UN officials head to Algeria and Morocco for talks on Western Sahara refugees
Senior United Nations officials are travelling to Algeria and Morocco today to discuss with officials in those countries new confidence-building measures to help some 165,000 Western Saharan refugees who have spent nearly three decades in camps in the desert.
The trip by Alvaro de Soto, Secretary-General Kofi Annan's Special Representative for Western Sahara, and senior staff from the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) is an attempt to build on positive meetings held last week in Geneva with officials from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Saguia el-Hamra and Rio de Oro (Frente POLISARIO), the UN agency said.
The UN representatives will be discussing plans first raised in 2000 to re-establish person-to-person contacts between the refugees living in desert camps in western Algeria and their relatives across the border.
Under this initiative, UNHCR would propose setting firm dates for the establishment of telephone and personal mail links between the refugees and their families, a spokesman for the agency said at a press briefing in Geneva. The UN agency would also like to organize family visits as soon as possible using UN aircraft.
"We believe that the implementation of the confidence building measures will help restore links between the long-divided Saharan community," spokesman Kris Janowski said.
An estimated 165,000 refugees have spent the last 28 years in five camps located around Tindouf in western Algeria's vast desert.