Morocco Said to Abandon Hundreds of Migrants in Desert ALGIERS, Oct 14 (AFP) - The separatist Polisario Front movement said Friday it has located hundreds of African migrants abandoned in the Western Sahara desert by Moroccan security forces driving them out of the country. Since Wednesday, we have located four groups of clandestine emigrants cast into the desert on orders from the Moroccan government in several parts of the liberated zones of the Sahrawi Republic, the movements leadership stated. The UN refugee agency and a UN peacekeeping mission in the Western Sahara on Thursday said they were worried and seeking west Africans left to fend without water and food in the territory, disputed between Morocco and Polisario, at the start of the week. One or two had managed to keep mobile phones and contact outsiders briefly to describe their dire straits, the outcome of a tough crackdown that started last weekend both in Morocco and Spains North African enclaves. The Polisario Front said the hapless emigrants have been rescued by Sahrawi military units around four points on defensive walls the Moroccan army built in the territory when separatists took up arms after it was annexed after Spanish colonists pulled out in 1975. The expellees were completely exhausted, thirsty and hungry, the movement said in a report by its Sahrawi news agency APS, adding that they had got there in convoys in inhuman conditions from northern Morocco. AFP has been able to follow the group since Saturday, when a Nigerian managed to slip a scrap of paper with his phone number to a photographer through the window of a bus. Since then, the man known only as George, managed to call several times to report where the bus was headed by reading off highway signs, and the bus was last heard of close to the Western Sahara. On Thursday, a Malian in the same group managed to reach AFP. We have no water, he said. We are going to die. On Thursday, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) office in Geneva said troops of a UN force known as MINURSO were trying to find sub-Saharans in a desert all the more deadly because of mines laid since the start of the separatist conflict. UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, pan-African and international human rights associations, and medical and other relief charities active in the region have all expressed concern over the speed and nature of the expulsions. More than 1,000 people from poverty-stricken west African countries who had trekked to Morocco as a potential jumping off point for new lives in Europe were either taken by police or voluntarily came out of hiding to get a place on government-chartered flights from northeast Morocco to Mali and Senegal.nytimes/2005/10/14/international/africa/14wire-morocco.html?_r=1&
Posted on: Fri, 23 Jan 2015 17:53:20 +0000
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