The Sahrawis living in the Algeria-based Tindouf camps repeatedly attempt to break the blockade imposed on them, but their efforts are not always successful, as experienced by Said Ould Aloua who had been brutally arrested by Algerian security forces in the region of Bechar.
Said Ould Aloua Ould Bechri Ould El Ouali was arrested allegedly because he did not have the authorization enabling him to move around Algeria. Yet, even if he is Sahrawi, Said Ould Aloua was born in the Tindouf camps, harbouring the Polisario headquarters, and is therefore Algerian by birth, underlined Forsatin, the Forum of Support to Tindouf Autonomists, which reported the news.

However, despite Algerian authorities’ obstinacy to confine the Sahrawis in the Tindouf camps, many people try to challenge the control imposed by both the Polisario and the Algerian military intelligence services (DRS) to escape the unbearable life in the camps. It must be said that the Algeria-backed Polisario, which is claiming the independence of Western Sahara, is tightly and relentlessly monitoring these camps.
Tens of thousands of Sahrawis are thus denied all their rights including freedom of expression or freedom of movement. This situation is all the more distressing for the Sahrawis since the Tindouf camps are located in a hostile region, where the desert climate makes life rather unbearable. According to Forsatin, Algeria’s contempt vis-à-vis the camps inhabitants translates its hidden goals, namely use the Sahrawis forcibly held in Tindouf to impose the Polisario movement as the bearer of the wacky Sahrawi republic project in the desert.