London, Feb 26, 2014 (SPS) - The President of the British NGO "War on Want" Mr. John Hilary, who visited occupied Western Sahara last week, has noted, in an article published by the Guardian, that the Saharawi territories occupied by Morocco have turned to be a "police state".
"Western Sahara can only be described as a police state. I was there recently with the first British parliamentary delegation to the occupied territory and everywhere we went we were closely shadowed by undercover agents. Wherever we were driven by our Saharawi hosts, we were tailed by Moroccan police," writes Mr. Hilary.
Most chilling of all was the heavy police intimidation of the monthly protests called by human rights groups to demand the release of all Saharawi political prisoners being held in Moroccan jails, and an extension of the mandate of the UN monitoring body, Minurso, to include human rights, he added.
Saharawi human rights groups had duly informed the Moroccan authorities of the protest in advance, but because all Saharawi organisations are banned, they were denied permission to hold the demonstration.
Instead, those trying to make it to the protest found their way blocked by gangs of uniformed and plainclothes police and paramilitary auxiliaries to prevent the rally from taking place.
Mr. Hilary said that he and the UK parliamentarians saw police vans driven fast towards them and plainclothes officers jumping out to disperse people with baton charges, wherever groups of Saharawi began to gather in surrounding streets.
He added that next morning they were shown video footage of uniformed and plainclothes police surrounding protesters and roughly bundling them away.
«We also met a number of those the police had assaulted, including one woman sporting bandages where she had been hit. Most shrugged off their injuries as an unavoidable hazard of activism under Moroccan occupation,» stated the article.
The delegation, which included the MPs Jeremy Corbyn and Mark Williams and the co-ordinator of the Western Sahara Campaign John Gurr, was in the territory to witness the human rights situation facing the Saharawi people after 39 years of Moroccan occupation.
We too had a brief taste of police harassment when the car in which we were driving was pulled over and impounded on the pretext that its papers were not in order.
While we were remonstrating with the crowd of plainclothes police who descended upon us, one reached into the car and snatched the camera with which we had been taking photos of the demonstration. We managed to retrieve it after making representations to the prefect of police, but all images of the rally had been wiped from its memory card, underlined Mr. Hilary. (SPS)
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