Bir Lahlou (SADR) 16 February 2021 (SPS) - President of the Republic, Secretary-General of the Polisario Front, Brahim Ghali, has affirmed in a letter to the UN Secretary-General, António Guterres, and the rotating president of the Security Council, Barbara Woodward (United Kingdom), the legitimate right of the Sahrawi people to respond firmly to any action that jeopardizes the security and safety of any Sahrawi citizen wherever they are.
The Sahrawi president denounced the recurrent and systematic violations committed by the Moroccan occupation forces against Sahrawi civilians in the occupied territories of Western Sahara, calling on the Security Council to assume its responsibilities to "protect Sahrawi civilians and ensure their physical and moral safety as a basic element of the United Nations responsibility towards the Sahrawi people and towards the decolonization of the last colony in Africa".
The President of the Republic indicated that the Sahrawi party had warned that the occupying power had launched large-scale retaliatory campaigns against unarmed Sahrawi civilians, human rights activists and journalists, in the wake of the Moroccan aggressive act in which it blew up the ceasefire on November 13, 2020, forcing the Sahrawi people to resume its legitimate liberation struggle.
In this context, the President of the Republic pointed out that "the intimidation and physical and psychological torture that the Sidi-Brahim Khaya family is facing today in the occupied city of Boujdour is only one example of the daily oppression, abuse and heinous practices that Sahrawi civilians undergo in the occupied Sahrawi territories."
The President of the Republic concluded his letter by underlining that "the Sahrawi people have been adhering to a peaceful solution for nearly three decades, at a time when the United Nations has kept its shameful silence on the Moroccan state's persistence in its illegal occupation of parts of our homeland and its brutality and intimidation of our defenseless citizens in the occupied territories, parallel to its obstruction of the organization of the self-determination referendum and then its recent act of ruining the ceasefire agreement on November 13, 2020". (SPS)
062/090