Spain’s top criminal court said Thursday it had archived a case involving genocide allegations against the leader of Western Sahara’s independence movement. Brahim Ghali, who heads the Polisario Front, had testified before the National Court on June 1 in connection with allegations of genocide against Moroccan citizens made in 2008 by ASADEDH, a Western Sahara rights group which is based in Spain.
At the hearing, Ghali testified by video conference from a hospital in northern Spain where he was recovering from a severe case of Covid-19, his presence sparking a major diplomatic standoff with Morocco. The National Court said it closed the case because the acts that allegedly occurred between 1975 and 1990, were “beyond the statute of limitations, that the crime of genocide had not been proven, and because witnesses contradicted the claims”.
At the hearing, Ghali had also been questioned in connection with allegations of torture at Sahrawi refugee camps in western Algeria that were made by a Polisario dissident. But the judge turned down a request for him to be taken into custody and turn over his passport, saying he posed no flight risk. Several hours later, he left Spain for Algeria.
Madrid’s decision to allow him in for medical treatment in mid-April angered Rabat which views him as a “war criminal”. A month later, Spain was caught off guard as up to 10,000 people surged into its tiny north African enclave of Ceuta as Moroccan border guards looked the other way in what was seen as a punitive political gesture. Ghali’s Polisario Front has long fought Morocco for the independence of Western Sahara, a desert region bigger than Britain which was a Spanish colony until 1975. Morocco controls 80 percent of the territory while the rest — an area bordering Mauritania that is almost totally landlocked — is run by the Polisario Front.
In 1991, following 16 years of war, Rabat and the Polisario Front signed a ceasefire but a UN-backed referendum on self-determination has been constantly postponed. Hostilities resumed in November when the Polisario Front declared the ceasefire to be over after Moroccan troops entered a UN-patrolled buffer zone to reopen a key road.
