U.S congress staffers visit moroccan southern city of Laayoun

A delegation of staffers of the U.S congress, who are visiting Morocco, went over the week-end to the Moroccan southern city of Laayoun where they met local dignitaries, observers of the UN identification mission and activists at women and youth associations.

During the talks they held in Laayoun, the U.S staffers also heard testimonies by persons who defected the Polisario camps, in southwestern Algeria, back to their homeland, Morocco.

The visit provided the U.S delegation with an invaluable opportunity to get first hand information on the reality of the situation in the Moroccan Sahara and on the population's attachment to their Moroccan identity and their mobilization to defend their country.

On the ongoing U.N settlement plan supposed to lead in March 2000 to the holding of a referendum in the Sahara, a former Spanish colony retrieved by Morocco in 1975 under the Madrid accord, the representatives of the population renewed that all persons of Sahrawi descent should be entitled to take part in the ballot, in conformity with the five identification criteria set by the United Nations. They went on that the Polisario, an Algeria-backed guerrilla movement claiming the independence of the Moroccan southern provinces are trying to shrink the electorate in a bid to foil the process.

They added that the Polisario's insistence that only persons covered by the 1974 census conducted by the Spanish colonial authorities should be entitled to vote is due to the fact that the Polisario perfectly knows that the voting will only confirm the Sahara as Moroccan territory.

After they deplored the embezzlement of humanitarian aid by the separatist movement, they issued an appeal to humanitarian and human rights associations to endeavor to end the siege enforced against the sequestered population in the Tindouf camps in south-western Algeria and to stop the violence prevailing there.

The U.S delegation was previously informed by the governor of the province on development projects carried out in the region.