UN opens appeals procedure for rejected voters in sahara referendum

The United Nations announced that it began on Monday hearing appeals of Sahrawis who were not admitted as voters in the UN-planned referendum in the Sahara.

UN secretary general's spokesman Fred Eckhard said the second part of the list of potential voters, includes more than 2,000 eligible voters from the more than 50,000 applicants from tribes that the secessionist Polisario considers ineligible.

The latest 2,130 names will be added to the 84,251 eligible voters identified from the initial 147,000 applicants, he added before announcing that the Identification Commission of MINURSO (French acronym for UN mission for the referendum in the Sahara) began on Monday hearing appeals at 14 centers.

The newly admitted voters belong to what the UN calls "contested tribes" that Morocco considers as sahrawis, and therefore eligible to vote, and to whom the Algeria-backed Polisario denies this right.

The first provisional voter lists published by the United Nations last July, covering the two first identification stages (from Aug. 94 to Dec. 95 and from Dec. 97 to Sep. 98) included some 84,251 found to be entitled to vote in the referendum.

Morocco insists that all Sahrawis should be entitled to say whether the Sahara, a former Spanish colony retrieved by Morocco in 1975 under the Madrid accords, should remain Moroccan territory or set up on its own. It also argues that the electorate should not be restricted to a census conducted in 1974 by the Spanish colonial authorities and which ignored nomadic populations and other groups who fled the territory to northern Morocco and southward to Mauritania to escape Spanish repression.