Police exactions against few young unemployed sahrawis (constanly stirred up by polisario agents) who voice their frustration with economic and social conditions (which are often better than conditions in some other areas of Morocco) by pledging allegiance to the mercenaries and starting fires in urban areas in order to attract attention, should not systematically be used against Morocco. Police mistakes are unfortunately not unique to the Sahara. As Morocco is developing its judicial and enforcement system, police interventions are increasingly becoming more professional. One has to add that despite the well documented mistakes, human right conditions in Morocco are far better than all countries in Africa (except for South Africa) and certainly all countries in the Middle East. Needless to say that human right conditions in Algerian camps run by Algerian military dictators and the polisario, a group known for its predilection for the most sadistic forms of torture and that won the infamous record of holding the oldest POWs in the world, are only worse in a place called hell. Members of the polisario torture squads should never benefit from the “Nation is merciful” policy adopted by Morocco and should be tried for what they are: human scum.

Well meaning individuals or organizations should make sure they can see beyond the “model” camps set up for foreign visitors in Algeria where Sahrawis are forced to yell their support to Abdelaziz the criminal (born and raised in Morocco whose father served as an officer in the Moroccan Army up until recent retirement) and put on a show for the foreigners under the threat of not receiving their set food and water rations or seeing their kids sent away.

If anyone wants to sincerely help, please demand that the polisario and Algeria release the Sahrawi tribes and let them go back to their country. Enough with the horrific conditions in which innocent little kids are brought up, enough with the polisario inflicted misery and exploitation. Sad to see well meaning activists act for the Polisario thinking they are contributing to a good cause when their actions are causing death and suffering

Gee, John, do you happen to work for a US Christian NGO?
I may happen to be one of those activists, and by reading your posts I do think about the possibility that maybe the POLISARIO are those you want to mention...
But I can only tell from what I have seen so far. I went to the camps last year, and I wish those people a better future. Still, since 31 years ago it is Morocco who I believe is the obstacle to a fair referendum. Why not let the sahrawis (and not the Moroccans) decide for their own future?
Please don´t talk about hell. I did not see Satan around.
And the fact that human rights are worse off in other parts of the world, does not mean that they are actually living in Disneyland. They are sistematically being beaten by good Moroccans.

POLISARIO freed all its Moroccan prisoners, Morocco has sahrawi prisoners still, and they keep detaining more and more (tortures, etc..).

If Morocco is really concerned about the plight of the Saharawi people and want them to return to their homeland, why is it obstructing the referendum which includes in one of its stages the return of refugees?

I agree with Lecercle that Morocco's human rights record is horrific and compared to the Apartheid regime in South Africa before the ANC took over.

Aminetou Haidar, Ali Salem Tamek, Sidi Mohamed Daddach, Brahim Dahan among many others are not children. They are old men and women in the occupied Western Sahara, who have spent many years in prison and who are constantly persecuted by the Moroccan police and army.

Why is the Black prison in El Ayoun full of Saharawi independence activists not mentioning the other prisoners in Morocco proper?

Why are independent observers including an EU delegation are not allowed to visit the occupied Western Sahara these days?

Why was a Swedish journalist expelled from the Territory few weeks ago?

Why Saharawis are not allowed to demonstrate peacefully in the occupied areas?

Lecercle seem to be full of hatred for the Saharawis and their independence movement the Polisario. But hatred will not lead you any way. It may lead you astray. Perhaps you are paid to do this dirty job of defending the crimes of the absolute monarchy in Morocco. May be you need the money and you're not happy with the job. Why not join the thousands of your compatriots who risk their lives in small boats trying to reach Europe every day because they are not happy at home. No decent jobs and no freedom.

The other alternative is to get a job in Algeria which is benefiting from the high price of oil and gas and has a surplus of foreign currency having managed to pay almost all its foreign debt.

Lecerecle if you’re depressed working as a secret service agent you may want to consider moving to Western Sahara and working in the lucrative business of fishing or in the Phosphate mines which Morocco is exploiting.

I believe that there are also oil companies exploring for oil in Western Sahara which has a great potential. Don’t worry the Saharawis will not kick you out when they achieve their independence.

You might get more depressed when you government starts negotiating with Polisario which you hate so much. By the way Kind Hassan II and the current King Mohamed VI have both met Polisario leaders that you hate and describe in many ways.

If Polisario is so bad why do your Kings meet its leaders and negotiate with them?

Furthermore one quite of the Polisario officials who went back to Morocco obtained very lucrative jobs better than you. One of them Omar Hadrami, who was the head of Polisario’s Intelligence Service, is a Governor and quite few others are Ambassadors. Why?

Any Polisario member who wants to go join Morocco will be given money, a house and a job but ordinary Moroccans don’t get these things. Why?

An interesting thing I have noticed in this interesting forum is that it has exposed this sort of people who seem, wittingly or unwittingly, to live in some other plant completely different from ours.

And John Lecercle is definitely one of them. One characteristic of these people is clearly their passionate adherence to a series of uncritically embraced beliefs about certain realities in this world. Because of this, they think that they are the only ones that can talk knowledgeably about these realties, simply because the rest of the mortals either have no access whatsoever to those realities or are inherently incapable of perceiving them. This is undoubtedly a presumptuous assumption. The other related characteristic is that they are too immersed in their self-created world that they are unable to see or perceive the world outside.

It is in this context that we can see this John leaving no stone unturned in order to depict an apocalyptic (albeit unimpressive) picture of the POLISARIO and the Saharawi people in a way that gives the impression that he really knows what he is talking about. I do not know him personally, and I have no idea about his background either. I am very sure, however, that he has never been to the Saharawi refugee camps in Tindouf.

We who have spent some time among the Saharawi refugees can readily see that his account of the situation and the people who live there is absurd and preposterous. It is not hard to identity the kind of sources on which he has drawn to come up with these extraordinarily fictitious accounts. The propagandistic discourses of Moroccan officials are very present there, in addition to the fabrications usually concocted by the notoriously unreliable MAP (the Moroccan state-controlled press agency). By the way, I have just been informed that MPs representing all Colombian parties have belied a recent wire by this agency in which they were allegedly quoted pledging their support for Morocco’s “proposal for autonomy”. It is not surprising to me at all! (continued…)

Let me remind John that thousands of visitors have been to the Saharawi refugee camps that are open and accessible to everyone who wishes to visit. The UNHCR, ECHO and MINURSO (the UN mission) and a host of other NGOs are present in the filed. How come that they have not seen or felt anything of what you claim, or do you have some Olympian vantage point from which you are able to see the unseen?

I have been to those camps, and I do follow the situation there with great interest. It would therefore be a waste of time for me to comment on the well-known fabrications of the Majzen propagandistic machinery, which you have recycled here in a remarkably faithful way.

Those of us who live in democratic countries are able to access a variety of sources of information about many issues including the situation in the whole region of North Africa.

One issue that evidently surpasses in its severity John's apocalyptic (albeit fictitious) accounts about the Saharawi refugee camps is the appalling situation in the Moroccan occupied-territories of Western Sahara. This is no conjecture, but an empirical fact established—explicitly and for everybody to see—in the publicly accessible reports of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, among others.

The medieval and barbaric repression carried out by the Moroccan various corps of security services is well-documented and evidenced graphically by these organisations: raping and dosing Saharawi youngsters with petrol is just the tip of the iceberg of the unspeakable horrors that the Moroccan security forces continue to inflict with impunity on the Saharawi population that has been engaged in peaceful demonstrations since May 2005.

To hide its crimes from the scrutiny of the world, the autocratic regime in Morocco has denied many people (including MEPs) the access to the occupied Western Sahara. International media are also barred from the territory. This is the real situation that John and company seem unable to see because they have long been irremediably blindfolded by the Majzen relentless propagandistic discourses… Wake up, gentlemen!