A Swedish freelance photographer, Lars Björk, was arrested Monday in Moroccan-controlled Western Sahara after he took photos of a demonstration by young Sahrawis waving the flag of the pro-independence Polisario Front.
“A professional journalist who has travelled several times to the region cannot be arrested and threatened with prosecution on serious charges without this being seen as an attempt by the Moroccan authorities to prevent any independent coverage of the situation in Western Sahara,” Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) said.
“Furthermore, the communication ministry’s vagueness about the criteria for giving foreign journalists accreditation prevents them from working freely,” RSF said.
“We see this arrest as a dangerous attack on press freedom by the Moroccan authorities,” said European Federation of Journalists (EFJ) Chair Arne König. “Photographing or reporting on a protest in a conflict area can be dangerous but Moroccan authorities must realise that they cannot simply intimidate media with arrests and detention to keep journalists from covering the story.”
During the four hours that Björk was detained in the centre of El Aaiún, his camera and passport were confiscated and he was interrogated for four hours in the city’s main police station. The authorities accused him of being a Polisario Front spy and of organising the demonstration.
“If you are lucky, you will be expelled, and if you are unlucky, you will be prosecuted for having links to a terrorist organisation,” one of the police officers told him before he was finally released and told to return to the police station Tuesday. He is still under police control.
Björk, who often works for the Swedish news agency Tidningarnas Telegrambyrå, went to Western Sahara to do a report on illegal immigrant smuggling. He received a late-night visit at his hotel on February 14 from a communications ministry official, who told him he had no right to work as he had no accreditation. His news agency had written to the ministry in December saying he wanted to go to El Aaiún. But the official said he should have sent a second letter just before setting off.
In a similar case, Norwegian journalists Anne Torhild and Radmund Steinsvag have still been unable to get permission from the ministry to go to El Aaiún although they filed a request with the Moroccan embassy in Oslo more than a year ago.
