Human rights abuses in the camps of Tindouf, in Algeria, are getting worse, warned the dissident of the Polisario, Mustapha Salma Ould Sidi Mouloud, who denounced the Stalin-like grip and influence exercised by the Front on the Sahrawi populations who are denied their most basic rights, including freedom of speech and freedom of movement.
The former Polisario security officer, who launched this warning from Nouakchott, is himself a victim of the exactions of the Polisario. In December 2010, Mustapha Salma was banished from the camps of Tindouf and from the Algerian territory just because he dared to express publicly support to the Moroccan Autonomy plan for the Western Sahara. At the order of the DRS, the Algerian military intelligence services, which have the actual control over the Tindouf camps, Mustapha Salma was snatched from his children and from his family in Tindouf and handed to the UNHCR. The UN body immediately transferred him to Nouakchott pending a solution to his case.

Since then, the dissident has not stopped protesting his forced exile in Mauritania and denouncing the abuses incessantly inflicted by the Polisario on the Sahrawis. Several international independent NGOs have been repeatedly denied access to the camps of Tindouf. In 2010, Amnesty International’s request to visit Algeria to investigate the case of Mustapha salma, who was then detained in total secrecy, was turned down. He was released few weeks later.
More recently, in its 2012 report on the situation of human rights in the world, the humanitarian organization has once again denounced the absence of any independent international monitoring in the camps of Tindouf.