On 5 March, Human Rights Watch publicly condemned the Moroccan government’s harassment of Sultana Khaya, who regularly holds one-woman demonstrations calling for independence for Western Sahara.
Moroccan security forces have kept ‘a near-constant heavy presence’ outside Sultana’s house in Boujdour, Western Sahara, since November, preventing people from visiting her.
On 13 February, as Sultana was filming police from an open window, she was hit in the face by a rock thrown by a member of the security forces.
Morocco has illegally occupied Western Sahara since invading in 1975.
On 17 February, 27 US senators wrote to new US president Joe Biden asking him to reverse Donald Trump’s ‘misguided’ decision to recognise Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara , and to ‘recommit the United States to the pursuit of a referendum on self-determination for the Sahrawi people of Western Sahara.’
The people of Western Sahara were promised a UN-monitored referendum by Morocco in 1991 as the price of a ceasefire by the Western Sahara liberation group, Polisario.
While Polisario has recently had exchanges of fire with Moroccan security forces near a border crossing, the UN said on 26 February: ‘we have not received any information that the situation in Guerguerat has changed in any way’. This suggests that the area remains calm.