Morocco: Human rights violations in the Western Sahara occupied territory

On the 8 October, seven prominent Sahrawi human rights advocates were arrested at Mohamed V airport in Casablanca, Morocco. They were driven away by Moroccan security forces immediately after disembarking from a flight returning from Algeria where they had been visiting the Sahrawi refugee camps between 26 September and 8 October.

The ‘Casablanca Seven’ are currently being held in Zaki prison in Sale City near Rabat awaiting trial before a military court. This has sparked fresh condemnation from politicians, human rights organisations, NGOs, academics and regional analysts from around the world, who have expressed serious concerns for their physical safety and psychological wellbeing.

A Moroccan official news agency statement, dated 8 October 2009, claims the arrests were made because the Casablanca Seven had meetings with ‘bodies opposing Morocco’, thereby undermining national interests. The Moroccan media and various political parties have branded the Casablanca Seven as ‘traitors’ and their visit as ‘tantamount to treason’, calling for them to be punished,1 sparking fears amongst the international observers that they will face lengthy sentences or even the death penalty.2 Morocco claims the visit was an attempt to ‘undermine the Moroccan proposal of autonomy in the Sahara region’. All visits ‘to the Tindouf camps are considered ‘anti-Moroccan’ and those who make the journey to the camp run the risk of severe consequences.3

Amnesty International argues that if this reference refers to the seven’s visits to the Polisario-administered Tindouf refugee camps on the Algerian border, then ‘all of these activities should be regarded as peaceful and legitimate exercise of freedom of expression, association and assembly as guaranteed in international law and standards.’ Amnesty International reports that four of those now detained have previously been imprisoned, including Ali Salem Tamek, who was subsequently adopted by Amnesty International as a prisoner of conscience, and Brahim Dahane, who was forcibly disappeared in the 1980s until his release in 1991.4 Moreover, Brahim Dahane was earlier this year nominated for the Swedish government’s Per Anger Peace Prize 2009. The award is due to be awarded in Stockholm on 16 November, but now Brahim is in a Moroccan prison.

Rippling around the arrest of the Casablanca Seven are more allegations of human rights violations, with reports that detainees’ family members have also faced harassment following their arrest.5 Harassment of Sahrawi activists has been reportedly on the increase. In August, six Sahrawi teenagers (the ‘Oxford Six’) were arrested and prevented from flying to a peace camp in the UK, and Nguia El Haouassi was abducted by Moroccan police (see Pambazuka News, 10 October 2009).6 September saw over 20 documented reports of police torture being forwarded to Amnesty International: e.g. Boujdour Sultana Khayia who had her arm broken by police, Mohamed Brakan (21 years old) being thrown from the roof of a house by police, Mohamed Tahil assaulted by police and his nose broken and Ayzan Amydan being arrested.7 On 6 October, five Sahrawi activists were prevented from travelling to Mauritania, and their identity documents confiscated before being released. (.).8Efforts to suppress activists are not only directed towards Sahrawi living in the southern Occupied Territory – one can cite Morocco’s violations against its own media’s freedom of speech. On 4 November, the International Press Institute (IPI) issued a statement expressing disappointment at US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton’s lack of mention of press freedom during her 2-day visit to Morocco to an international G8-backed forum in Marrakesh. IPI’s press statement lists examples of recent deteriorating press freedom in Morocco itself. For instance in August, the government seized copies of the current affairs magazines, Tel Quel and Nichane, after they published the results of a poll on how Moroccans regarded the King’s first decade in power.9

These latest Moroccan human rights violations have attracted worldwide responses. In the US, the Robert F. Kennedy Centre (RFK) for Justice and Human Rights issued a press statement on 9 October, urging the Moroccan authorities to comply with human rights obligations under international law such as International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights which Morocco has ratified, and the Basic Principles for Treatment of Prisoners, adopted in the United Nations General Assembly Resolution, 45/111 of 14 December 1990. Also on the 9 October, the United Nation’s Fourth Commission of Decolonisation held in New York attracted 84 petitioners who addressed the Committee on the human rights and political dimensions of the conflict. Three US Senators wrote the Moroccan King stating ‘We believe that this action will not advance the confidence building between your government and the Polisario in the conflict in the Western Sahara and could be detrimental to the success of the U.N. sponsored negotiations’. In London, the Guardian newspaper published a letter on 16 October signed by eight British MPs and Ruth Tanner (Campaigns Director of War on Want), expressing concern for the safety of the seven detainees.10 A Western Sahara athlete, Salah Hmatou Amaidan, addressed the British All Party Parliamentary Group on Western Sahara concerning the human rights situation in the Occupied Territories. On the 26 October, four Swedish MPs also wrote to the Moroccan authorities demanding the immediate release of the seven. On 30 October, the Swedish Social Democratic Party announced that if it won the elections in 2010, that it would recognise the Western Sahara, which would make it the first member state of the European Union to do so.

Until now, Morocco has fairly successfully kept the beatings and killings of leading Sahrawi human rights advocates and civil society groups in the Moroccan Occupied Territory beneath the radar of the global media. But two phenomena are successfully breaking through Morocco’s ‘wall of human rights shame’. Firstly, internet and mobile phones enable rapid communication to channel evidence through Morocco’s ‘propaganda wall’, such as video clips of Moroccan police’s excessive use of force at peaceful student demonstrations, thereby enabling external observers to monitor the ongoing state of affairs. 11 Secondly, these observers comprise a growing network of NGOs, human rights organisations, academics and regional analysts as an intellectually informed ‘Green Line’ against Morocco’s belligerent ‘tools of persuasion’. 12 Both these phenomena provide – as Pazzanita so aptly put it – the ‘antidote to the propaganda’.13

Following the 1975 Spanish colonial withdrawal and the ICJ opinion sought by the United Nations14, Morocco ‘ignored or discounted’ that opinion (1983: 60-62)15 and invaded the Western Sahara annexing approximately eighty per cent of the territory and now commonly referred to as the Occupied Territory (Hodges 1983; Damis 1983; Shelley 2004). A sixteen-year war ensued between the Moroccans and the Sahrawi independence movement, the Polisario Front. A 1991 United Nations brokered ceasefire has been successfully maintained, but the ceasefire agreement carried a promise of a referendum for Sahrawi self determination which has been repeatedly stalled or blocked by Morocco. For the last 34 years, an estimated 165,000 refugees have lived in exile in refugee camps administered by the Polisario Front on the Algerian desert border town of Tindouf. The Polisario formed their nation-state in exile in 1976, the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR), and control the remaining twenty per cent of the Western Sahara, often called the ‘Free Zone’ or ‘Liberated Territory’. The Polisario continues to seek self-determination and a return to homeland, while the remaining Sahrawi population live under Moroccan occupation.

* Konstantina Isidoros is a doctoral researcher in Social Anthropology at the University of Oxford. Her field of specialisation is on nomadic pastoralism across the Sahara Desert with a particular interest in the hassaniyya-speaking Sahrawi nomads of the western Sahara.