Media sources confirmed the suffering of the Mauritanian employees at the border crossing between Mauritania and Algeria from difficult circumstances, which greatly affect their work. In fact, the crossing was transformed into a military camp commanded by a gendarmerie commander, while the workers are still suffering from the poor housing conditions and bad food services.
The border crossing between Mauritania and Algeria opened, last August and received several commercial convoys from Algeria to Mauritania or across Mauritania to Senegal.
The local media stated that the suffering of the workers are worsened because of their isolation in the depths of the desert, far from any inhabited area within the Mauritanian territories, where the nearest Mauritanian town, Bir Om Ikrin, is far 400 kilometres from the crossing.
Unlike the border offices with the neighbouring countries of Mauritania, which are located along the border with Morocco (55 Km), Senegal (Gama) and Mali (Gogui), the border office with Algeria established a focal point responsible for the office transferred into a military zone.
The focal point is the one supervising all the departments of the office, which receives the financial allocations for their food, and the public services at the office. It is a situation that is different from the the other three border centres in the country, as each one has its own independent administration.
The workers of the border office also pointed out the miserable food services, in light of ‘deadly isolation’ in the depths of the desert, stressing that the general situation gave several of them many different diseases, and they were treated in the closest Algerian territories.
#harsh_conditions #Mauritania #border #Algeria
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