Polisario’s Serious Violations Against Children in Tindouf Exposed in Casablanca

Polisario’s serious violations against children sequestered in the camps of Tindouf in Algeria were exposed, Wednesday evening in Casablanca, by the president of the Sahara Observatory for wealth and human rights, Hafdi Mohamed El Bachir. Speaking at a ceremony held at the Moulay Rachid complex on the occasion of the celebration of the National Day of the Child, Mohamed El Bachir stressed that the separatist group inflicts the most heinous forms of violations of their rights (violence, exploitation, forced recruitment …) on sequestered children, in flagrant violation of all international charters relating to the rights of the child. The separatist front snatches sequestered children from their parents and sends them abroad to be brainwashed into hatred and hostility towards anything that goes against the separatist doctrine of the front, while depriving them of their basic right to education for fear that they will see the reality of the separatist chimera. The front is forcibly enlisting these children in violation of all international charters on children’s rights, including the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child and the Statute of the International Criminal Court, he said, noting that the sequestered children may also be subject to murder, mutilation and sexual violence by the polisario militias. In this regard, Mohamed El Bachir noted that the international community is unanimous in classifying the recruitment of children by armed groups as “war crime”, noting that the UN Security Council has strongly condemned the recruitment and use of children in armed conflict, and called for an end to these practices.  The separatist group documents, through audiovisual media, the operations of recruitment of children and their incitement to take up arms, thus ignoring both the Additional Protocol to the Geneva Convention of 1977 and the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the involvement of children in armed conflict of 2000. This ceremony, organized by the Moroccan Office for Human Rights and Citizenship in coordination with civil society organizations and in partnership with the district of Moulay Rachid, saw interventions from many stakeholders and defenders of children’s rights.