Algiers, 22 May 2022 (SPS) - The Algerian special envoy for Western Sahara Issue and Maghreb Countries Amar Belani deconstructed Saturday Morocco’s fallacious arguments on the situation in the Sahrawi refugee camps, affirming that the Makhzen has once again been caught out in a diplomatic swindle.”
“The Moroccan system and its propaganda apparatus have been once again caught in a diplomatic swindle! After the famous episode of “souk of Marrakech,” where the statements of some Foreign ministers were knowingly falsified and decontextualized, it is the turn of the European Parliament to bear the brunt of similar hoaxes from a delegation of Moroccan MPs that went to Brussels as part of the meeting of the Moroccan-EU joint parliamentary commission,” the diplomat of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and National Community Abroad told APS.
Balani underlined that the joint communiqué, published after this meeting, devoted exclusively to the bilateral relations between Morocco and the European Union (AU), “doesn’t contain one word on Western Sahara, but this didn’t prevent this delegation from relaying, via the Moroccan news agency, obsolete elements drawn from the hackneyed propaganda of the Moroccan diplomacy.”
“We must point out that the head of this commission, on the European side, the deputy Andrea Cozzolino, who is also the chairman of the delegation for the relations with the Maghreb countries and the Arab Maghreb Union, and who, in this regard, is bound by neutrality, insisted since the beginning of the aforementioned meeting on the exclusively bilateral character of this event, rejecting any debate implicating a third party,” he underlined.
“The Moroccan deputies, frustrated at this rejection expressed by the European Parliament, got involved in a manipulation operation through an open letter recycling outdated clichés,” he added.
“Uttering, in such a false way, that Algeria doesn’t apply to the Sahrawi refugees in the camps of Tindouf the Geneva Convention of 1951 and the Protocol of 1967, is nothing but misleading because Algeria, as a country of asylum, has never breached its obligations stemming from the international instruments governing the rights the refugees to which it adhered,” he affirmed.
062/SPS/APS