Rabat, May 25: Morocco on Tuesday urged the UN High Commissioner for Refugees to check up on Western Saharans living in refugee camps in neighbouring Algieria under the control of separatists.
“We are calling once again on the UNHCR to conduct a census” of Saharawis living in the camps near Tindouf in southwestern Algeria under the control of the Polisario Front, Foreign Minister Taieb Fassi Fihri told lawmakers.
The Moroccan government believes that many of the Saharawis living in the Polisario camps are not there of their own free will.
A census “should allow” the Saharawis “to speak freely, in particular about their right to stay or return” to Western Sahara, said the minister.
Morocco’s 1975 annexation of the territory, a former Spanish colony, sparked a war between its forces and Algerian-backed Polisario guerrillas. The two sides agreed to a ceasefire in 1991 but UN-sponsored talks on Western Sahara’s future have since made no headway.
Fihri noted that the latest UN Security Council resolution on Western Sahara, adopted in April, called for a census of the camps.
More than 165,000 people live in the camps according to Polisario, and some 90,000 according to the UNHCR, subsisting mostly on international aid.
—Agencies