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Call for concerted efforts to protect Sahrawi civilians from Moroccan occupation crimes

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Shaheed Al Hafed, 17 December 2022 (SPS) -  Participants in the open media day on "Moroccan war crimes in Western Sahara" called for concerted efforts to protect Sahrawi civilians from the crimes of the Moroccan occupation and to continue efforts to raise awareness on the situation of war and its repercussions.
During the media day organized on Thursday by the Union of Sahrawi Journalists and Writers (UPES) under the theme "Moroccan war crimes in Western Sahara, targeting civilians with blatant international complicity", the political governorate of the Sahrawi People's Liberation Army (SPLA) presented a briefing on the developments of the war in the occupied Sahrawi territories.
In this context, the representative of the governorate reviewed the general guides and orientations to keep pace with developments in a way that suits the specificity of the struggle of the just Sahrawi people, while a representative of the Directorate of Security and Documentation presented a toll in numbers of the Moroccan occupation’s attacks on defenseless civilians, which included citizens of other nationalities over a period of more than two years.
The humanitarian repercussions and the death machine through which the Moroccan occupation deliberately targets Sahrawi civilians were also the focus of a lecture in numbers by the Director of Operations of the Sahrawi Mine Action Coordination Office (SMACO), who reviewed the type of drones possessed by the Moroccan occupation, the number of its attacks and its direct victims including the dead and wounded, pointing to the danger of the used objects and the gravity of the recorded consequences, noting the increase in the frequency of Moroccan attacks during the last two months compared to the past few months.
In his intervention, the Secretary-General of the Union of Sahrawi Jurists reviewed Moroccan war crimes in Western Sahara, human rights and legal advocacy mechanisms, as well as the responsibility of international law and international humanitarian law towards them, with reference to Morocco's violations of all international conventions and norms, as an illegal occupying state, affecting the defenceless Sahrawi people, and targeting aspects of life daily in full-fledged crimes.
Methods and forms of media coverage and reporting were the title of the intervention of the Secretary-General of the Union of Sahrawi Journalists and Writers (UPES), who presented examples of media lessons learned from some hotspots of armed conflicts around the world, calling for the need to find mechanisms to follow up on daily developments and provide data on each case, in a way that enables documenting and exposing these crimes, calling at the same time the elites of writers and journalists to play their required awareness role, especially with the availability of modern communication technologies.
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