoed images showing police officers taking action against the crowd in what is claimed to be Western Sahara.

The problem is that the first edited video showing Moroccan police agents dispersing protesters was actually shot in the city of Guelmim back in 2008 and not in Laayoune in 2013.
The second video was just grotesque. Kerry Kennedy’s video editing staff actually collected pictures of clashes between Tunisian police and protesters during the Jasmine Revolution in late 2010 and early 2011 in the streets of Sidi Bouzid, the town where the uprising against the regime of Ben Ali started.

Observers from the MINURSO, the UN Mission entrusted with monitoring the cease-fire in Western Sahara, have seemingly forgotten their initial role and evolved into Cuban-like military instructors.
While the Security Council is expected to vote on Thursday on the renewal of the MINURSO mandate which expires at the end of April, a video has been circulating since last Monday in social networks as a wildfire.
The video shows two MINURSO officers in military attire stirring up some thirty young Polisario activists against Morocco. The scene is taking place in a tent in the Tindouf camps.
If authenticated, the video would constitute a serious precedent and an irrefutable evidence of the violation of the MINURSO neutrality by some of its officers who would have thus infringed the mission entrusted to them.
The 2-mn video shows the two observers, identified as Julio Eduardo Estibar from Argentina and Hany Mustapha from Egypt, giving instructions to the Polisario young separatists and explaining to them how to organize a revolt against Morocco.