Photos: Western Sahara Rebels Shutter Border Crossing, Demand UN Add Human Rights Mission

Saharawi demonstrators have shut down a border crossing with Mauritania in order to draw attention to their plight ahead of the United Nations’ renewal of its mission in Western Sahara. The activists demand the UN begin monitoring human rights in the country, which has been occupied by Morocco for 45 years.

For more than a week, protesters have shut down the El Guerguerat border crossing between Western Sahara and Mauritania in a bid to pressure the United Nations to increase its activities in the desert country. A six-month extension of the UN Mission for Western Sahara (MINURSO) is due to be voted on Wednesday, and activists and representatives of the Saharawi people have demanded its purview be extended to include human rights monitoring.

The annexation got Morocco kicked out of the African Union for many years, but more recently, some African nations have come around to supporting Rabat’s position, though efforts to curry favor with world powers such as Russia have met with mixed results. Meanwhile, Morocco has retained control of Bou Craa, one of the world’s largest phosphate mines, in Western Sahara’s north.

Saharawi Voice, a collective of Saharawi citizen journalists, wrote on Twitter on Monday that “a mixture of frustration, anger and timing has led to the current situation.”

“The little hope that MINURSO will eventually carry out a referendum for Saharawis to decide our fate, lies in the Personal Envoy of the Secretary General for Western Sahara (PESG),” the journalists wrote. “They bring the parties together and facilitate negotiations. They are key to the process.”

Locations of the various sand walls built by Morocco in Western Sahara

London-based human rights nongovernmental organization Amnesty International has also thrown its weight behind the Saharawi demands, calling on October 22 for the UN to establish a “fully independent and impartial mechanism within the UN peacekeeping mission, with the mandate and resources to effectively monitor human rights abuses in both Western Sahara and the Tindouf camps,” the Saharawi refugee camps across the border in Algeria that are home to close to 100,000 refugees.

“After the last Personal Envoy, German former president Horst Köhler, resigned over ‘health reasons’ over a year ago the Secretary General has yet to appoint a new PESG. The message this sends is that Saharawis’ fate and future are neither important nor a priority for the UN,” Saharawi Voice noted. 

Sourse: sputniknews.com