Rabat - Morocco fully rejects the allegations made by certain foreign media outlets and NGOs, which rushed to truth distortion by reporting on the so called "arrest", "pressure", or "coercion" that Aminatou Haidar would have underwent to "in violation of the international law," Moroccan Foreign minister, Taib Fassi Fihri said on Saturday.
"Having refused to comply with normal airport formalities, Aminatou Haidar was held, without any prejudice to her moral of physical integrity, in the international zone of Hassan 1st airport in Laayoune," Fassi Fihri told MAP on the sidelines of a meeting in the House of Representatives in Rabat.
The minister underlined that "members of Aminatou Haidar's family talked to her and were present when she signed her statements in the presence of the public prosecutor, wherein she gave up her Moroccan citizenship."
"After these formalities, Aminatou Haidar took a flight, on Saturday morning, to the Canary Islands wherefrom she had come the day before," he added.
"It's thus legitimate to wonder why Aminatou Haidar has chosen today to waiver her Moroccan citizenship after having for so many years used her Moroccan passport at the service of her activism abroad, under the supervision of the Algerian diplomacy," said Fassi Fihri.
The minister recalled that "since almost two years, Morocco has warned that the other parties have been using a strategy that is financially backed, diplomatically programmed and media-supervised ".
"These parties are taking advantage of the consolidation of freedoms in Morocco under the false pretext of defending human rights," he said, noting that this "negative strategy and propaganda only aims at fuelling tension."
"Some individuals, like Aminatou Haidar, were identified and recruited to this end. All of them act under the instructions of the other parties who are providing backing and coaching", the minister said.
"These people can by no means be human rights or freedom of speech advocates, but simply individuals at the service of an agenda devised abroad by the well known adversaries of Morocco's territorial integrity," he noted.
"The sole purpose of this scheme is, in fact and obviously, to counteract the significant headway that the Moroccan Sahara issue has witnessed at the international level and in the UN, particularly through the new dynamic of negotiations initiated thanks to Morocco's autonomy initiative", the minister concluded.
