Algiers, March 31, 2018 (SPS) - The member of the African National Congress (ANC), the ruling party in South Africa, Zwelivelile Mandela on Friday, in Algiers, called the UN Security Council to assume its moral and legal responsibilities towards Western Sahara people and to set a date for a referendum on their self-determination.
"In line with Resolution 1514, the United Nations must assume its moral and legal responsibilities over this long-running conflict and set a date for a referendum on self-determination in Western Sahara," Zwelivelile said in a speech at the sixth Conference on "Peoples' Right to Resistance: the Case of Sahrawi People."
Zwelivelile, the grandson of the South-African leader, Nelson Mandela, denounced the illegal exploitation of Western Sahara's natural resources, stressing the need to "create an international lobby" to put the those resources "under a UN mandate to protect them."
He seized the opportunity to launch an appeal for Saharawi young people to tell their own stories about the struggle against Moroccan occupation on social media.
"You will thus inspire the whole continent on anticolonial struggle."
"We won' defeat Morocco's occupation forces unless we are unified," Zwelivelile Mandela told the participants at the two-day conference.
The speaker underlined the historic position of the late South-African leader, Nelson Mandela, on Western Sahara, who "considered the struggle of the Saharawi people as his own struggle, their pain as his own pain and their suffering as his own suffering."
In addition to Saharawi delegations from refugee camps and the occupied Western Sahara territories, the conference is attended by nearly one hundred participants from 53 African, Latin-American, Arab and European countries. (SPS)
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