Exploitation of Children in Tindouf in the 21 Century
To people around the world, especially in Western coalition nations such as NATO, the exploitation of one group by another is totally unacceptable. In the West, we often hear of child pornography rings, or young girls being used as sex slaves, but significant efforts by perpetrators go into keeping these activities underground and away from the prying eyes of authorities, but there are parts of the world where this exploitation is right out in the open for all to see.
In the Sahara region, there is a political faction known as The Polisario Front and it is one of those groups that have no issue with the exploitation of others. The Polisario Front is a military movement founded in the 1970s that claims to represent the national liberation interests of the Sahrawi people. The Sahrawi are an originally nomadic ethnic group that consists of many tribes and whose culture is a mixture of Berber, Black African, and Arab elements, they have been displaced, with no homeland for over 45 years.
On December 10, 2020, the United States recognized the sovereignty of Morocco over the Sahara. This move upset The Polisario Front, causing its militia officers to lift their 1991 armistice with Morocco, and step-up violence in the western region.
The Polisario Front has been guilty of systematic oppression of the Sahrawi people for decades, all while claiming they are their protectors. Sahrawi women and children routinely suffer from abuse, forced marriages, genital mutilation, exploitation as child soldiers, and oppression, facilitated by the Polisario’s leader, Brahim Ghali. The militia group gets funding in part from its theft of European Union aid to the Sahrawi, which it then sells, to buy weapons and lavish real estate around the world for the Leadership of the group. It also receives support from rogue nations as Iran, which welcomes this conflict to strengthen its influence in North Africa and, at the same time, to disrupt the peace efforts between Morocco and Israel.
The Sahrawi people have been suffering for over 40 years and are trapped in a desperate situation in southern Algeria. These people are being used and abused for political and criminal purposes, and the European and international communities are doing little to nothing, to put an end to this blatant violation of human rights.
The International Alliance for the Defense of Rights and Freedoms (AIDL) protested the abuse of the Sahrawi, and against the illegal military enlistment of children, a crime that is liable to prosecution before international courts. The direct exploitation of children pressed into military service is in direct violation of the United Nations charter, and several other written grants of world humanitarian organizations.
Since the establishment of Sahrawi refugee camps in Tindouf in 1975, Polisario has exercised autocratic control over Sahrawi residents, without external or internal oversight. Human Rights Watch argues that the Polisario must be accountable for how people under its control are treated. With most of the original refugees still living in the camps, the situation is among the most prolonged forced relocations in the world.
Human Rights Watch also calls on the Polisario to abide by international humanitarian law that requires non-state parties to a conflict to comply with their responsibility to protect civilians, instead, the Polisario uses people under its control for military and personal gains. The abuses that take place in the Tindouf camps rival any of what the world witnessed with the Nazis in World War II, and the situation is hard to digest, and the tragic suffering of women and children is especially horrific.
Terrorist organizations such as Hezbollah have set up training camps for recruits from Tindouf, which are located in the Sahara/Sahel zone. They are constantly on the lookout for people who are hopeless, vulnerable, and in crisis. The Tindouf camps are fertile recruitment grounds to find the impressionable, to be radicalized and recruited into a life of terrorism. The tasks these young recruits are given include drug smuggling, weapon smuggling, human trafficking – and forced combat as Polisario child soldiers.
For years, there have been reports that the Polisario Front recruits, in Tindouf, child soldiers and supervises their brutal training. On March 10, 2021, the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva allowed several human rights organizations to speak about the violations of children in the camps and their forced recruitment by militias from the Polisario Front. The UN knows that children are used as cannon fodder in military actions and forced into criminal activity. The Polisario Front has been recruiting boys as young as 10 years old for their armed forces, stealing their chances to be children and to grow up in a protective environment. It is no longer acceptable that the world merely condemns the situation with talk and does nothing to bring about change on the ground. The criminal evidence is overwhelming, the time for discussion has passed, and the people of the Sahara deserve real justice.
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