Sahrawi Refugee Camps - Family Separation and Human Rights

Family Separation and Human Rights

Since the Polisario Front and Morocco are still at war, visits between the camps and the Moroccan-controlled parts of Western Sahara are virtually impossible, with the Moroccan Wall hindering movement through Western Sahara, and the Algerian-Moroccan border closed added to the restriction on movement by the Polisario on the camps population. Thousands of families have been separated for up to 30 years, a painful situation for the population in both Western Sahara and the refugee camps. In 2004, UNHCR managed a family visits exchange program for five-day visits for a limited number of people, going from the camps to the Moroccan-held territories and vice versa. The United Nations has also established telephone and mail services between the camps and Moroccan-held Western Sahara.

While Polisario complains of repression of Sahrawi human rights activists in the Moroccan-held parts of Western Sahara; the government of Morocco, dissident groups inside Polisario, as well as former members of Polisario, have claimed that the refugee camps occasionally are the scene of human rights abuse against the refugee population by the Polisario.

The Polisario Front has acknowledged reports of mistreatment in the seventies and eighties, but deny the accusations of on-going abuse. Reports of beatings and torture, in many cases leading to death, of Moroccan prisoners of war who were formerly held in the camps were backed by some human rights organizations, which seems to have contributed to the release of the last of these prisoners by the summer of 2005. There are complaints of limitations on movement between the camps, with Morocco describing them as completely shut off from the outside world, but camp authorities maintain that this is untrue, and that they are simply engaged in registering movements for aid allocation purposes. Visiting human rights organizations have concluded that the conditions are troublesome with regard to basic subsistence, but that the human rights situation is satisfactory. An OHCHR (United Nations' human rights monitors) visit to both Moroccan-controlled Western Sahara and the Tindouf refugee camps in 2006 documented no complaints of human rights abuse in the camps, but stressed the need for more information. However, the report, which severely criticized Moroccan conduct in Western Sahara, was slammed as biased and partisan by the Moroccan government. In April 2010, the Sahrawi government had called the UN to supervise human rights in the liberated territories and refugee camps, stating that "We are ready to fully cooperate with UN human rights observers in the territory under our control. The United Nations should take this proposal seriously, and ask Morocco to do likewise".