June 20 (EUROPA PRESS) –
A consortium of NGOs has alerted this Tuesday of the “alarming” situation in which more than 173,000 refugees live in the Tindouf camps (Algeria), the result of a crisis that goes back almost half a century and that, from the point of view of politically, it shows no sign of resolution.
More than a dozen organizations, including Oxfam, Doctors of the World and the Danish Refugee Council (DRC) have warned in a joint statement that the extreme weather conditions have now been compounded by a shortage of basic products and supplies. “Inflation derived from various factors such as the COVID-19 pandemic or the war in Ukraine has impacted already extremely limited resources for a population that subsists almost exclusively on humanitarian aid,” they stated.
The basic basket of food that is distributed to these people only reaches 75 percent of the population, while more than half of the children under five years of age suffer from anemia and the malnutrition rate has increased three points among the child population in the last three years. In addition, for the NGOs, access to water is “insufficient”, despite being “a fundamental right: the Saharawi refugees receive an average of 17 liters per person per day; a water that must be divided between consumption, hygiene, use domestic and livestock.
These organizations, which have made their message coincide with World Refugee Day, have pointed out that the “fragile subsistence” of the camps is even more at risk due to the flow of new refugees, since after the rupture of the ceasefire almost two years ago between Morocco and the Polisario Front, more than 4,700 people have arrived in these enclaves.
For this reason, and in the face of an “increasingly critical and unsustainable” situation, they have appealed to civil society and the international community to redouble their efforts and work for the sake of “a peaceful resolution of the conflict.”
