UN unsustainability in the Tindouf Refugee Camps

The UN says that it seeks sustainability in its work and programmes, that it seeks “integration of the social, economic and environmental dimensions of sustainable development in policy-making at international, regional and national levels”.

And the UN’s Children’s Fund, UNICEF, says on its website that “UNICEF has worked from its founding on nutrition programming aimed at fulfilling every child’s right to adequate nutrition,” because “good nutrition benefits families, their communities and the world as a whole.”

But these principles have seemingly not been applied in the Tindouf refugee camps. Here approximately 150.000 Saharawis have been in a desert exile for 35 years, since their homeland, Western Sahara, was invaded by Morocco.

Tre europæiske hjælpearbejdere kidnappet i flygtningelejr i Algeriet

Ifølge en repræsentant fra den Afrikanske Union, er tre hjælpearbejdere fra henholdsvis Spanske og Italienske NGOer blevet kidnappet af Al-Qaeda i en flygtningelejr nær Tindouf i Algeriet den 22. oktober.

Jean Ping, som er formand for den Afrikanske Unions kommission, udtalte forleden i en pressemeddelelse, at bortførelsen af hjælpearbejderne var udført af ”militante fra Al-Qaeda”, og opfordrede landene i Magreb-regionen i Nordafrika til at samarbejde i kampen mod terrorisme.

Saharawis: Now we go to war!

After 36 years in exile in a desert in South Western Algeria the Saharawis have had enough. The UN-led negotiations have not brought a viable solution to the problem of the 165.000 refugees from occupied Western Sahara that fled the advancing Moroccan troops in 1975.

“We have tried to get our land back with peaceful means for over twenty years now,” says twenty-one-year-old Mohammed who lives in the Smara refugee camp. “Twenty years of forlorn negotiations and Moroccan obstruction and delaying tactics. Now we wish to go to war to reclaim our land.”

Western Sahara’s forgotten refugees

The conflict in Western Sahara should be making headline news around the world and have ordinary people up in arms, metaphorically speaking. Not only has the country been colonised by Morocco since 1975, regardless of the illegality of the colonisation and the seemingly endless number of UN resolutions that substantiate this. Not only has the European Union amongst others benefited from trade agreements with Morocco to illegally extract its resources. And not only has Morocco been scolded for the many Human Rights abuses that have been committed by its police and security forces against the Saharawi population, as well as against human rights activists in Morocco and the occupied territories of Western Sahara.