In the United States, pressure on the Polisario Front continues to mount. Alongside congressional initiatives aimed at designating the group as a terrorist organization, a former Pentagon adviser is now calling on the United Nations to shut down the Tindouf camps. He bases his appeal on a series of arguments he considers compelling. DR ‹ › After recently calling on King Mohammed VI to launch a new «Green March» to reclaim Ceuta and Melilla, Michael Rubin, a former Pentagon advisor, is now turning his attention to the Polisario. In a new article, he advocates for the closure of the Tindouf camps. «With the United Nations endorsing Morocco's Autonomy Plan for the Sahara, there is no reason the Sahrawi cannot go home», he argues. Revisiting the origins of the conflict, Rubin points to the 1991 ceasefire and the establishment that same year, by the UN Security Council, of the United Nations Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara (MINURSO). He contends that «over the past thirty-five years, not only has MINURSO failed to complete its mission, but it never really began it». He attributes this failure to «Algeria's military junta», which «understood that a free and fair referendum would expose their fraud and delegitimize their Polisario proxy, so they threw obstacles in front of any census, flooding proposed voter rolls with people who never lived in the Western Sahara and who, in many cases, were not even Sahrawi». It is worth recalling that former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan dissolved, in 2000, the commission tasked with identifying Sahrawi voters eligible to take part in the referendum. Between 1993 and December 1999, the commission identified only 2,130 eligible voters out of a list of 51,220 applicants. Closure framed as aligned with U.S. interests According to Rubin, shutting down the Tindouf camps would also serve U.S. interests. «As the largest donor to the United Nations, peacekeeping, and the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the United States has an interest in cutting the flow of funds to missions that are impossible to fulfill», he says, citing MINURSO as an example. Last week, the U.S. permanent representative announced that the administration is conducting a «strategic review» of the mission. He also accuses the Algerian government of «inflating» camp population figures «to bilk donors and embezzle aid». He points to a 2007 report by the European Anti-Fraud Office, which detailed the diversion of aid intended for Sahrawi refugees. «Meanwhile, as many as half of the Tindouf camps' residents are technically not refugees from the Western Sahara but, rather, moved to the camps from elsewhere in Algeria, Mali, or Mauritania», he claims. Rubin further accuses the Polisario of «holding camp residents hostage», with what he describes as the complicity of the UNHCR, which he says allows «a totalitarian movement» to manage the camps. «This must stop», he insists, adding that «Morocco now has a decades-long record showing generous treatment and integration of returnees».
