Western Sahara - A Sign of Africa’s freedom struggle

By Richard B. Muhammad | Last updated: Feb 3, 2015 - 1:39:40 PM

Riders on camels from the nomadic tribes of Saharan wait for the start of the traditional Fantasia at the Moussem festival in Tan Tan, southern Morocco on Saturday, Sept. 7, 2013. The UNESCO-sponsored festival attracts thousands of tribe members for games, weddings and other activities. The festival did not take place for 30 years before 2004 due to political conflict in Western Sahara. Photo: AP/Wide World photos

TINDOUF, Algeria (Boujdour Refugee Camp)—Khadaja Mami believes leaders of the Polisario Front, which represents her people, are right to press the United Nations to make Morocco obey resolutions denying its right to occupy her homeland and allow her people to vote to decide their future.

She wasn’t born when her mother fled Western Sahara as Morocco invaded the North African territory and the Saharawi people fled to nearby Algeria.

Saharawis say they suffered cold, hunger, deaths and napalm dropped by French planes supporting the Moroccan army. In the panic, refugees fled with nothing as belongings and even children were left behind. Families were separated.

Yet Khadaja, whose father died when a vehicle struck a landmine planted as part of the conflict, is resolute as are her mother and her sister.

“We have faith in our leaders, we believe they are doing the right thing and we support them,” Khadaja told Black journalists who stayed with her family as part of a trip to learn more about the Saharawi and their struggle.

Nomad encampment in El Aaiun, May 14, 1975. Tents that are practical in the desert easily become slums in urban areas. Since 1968, the severe drought affecting the entire sub-Saharan zone has forced all but an estimated 20 percent of the Territory’s largely Nomadic population to set up their tents in and around urban and trading centers. The narrow strip of desert in north-west Africa known as Western or Spanish Sahara is presently ruled as an overseas province of Spain. It is the last outpost of colonialism in the area, the only corner of the vast desert that is not part of an independent state. Spain has recently indicated its willingness to transfer power to the people of Sahara. But that transfer of power has been complicated by the conflicting claims and interests of three neighboring countries: Morocco, Mauritania and Algeria. Photo: UN Photo/Yutaka Nagata

However, she admitted, patience is growing short.

The young are tired of peaceful demonstrations, tired of over 20 years living in exile and ready to strike back at Moroccans, she said.

While Khadaja and her mother and sister live in camps in western Algeria under Polisario, over 100,000 Saharawis live in parts of Western Sahara controlled by Morocco. They suffer from rights abuses, discrimination and imprisonment. Videos and news reports aired over the fledgling Saharawi Republic television station broadcast videos of Saharawis being beaten by Moroccan security forces. Women bear their legs, backs, arms and sides to show bruises and wounds. Images of running battles between Saharawis and Moroccan police are shown as well. The main weapons appear to be rocks versus police vehicles, shields and batons in these clashes.

Polisario controls small portions of Western Sahara and administers refugee camps in nearby Algeria while Morocco controls the majority of the territory. The territories are separated by a huge, fortified, sand wall and heavily mined area that stretches along 1,600 miles. Morocco controls about 85 percent of Western Sahara and has an estimated 100,000 troops in the region along with settlers moved in by the government, which provides jobs and subsidies for those willing to emigrate.

Human Rights Watch, in a report released Jan. 29, cited continued human rights violations suffered by Saharawis under Moroccan rule.

A long struggle for self-determination

A Saharawi woman stands in front of her tent in a refugee camp in Laayoune, Western Sahara June 24, 2010. Photo: UN Photo/ Martine Perret

While the continent suffers under neocolonialism and corporate domination, the Western Sahara has been unable to take basic steps other countries took with the official end of the colonial period.

Two decades ago the Polisario Front, which represents Saharawis, suspended armed struggle with Morocco over this patch of land with the North Atlantic Ocean and Morocco to the north, Algeria to the east and Mauritania to the south.

The Western Sahara, which is often called “Africa’s Last Colony,” should have been on the road to independence when other nations achieved self-governance with the end of the colonial period in Africa.

Instead its colonial master, Spain, abandoned its duty to organize a referendum and signed a pact with France, Morocco and Mauritania. The agreement allowed Morocco and Mauritania to claim parts of Western Sahara. But Saharawis declared themselves independent February 27, 1976. They fought the Mauritanians and the Moroccans. Mauritania eventually abandoned the fight and settled on a peace treaty. The Polisario Front fought Morocco for 16 years. A ceasefire was reached in 1991 and since then a standoff has ensued.

Morocco claimed the region as part of its pre-colonial state but those claims were rejected in international arenas and the traditionally nomadic Saharawis rejected their rule. United Nations rulings call for giving Saharawis the right to vote to determine their future, but elections have never been held. Polisario blames Morocco and her Security Council benefactor France for the impasse.

Over 80 countries and international bodies, including the African Union and the European Union, have recognized the Western Sahara, officially the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic, as a nation. Western Sahara’s government sits in exile in Algeria. The government includes government ministers, diplomats, elected representatives at the local level as well as governors, members of Parliament and a president.

Morocco marched 300,000 people into the area in 1976, after an international court rejected its claim. The United Nations still lists the Western Sahara as a non-self-governing territory with Morocco as the administrator.

Ambassador Mohamed Yeslem Beisat, who is based in Washington, D.C., and represents Polisario and the Saharawis, is hopeful that 2015 can be a breakthrough year. Morocco recently announced it would cooperate with the United Nations in good faith and would meet with UN representative Christopher Ross after years of stonewalling, Amb. Beisat said in an interview. After some diplomatic arm twisting, promises to resume shuttle diplomacy have been made, he added.

Saharawi men at a December conference in Algeria devoted to self determination. Some of the men said they were tortured by Moroccan authorities.

Those promises, however, mean nothing if pressure is not continually applied, said the ambassador. He likens the fight for self-determination to efforts to end apartheid in South Africa—nothing happened without public campaigns and international pressure. Morocco has sabotaged peace efforts since 1991, backed by veto-wielding France in the Security Council, said Amb. Beisat.

Reports of rights violations

Morocco has been very brutal in response to peaceful demonstrations since 2005 and is guilty of torture, kidnapping and inhumane treatment, he continued. Those violations call for expansion of the United Nations peace mission for Western Sahara to include rights violations, argued Amb. Beisat. The current mandate is largely limited to maintaining the ceasefire and facilitating stalled elections. International law obliges the United Nations to monitor and report on human rights around the world, but the United Nations does not care about human rights in Western Sahara, he said.

According to Human Rights Watch World Report 2015, Morocco has enacted some legal reforms, but military courts continue to deny defendants trials. “Moroccans are denied rights to peaceful expression, assembly, and association. Local free speech groups and Sahrawi human rights associations are withheld legal recognition. Women and girls continued to face discrimination in family codes,” said Human Rights Watch.

“Courts imprisoned demonstrators and outspoken critics on the basis of repressive speech laws or following unfair trials. Beginning in July, 2014, authorities blocked scores of peaceful private and public meetings organized by various Moroccan human rights associations, reversing a long-standing tolerance of such gatherings. The authorities also refused both new and long-standing human rights groups legal recognition. In Western Sahara, police blocked all public gatherings thought to be organized by opponents of continued Moroccan rule over the disputed territory,” Human Rights Watch added.

Maria Bensaid of the Moroccan Embassy in Washington, D.C., responded to a Final Call request for an interview by requesting questions in writing and a formal interview request. Sometimes we can answer these questions right away, other times we have to get answers from the foreign affairs office, she explained.

Morocco, however, has generally denied accusations of rights abuses and clung to its claims on Western Sahara despite international declarations that deny those claims. Morocco has also accused Polisario of rights abuses and slavery, but these accusations have not been received with much credibility.

Adala Hamadi was about 19 years old when she fl ed the Western Sahara as Morocco invaded the region She like her daughter Khadaja Mami wants to return home though decades have passed. Photos: Richard B Muhammad

In a report issued last October, Human Rights Watch reported some forms “of slavery persist in the camps in a few isolated cases … despite the Polisario’s long-standing call for its eradication and enactment of a law criminalizing the practice. The victims tend to be dark-skinned Sahrawis and the slavery takes the form mainly of non-voluntary housework, according to the Freedom and Progress association, an anti-slavery group formed by a group of camp residents.”

Human Rights Watch also found camp residents generally have freedom of movement and its investigators were able to freely talk with camp residents. UN officials said access to the refugee camps is easy but access on the Moroccan side is much more difficult.

Morocco has its own problems with race and human trafficking. The U.S. State Department reported, “Morocco is a source, destination, and transit country for men, women, and children who are subjected to forced labor and sex trafficking. … Men, women, and an increasing number of children primarily from sub-Saharan Africa and south Asia enter Morocco voluntarily but illegally with the assistance of smugglers; once in Morocco, some of the women and older girls are coerced into prostitution or, less frequently, forced into domestic service. International organizations and local NGOs report that unaccompanied children and women from Cote d’Ivoire, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Nigeria are highly vulnerable to sex trafficking and to a lesser extent forced labor in Morocco. Some women from Cote d’Ivoire, Philippines, and Indonesia are recruited to work as domestic workers in Morocco; some report being subjected to conditions of forced labor, including withheld wages and passports and physical abuse at the hands of their employers.”

Human trafficking can include involuntary servitude, slavery or practices similar to slavery, debt bondage, and forced labor.

According to a State Department Trafficking in Persons Report, Morocco was rated as a Tier 3 Watch List country, meaning “Morocco does not comply with the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking; however, it is making significant efforts to do so. Despite these measures, the government did not demonstrate evidence of overall increasing efforts to address human trafficking since the previous reporting period.”

Morocco is also responsible for 42 percent of the world marijuana supply, according to the United Nations. Illegal growing accounts for about 10 percent of Morocco’s economy, about $10 billion, according to the Moroccan Network for the Industrial and Medicinal Use of Marijuana. The Moroccan government has undertaken measures to stop marijuana production and there have been discussions of marijuana legalization for medicinal purposes.

Saharawi leaders accused Moroccan leaders of ties to the illegal trade and, they argue, continued limbo for Western Sahara hurts a region already facing instability. A free Western Sahara could be a strong partner to help combat drug trafficking, human trafficking and terrorism, they said.

The smugglers change hats but persist in illegal and destabilizing activity, said Saharawi leaders in talks with Black reporters.

Peaceful struggle versus violent overthrow

There is also fear as young people, and as the speaker of the Saharawi Parliament noted, old men tire of negotiations, violence could be a tool of last resort. They don’t feel Islamist groups are making headway, but the threat is there.

And there is not only the threat of radicals, but of seeds planted by a world community and media that fail to respect peaceful struggle.

One bomb by one madman brings media attention and discussion of a group’s philosophy and its cause, said a frustrated Amb. Beisat. “ ‘Plant bombs or kill innocent people or we don’t hear you.’ It’s a very dangerous political message to send. Polisario has spent considerable resources on strong belief in the peaceful process and legality but on the ground there is frustration,” he said. “We think the time has arrived to solve this issue.”

The simple answer, according to UN resolutions, is a simple referendum, a vote for integration into Morocco, autonomy under Morocco, or independence, the ambassador said. Voter eligibility has been determined by a census conducted by the United Nations and since balloting would only include a couple hundred thousand people, it could be done in two weeks, he said.

France: The colonial power behind the throne?

One obstacle is France’s role and support for Morocco, tied to “colonial thinking and calculations. The region was colonized by France two centuries ago with the exception of Western Sahara, which is why France is doing everything to side with Morocco right and wrong. France has contradicted itself, calls itself a democracy, why the blind eye on human rights and violations of human rights in Western Sahara?” the ambassador asked.

France, he continued, benefits from businesses in Morocco with French banks, French companies integral to the Moroccan economy from banking to telecommunications, mining, tourism and agriculture. “France has a colonial way of thinking, seeing Africa as its backyard and Morocco as a proxy, as a satellite state for France,” he said.

With Western Sahara supported by Algeria, France is angry because of her humiliating defeat at the hands of Algeria’s freedom fighters, the ambassador said. “France wishes to use the Moroccan regime to settle those old scores.”

The Western Sahara is a mineral rich territory, which includes phosphates used in agriculture, possible gas and oil deposits and coastal fisheries. Amb. Beisat said the region also may have iron and copper deposits to be exploited.

Morocco is stealing and plundering the resources of the region through its illegal occupation and industry, which includes fishing and phosphates, often with the riches exported to Europe, said the diplomat.

A European court should soon be ruling on illegal activities, which is why his government is urging businesses to wait until the question of self-determination is resolved. Shady deals with Morocco only help to escalate the conflict, he said.

The ambassador also hopes to connect with Blacks in America as Western Sahara has received recognition from the African Union and many nations in sub-Saharan Africa. “Before we are anything, we are African,” he told the Black journalists and other members of the delegation. “We are very grateful for the help, of the support, from our brothers in the continent. … We take this occasion to send a message to all our brothers and sisters in the United States to help us in our legitimate struggle for self-determination.”

The Final Call