Saharawi Republic Waits to Be Born

Insight on the News, Oct 4, 1999 by Catherine Edwards

For 25 years thousands of Spanish-speaking Africans have been detained in camps surrounded by the sands, their fate tied to a U.N. decree long promised but still not delivered.

I don't like to speak about my father," says 25-year-old Digya Salek Mohamed as she peers out from beneath her orange malhfa, squinting in the bright Saharan sun that beats down mercilessly on her head. It's 120 degrees, no shade. Digya is one of the 165,000 Saharawi refugees who have lived in makeshift camps in southwestern Algeria for 25 years. They dwell in tents and dusty mud-brick buildings, subsisting on humanitarian aid, refusing to build permanent structures in this barren desert. For they are not home. If they can just return home, maybe then Digya can meet her dad.

Home is the Western Sahara, on the upper coast of North Africa, just below Morocco. When European colonial powers withdrew from Africa in the postwar era, most nations were granted independence -- but not the Western Sahara. Known formerly as Spanish Sahara, Spain abandoned its colony in 1975 before holding the promised U.N.-brokered referendum for the Saharawis to vote on independence. King Hassan II of Morocco stirred national zeal by ordering 350,000 civilians and Moroccan troops to march into the Western Sahara in 1975. Claiming the territory as historically a part of greater Morocco, Moroccan troops seized the northern part of the colony while Mauritania took the southern part.

Around the world, some 70 nations have recognized the territory as the Saharawi Republic, but the United States and many major European countries have not. Nevertheless, these Spanish-speaking Africans of the Western Sahara are determined to forge a new country. The U.S. government always has supported the right of the Saharawis to a free, fair and transparent referendum on independence. Congress passed a resolution two years ago acknowledging its support as well. The United States provides financial support to Morocco but gives no aid to the Western Sahara.

In an early September visit to Morocco, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright made no public mention of the Western Sahara when she met with the new king, Mohammed VI, according to a State Department spokesman. Similarly, the press office of Hillary Rodham Clinton says the first lady made no mention of the situation when she took Chelsea to Morocco this year during spring break. Nor was the topic of Western Sahara on the agenda. But Insight visited the Saharawi refugee camps in mid-September and talked to the people about their hopes and aspirations.

Digya was just 2 years old when her mother fled the napalm of Moroccan troops. Algeria allowed these Saharawis to set up refugee camps outside of Tindouf, an Algerian frontier town, in the hot, flat, almost uninhabitable Hamada region of the Sahara. Digya's parents were separated in the mayhem, and she hasn't seen her father since. He remains in the occupied territory that is under Moroccan control. He managed to get a photograph to her a few years ago. "He's so old!" she told her elder brothers. Twenty-five years take their toll on a man.

For all that time they have lived behind the "berm." The Berlin Wall of the Sahara, the berm is built of mud bricks and runs through the Moroccan-occupied territory of Western Sahara. After the Saharawis fled to the camps they organized a fighting force called the Polasario Front, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Saguia el-Hamra and Rio de Oro, the names for the two provinces that comprise the territory known as Western Sahara. Guerrilla warfare defeated the Mauritanians in 1979 and brought hostilities to a standstill with Morocco in 1991 when the U.N. brokered a cease-fire.

The United Nations promised both parties a referendum to poll Saharawis who had lived in the territory prior to 1975 to ask them one question: Should Western Sahara be an independent state or part of Morocco? It has been eight years since the cease-fire and the Saharawis still languish in the desert, living on U.N. aid and money from sympathetic European countries and making the best of their plight. Almost lost in the sand, forgotten by the West, they await their freedom, frustrated and fearing it may never come.

The holdup, say U.N. officials in Tindouf, is the voter-registration process. The vote on the first referendum, conducted by the U.N. Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara, or Minurso, was supposed to have occurred in 1992. Former secretary of state James Baker was sent by the United Nations to revive the process in 1997. Kofi Annan, secretary-general of the United Nations, recently visited the region in 1998 and reset the date for July 2000. The Polasario blames the Moroccan government for stalling the process.

Since 1994, 174,000 Moroccans have claimed Saharawi citizenship. However, in accordance with the strict U.N. guidelines, only 84 were deemed eligible to vote. A letter from Driss Basri, the Moroccan minister of the interior, circulated in January instructing Moroccans on how to ensure they are registered as Saharawis. These attempts only have worked to slow the process further.