Polisario, which seeks the independence of the Western Sahara from Morocco, also said that violence had spread from the Laayoune region where the camp was dismantled on Monday to the territory’s other major city, Smara.
More than 2,000 people have been arrested, Polisario said in a statement which charged that Morocco’s “army, auxiliary forces and police units are continuing to attack Sahrawi citizens, making arrests at random.”
Ibrahim Ghali, the ambassador to Algeria of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR), which is recognized by the African Union but not by the United Nations, said that the clashes spread on Thursday to Smara, 240 km from Laayoune, the chief town.
“The situation is confused Friday in Smara where there have been numerous arrests,” Ghali said without giving figures.
Polisario said that Smara was “the scene of violent demonstrations organized by young students in solidarity with the Sahrawi citizens of Laayoune.” The movement added that police had closed schools in Smara “until further notice.”
Morocco annexed the Western Sahara, a former Spanish colony, after Spanish settlers pulled out in 1975. The Polisario Front founded the SADR and waged a guerrilla war against Moroccan troops until a cease-fire was brokered by the UN in 1991. The camp outside Laayoune was set up by some 12,000 people from the town who were protesting at bad living conditions, according to Polisario, which also accused Moroccan security forces of ransacking houses and destroying people’s property in the coastal city. Morocco has said that 12 people were killed during the raid to clear out the camp, 10 of them members of the security forces. Polisario’s earlier toll was 11 dead and 723 injured.
Meanwhile, Spain pressed Morocco on Friday to allow foreign media to cover the deadly unrest.
Britain’s Minister for the Middle East and North Africa announced the country was sending a mission to Western Sahara to investigate the human rights situation there. “We had been thinking about sending a human rights observer mission for some time,” Alistair Burt said during a press conference in the Algerian capital, Algiers. “The events that took place over the past days have pushed us to do it immediately.”
The Spanish Foreign Ministry said one of the dead Saharawis apparently held Spanish citizenship and it has asked Morocco about the case. Three Spanish radio reporters made it into Laayoune Thursday but were eventually detained and served with an expulsion order by Morocco, and their employer Cadena Ser says they are now being held at Laayoune’s airport.
“We are permanently making efforts with Morocco so that the right to information can be exercised in Laayoune and everywhere else,” Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero said Friday from Seoul, where he attended the G-20 summit. Morocco’s government had no immediate reaction.
Zapatero reiterated comments by other Spanish officials to the effect that Spain is “deeply concerned” by the events in the Western Sahara, a mineral-rich former Spanish colony that Morocco occupied when Spain pulled out in 1975.
Asked if the unrest merited a stronger reaction from Spain, Zapatero was evasive. He said the government needed a full accounting of what happened and that much of the information coming out of the Western Sahara so far has been contradictory.
“I think it is prudent to have complete information,” he said.
Zapatero said the Spanish government’s position was to support talks between Morocco and the Saharawi pro-independence movement, the Polisario Front. The two waged war with each other from 1976 until a UN-brokered truce in 1991.
A new two-day round of informal negotiations that started Monday, just hours after the raid on the protest camp, yielded no significant progress beyond a commitment to meet again in December and some confidence-building measures.
