European Commission accuses Algeria of embezzling aid
As Spain prepared to withdraw from the Western Sahara in November 1975, its colonial possession, Morocco, which has always claimed the territory, launched the “Green March,” a mass demonstration which sent hundreds of thousands of Moroccans into the territory, escorted by Moroccan troops. It was a successful operation and Morocco absorbed the territory, but, in the aftermath of Morocco’s move and against the backdrop of the Cold War, the Soviet Union, Cuba, and Algeria helped form and sponsor the Polisario Front, an authoritarian Marxist group which declared itself the legitimate leaders of the self-styled Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic. From its base in Algeria the Polisario battled Morocco in the Western Sahara from 1975 until 1991, when it accepted a ceasefire. While many Sahrawi refugees returned to Morocco or the Moroccan-controlled Western Sahara, tens of thousands of others ended up in a series of refugee camps in Algeria’s isolated western province of Tindouf, nearly a thousand miles from Algeria’s Mediterranean port of Oran.
In 1991 the United Nations Security Council established the United Nations Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara (MINURSO). Rather than simply being a peace-keeping force as are so many other United Nations missions in conflict zones, the role of MINURSO was to hold a referendum among the Sahrawi population in order to determine the final status of the Western Sahara. This operation, however, bogged down in a dispute with regard to procedures and referendum eligibility. Many of those in the Tindouf camps, for example, originate not in the Western Sahara but rather in Mauritania or Algeria itself. Algeria also would not allow free access to independent observers in order to conduct a census. As a result of these disputes, an indeterminate number of refugees have remained in the Tindouf camps the almost quarter century since MINURSO’s establishment.
Tindouf itself is barren and without any appreciable industry. Many of the refugees survive on international assistance provided by the European Union or other donors. The Moroccans have long suspected that much of the aid goes awry, but because Algeria limits access, it has been hard to detail the diversion of international aid. On 23 January 2015, however, Le Monde Afrique revealed that in 2007 the Anti-Fraud Office of the European Union had published a report that detailed with precision the diversion of humanitarian aid destined for the Tindouf refugees. This article intimates that the report was subsequently “forgotten.” The diversions began with the connivance of the Algerian military in Oran and continued as the convoys made their trek into the camps. The basis for much of the fraud was the Polisario (and Algerian) inflation of the number of refugees. In effect, the European Union was feeding ghosts.
