On the international scene, the polisario has suffered due to its intransigence and its inability to negotiate but also because of the changing geopolitical context, the ESISC said, noting that the number of states recognizing the so-called SADR has only diminished.

    "Furthermore, the support of many Western states like the United States and France for an autonomy plan proposed by Morocco which they described as serious and credible has weakened the Polisario still more on the international diplomatic scene," underlined the report.

    "Today the only true support on which the Polisario can rely on is that of Algeria,” which uses the Sahrawis in an attempt to destabilise Morocco, the document added.
   ESISC also stressed that the isolation and sclerosis of the leadership of the Polisario also may be seen in its increasingly aggressive attitude towards any form of challenge to its way of managing and operating.

    The report made it clear that for many years, the Polisario Front has been accused regularly of misappropriating humanitarian, financial and material aid provided by NGOs, as well as by international organisations.

    This tendency was accentuated by the process of disintegration of the movement which accelerated over recent years, ESISC said, adding that in 2003, the European Union decided to strengthen its system of monitoring its humanitarian assistance but “encountered resistance from the Polisario to its carrying out its mission.”

    The fact that the Polisario still continues to deny the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) access to the camps in Tindouf, not even to carry out a census, does not point to positive change as regards this practice of misappropriation, the same source lamented.

     A recent investigation by the European Anti-fraud Office (OLAF) established a possible co-responsibility of Algeria and the Polisario Front in these cases of misappropriation, the report noted.
    In parallel with these abuses, ESISC went on to say, the extreme poverty which reigns in the camps has encouraged the growth of criminality, which must be understood in the context of the impunity prevailing in the Sahel, adding that, in the same way, terrorism has encouraged the growth of all kinds of illicit trafficking, the report added.

    The document underlined that the region is both a major area of drug production (cannabis) and a transit corridor towards Europe for cocaine originating in Latin America.

      The report noted that many former leaders of the Polisario have broken with the movement, preferring to go into exile in Spain, Morocco and Mauritania. “The youngest and/or most modest Sahraouis have also sought to free themselves even as they share this knowledge of the defeat,” The ESISC said.

Source: MAP
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