The Lonely Saharan Drift of Algeria’s Minister Attaf at the Security Council

Algerian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Ahmed Attaf, stood out miserably during a UN Security Council debate on the participation of women in international peace and security, by rehashing his country’s lies on the issue of the Sahara.

In response to these fallacious assertions by the Algerian minister during this debate held Wednesday in New York, the Deputy Permanent Representative of Morocco to the UN, Omar Kadiri, stressed that the Algerian official was the only one to mention the Sahara among the hundred member states and several senior UN officials and representatives of civil society who took the floor during this meeting.

The Algerian minister “demonstrated once again, if need be, that Algeria is the main party to the regional dispute over the Moroccan Sahara, which it created and which it is perpetuating “, underlined the diplomat. The Algerian official “deemed it suitable to mention the Sahara issue in misleading terms, demonstrating all the hatred his country harbors for its neighbor, Morocco,” the diplomat said.

In the same vein, Kadiri affirmed that unlike Algerian women, Moroccan women in the Moroccan Sahara enjoy the fullness of their civil, political, economic, social, and cultural rights and proclaim their Moroccanness on a daily basis, by participating in elections, by being elected, by managing their local affairs, and by participating, on equal footing as men, in the political emancipation and socio-economic and cultural development of the southern provinces of the Kingdom.

“Unfortunately, this is not the case for Algerian women, who suffer the worst violations of all of their rights, who are prohibited from demonstrating and protesting against these violations, and who are reduced to silence, or forced to leave and even seek exile,” he added, deploring the fate of the women of the “valiant Hirak, who were arbitrarily arrested, and who suffered and continue to endure the worst violations only because they demand a better present and future for themselves and for their children”.

He also denounced the situation of “valiant Kabyle women, who are imprisoned for simply claiming their inalienable right to self-determination, repressed and prevented from wearing their traditional clothing which has represented their culture and their Kabyle specificity for centuries”.

Referring to Morocco’s firm commitment to advance the implementation of the UN “Women, Peace, and Security” (WPS) agenda, the diplomat recalled the National Action Plan which is part of the commitment of King Mohammed VI to the promotion of gender equality as the foundation of a just, democratic and egalitarian society.

“Morocco considers its National Action Plan-WPS not as an exercise in formalism, but on the contrary a concrete manifestation of Morocco’s commitment to gender equality, as well as its conviction that the WPS agenda is an essential component of maintaining international peace and security,” the Moroccan diplomat explained.