[ad_1]
Truck traffic resumed between Mauritania and Morocco on Saturday a day after Rabat launched a military operation to reopen a key highway in disputed Western Sahara that it said was blocked by the Polisario Front.
But the independence movement, which on Friday declared the end of a nearly three-decade ceasefire in Western Sahara, said fighting continues in the disputed territory.
Tensions in the former Spanish colony have sparked concern around the world, with the United Nations, the African Union, Algeria and Mauritania urging both parties to respect the 1991 ceasefire.
But on Saturday Mohamed Salem Ould Salek, a Polisario-declared Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR) foreign minister, said the UN-supervised ceasefire was “a thing of the past.”
“The fight continues after the crime committed by the Moroccan troops in Guerguerat,” he told AFP.
Subsequently, Sahrawi Defense Minister Abdallah Lahbib, quoted by the official Algerian news agency APS, said that “the war continues on all fronts along the Moroccan wall of shame.”
He was referring to a 2,700-kilometer (1,700-mile) long wall erected by Morocco in the 1980s in Western Sahara to prevent infiltration by Polisario fighters.
“The Sahrawi army has achieved important victories and inflicted human and material damage on the enemy,” Lahbib said.
The SADR defense ministry said the Mahbes and Guerguerat regions had been “targeted by projectiles and machine guns.”
Neither claim could be independently verified.
But on Saturday, a Mauritanian security official and a senior Moroccan official said separately that truck traffic between Mauritania and Western Sahara had resumed.
“Dozens of trucks … blocked for three weeks due to the actions of Polisario militias have crossed the borders of Mauritania and Morocco,” Morocco’s state news agency MAP reported.
‘Security cordon’
The trucks had been stranded in Guerguerat, and Morocco accused the Algerian-backed Polisario of preventing them from traveling on a highway that is key to trade with the rest of Africa.
Map of Western Sahara. By Adrian LEUNG (AFP) Morocco said on Friday it launched a military operation in the Guerguerat buffer zone to reopen the road to Mauritania.
The army said it had secured the Guerguerat crossing between Morocco and Mauritania by installing “a security cordon” along its desert wall.
Stephane Dujarric, spokesman for the UN chief, said that the UN peacekeeping mission MINURSO deployed in Guerguerat “a special civil-military team … since the beginning of the crisis.”
Photographs released by the Moroccan army reportedly showed the tents used by the Polisario on fire near the border with Mauritania after the operation.
Polisario Secretary General Brahim Ghali said he had issued a decree on Friday announcing the end of his obligations under the ceasefire agreement.
The unrest in Western Sahara sparked a series of calls for restraint.
‘Avoid escalation’
UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres expressed “grave concern about the consequences of the latest events” that broke out despite UN efforts to prevent an escalation.
Algeria, the main foreign sponsor of the Polisario, and Mauritania have called for restraint and respect for the 1991 ceasefire, and their calls were repeated by the African Union, France, Russia and Spain.
The chairman of the AU Commission, Moussa Faki Mahamat, expressed “deep concern”, while Spain, the former colonial power of Western Sahara, urged the parties to resume negotiations for a “durable solution”.
France called on all parties to “avoid an escalation” and Russia urged them to “refrain from taking measures that may aggravate the situation.”
The Gulf power, Saudi Arabia, as well as Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and other Arab countries, have expressed their support for Morocco in the conflict.
A Sahrawi, in February 2017, holds up a Polisario flag under the watchful eye of Moroccan soldiers guarding an observation post on the 2,700-kilometer-long (1,700-mile) wall that Rabat built to defend its control of the disputed Occidental Sahara. By STRINGER (AFP / Archive) Rabat controls 80 percent of Western Sahara, a vast strip of desert on the Atlantic coast, including its phosphate deposits and lucrative ocean fisheries.
Morocco maintains that Western Sahara is an integral part of the kingdom and has offered autonomy for the disputed territory, but insists that it will maintain sovereignty.
The Polisario demands a referendum on self-determination as established in the 1991 ceasefire.
The vote has been repeatedly postponed due to disputes between Rabat and the Polisario over voter lists and the question to be asked.
