According to a leading member of a Saharawi NGO in Tindouf, the Algerian authorities have banned Saharawis from transporting, selling, buying or otherwise procuring gaz and refined products anywhere beyond the perimeters of the Saharawi refugee camps. Algerian truckers have been assigned to deliver refined products (gasoline, kerosene etc.) to the camps. As of Nov.1, the Algerian authorities began confiscating refined products transported by Saharawi truckers outside the camps. No decision has been announced, however, and the Polisario/SADR authorities have not been formally notified. The Algerian local authorities in Tindouf have indicated that the measure has been taken as part of a broader crackdown on smuggling and black-marketeering.
A group of 12 common law prisoners are reported recently to have walked out of the Chahid Abderrahman prison (also known as Al-Dhahibiya), in the Tindouf camps, illegally but without any use of violence against the prison guards. Polisario’s security forces failed to apprehend them and say that they have now left the Tindouf camps altogether for an unknown destination or destinations. According to a relative of a member of the Saharawi National Council (the SADR’s pseudo-parliament), this “escape” was facilitated by accomplices within the administration, and that SADR Defence Minister Mohamed Lamine Bouhali is behind it. Bouhali, claims the source, runs an extorsion racket whereby prisoners and their families are offered the alternative between “escaping” (in exchange for a payment in hard currency) or staying in prison even after completing their official sentence.
[Note: SADR Justice Minister Hamada Selma told Human Rights Watch in 2008 that Al-Dhahibiya prison had been closed around the beginning of 2007. In its December 2008 report Human Rights in Western Sahara and in the Tindouf Refugee Camps, HRW commented: “There are persistent allegations that the Polisario operates secret places of detention. With respect to the period we examined – 2006 to the present – no one we interviewed, including Sahrawis who had recently worked in the Polisario security forces before resettling in the Moroccan-controlled Western Sahara, claimed to have information about unacknowledged places of detention or of prisoners being held in secret.”]
Ambassador Edward M. Gabriel, Ret.
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