The gods’ landscape architects must have been on strike the day they created that little corner of the Sahara where 150 000 refugees huddle in tents and mud houses waiting to return to their promised land.
The camps where the Sahrawi refugees have been waiting, many for a quarter of a century, are near Tindouf, the last town in western Algeria. Locals call this part of the Sahara hamada, Arabic for ”unfruitful”. Nature is like a giant earthworks of broken slate, gravel and abrasive sand. Summer afternoons, when night and early morning have lost their cool, the sun rubs in the meaning of ”swelter”. All but indispensable movement is interdicted.
Follow the sun about 50km across this territory and there lies the promised land. Or at least a sliver of it, for all too soon there is the Berm, a wall of earth ramparts, fences, trenches, minefields, observation posts and high-tech detection equipment. Morocco built this military marvel to keep the Sahrawi refugees and their army out of the remaining two-thirds of the land they claim. (The Berm stretches 2 300km north to south and reportedly costs $2-million in maintenance a day. Poor little Great Wall of China.)
Beyond the Berm, on the side Morocco controls, the land is said to be more hospitable as it descends towards the Atlantic and the old Sahrawi port capital, Laayoune. The phosphate mines are the richest in the world and the coastal waters are prime fishing grounds. Oil prospecting is under way.
In earlier colonial times this entire land was known as the Spanish Sahara. Morocco, which occupied its two-thirds as and after the Spanish hotfooted it in 1976, would like it to be known as just another part of Morocco. The Sahrawi independence movement, led by the Polisario Front, would like to call it the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic.
Much of the world calls it the Western Sahara, a convenient geographical tag that absolves the speaker of moral choice; for if a name is merely a place and the place has no name, how need it belong? (Berm-sitting made easy.)
Who has the right to name this land? Three kilometres from the Berm, about as near as we could get without bending ceasefire rules too far, Sahrawi unit commander Brahim Biadillah led us up a hill for a better view. There we saw the fossils strewn underfoot. They looked like shells, like coral, like little worms; nameless prehistoric life. This must have been sea once.
Later, returning to the refugee camps near Tindouf, we were to drive past ancient rock etchings depicting cattle, antelope, giraffe and rhino; another set of inhabitants relegated, in these parts, literally, to history’s dustbin.
The Sahrawi are said to be descendants of Berbers who reached North Africa millennia ago and Yemenis who immigrated between the 13th and 16th centuries. First there was the sea, then fertile land with no borders, then the shifting sands, then European domination, now the Berm and competing claims, both from Africa, over this land.
The gods, some may say, are too big to concern themselves with such petty squabbles. I may facetiously dismiss the ”giant earthworks” that the locals call hamada, but a quantum physicist will marvel at the universe contained in a single grain of sand. In this place the eternity of time, space and evolution seemed so much clearer than elsewhere. Human struggles are small and fleeting.
But they matter to those who live them, and so they should to us.
After Biadillah had made us peer through his binoculars at the Berm, we retreated to a dry river bed. This was too far west to be hamada and the land, though still desert, was ruggedly varied and handsome, not unlike the Richtersveld of the Northern Cape. Under the shade of a thorn three Biadillah’s companions prepared tea.
Biadillah waxed lyrical (reconstructed across language barriers) about his environment: ”I don’t need a five-star hotel. There the stars are all enclosed. Here I have the desert, the trees, a water well, tea & and at night a whole sky of stars. That is all a Sahrawi needs.”
Biadillah felt he belonged, and the land to the people who call themselves Sahrawi. To him his struggle mattered.
I may be no objective observer, having experienced the embarrassingly lavish hospitality of the Sahrawis. (It is said they’ll slaughter their last camel for a guest, and starve afterwards.)
But there are some immutable truths and these are about broken promises. They are about an international community and its institutions that have recognised the Sahrawis as colonised people — now Africa’s last — and their right to decide their own fate.
But they are also about that same international community, servant to the god of expediency, that would sweep the Sahrawis under the rug. People of the world, ignore your promises to these pesky people just a few more years and they may disappear under the sands of the Sahara!
Tifariti, in that patch of their promised land that the Sahrawis control, is a small outpost: an unused school, an empty hospital, a few administrative buildings, some more buildings bombed beyond recognition. After and if the rains come later in the year some of the refugees, in their nomad tradition, may leave their camps in Algeria and try to fatten their few goats and camels around here. Now it is quiet.
Tifariti tells part of the story why the refugees are in Algeria in the first place. During the 1960s the winds of change blew across Africa and decolonisation was in the air. The United Nations reaffirmed the ”inalienable right to self-determination” of the Sahrawi people and asked Spain to end its colonial rule.
In 1973, after years in which peaceful Sahrawi protest met with brutal Spanish repression, the Polisario Front embarked on armed struggle. Weakened in 1976, Spain abandoned the territory, leaving it to increasingly assertive neighbours, Morocco to the north and Mauritania to the south, to occupy.
Morocco’s King Hassan II had helped ensure the future of his monarchy by leading a patriotic march of 350 000 of his citizens into the territory late the previous year. Morocco and Mauritania claimed historical sovereignty, but the International Court of Justice in The Hague disagreed in these words: ”The court’s conclusion is that the materials and information presented to it do not establish any tie of territorial sovereignty between the territory of Western Sahara and the Kingdom of Morocco or the Mauritanian entity.” The UN classed both ”invading powers”.
What followed was a bitter desert war between the Polisario on the one hand and the Moroccans and Mauritanians on the other. Morocco meted out harsh treatment to Sahrawi civilians. Their aerial bombardments included napalm. Sahrawis fled in their thousands to the relative safety of Algeria.
By 1979 the Mauritanians capitulated to the Polisario, but as they withdrew the Moroccans grabbed much of that land, too. They started building the Berm, isolating ever more territory.
While the UN and bodies like the Organisation of African Unity repeatedly emphasised the Sahrawis’ right to decide their independence, the big powers chose their sides according to Cold War logic. Morocco was seen as an ally of the West; the Polisario potentially in the Soviet sphere of influence.
The United States gave the Moroccans billions of dollars in arms and security assistance. France, Spain and Saudi Arabia chipped in, as did apartheid South Africa for a while. (Near the camps the Sahrawi maintain a military museum of sorts. South African armoured vehicles, circa 1978/9, take pride of place. The Polisario looted them from the Moroccans.)
Looted equipment apart, the Polisario were supported principally by Algeria.
The war cost Morocco heavily in personnel and a quarter or more of its budget. The 1989 collapse of that other Wall, in Berlin, gave new impetus to peace plans. In 1990 the UN Security Council endorsed the so-called ”settlement plan”, agreed on between both sides. The plan provided for a referendum in which Sahrawis would have a choice: independence or integration with Morocco. In April 1991 the Security Council set up the UN Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara (Minurso), charged to prepare for and hold the referendum in January 1992.
But back to Tifariti and its bombed-out buildings: a ceasefire was agreed for September 1991, and has held ever since. But a month earlier, as if to make sure the last refugees were herded towards Algerian territory, Morocco bombarded this place. The Sahrawis told me they did not retaliate after the UN begged them not to endanger the impending peace.
The Sahrawis put their faith in the UN and have waited for their referendum ever since.
The camps near Tindouf are mud-and-cloth shanty towns, humble but well-ordered. The Polisario provisional government of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic runs the camps and presides over the distribution of food and other essentials, much of it international aid. The administration is largely democratic — everyone is Polisario and everyone has the right to vote and participate in contested elections. Officials are not paid. ”The only salary we expect is our independence,” one daira president, the equivalent of a mayor, told us.
Sahrawis don’t kill trees. They take only so many branches as wouldn’t endanger the tree. ”It would be a serious crime,” said our guide, protocol officer Abdati Brika. When we asked about the punishment that would be meted out to a tree killer he seemed stumped. Sahrawis don’t kill trees. Later I asked another official about murder, the homicide variety. Yes, he knew of one in his father’s time, he said.
Sahrawi culture contains a code of honour that excludes attacking an enemy who has not been warned. Terrorism seems out. I asked this second official whether it would ever be considered. He was angry, saying that his daughter was eight, the same age he was when he first reached the Algerian camps. A whole generation in exile, fed by donors, stripped of dignity, clutching to fading promises.
The official was angry. ”Those little white ladies must die!” he shouted. He was referring to the stereotypical tourists propping up the Moroccan economy and whom he felt would make perfect targets. But then he calmed down and said no, of course terrorism was not an option. He was just angry.
Perversely, the US-led ”war on terrorism” is threatening to block the Sahrawis’ last avenue for legitimate expression. As during the Cold War, the US is building a hegemony of alliances determined not by partners’ democratic inclinations, but rather by their usefulness to the cause. Indulge the ”moderate” Arab and Islamic nations. Indulge Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Morocco.
UN Secretary General Kofi Annan is advised on the Sahrawi question by his special envoy James Baker, formerly Ronald Reagan’s chief of staff and then secretary of state under George Bush senior. Baker and Annan, the Sahrawis charge, have indulged Morocco to the point of impunity.
Since Minurso started preparing for the referendum, its work has been delayed by Morocco and the Polisario’s failure to agree who qualifies to vote. Apart from those old enough among the refugees, there are another 200 000 or more Sahrawis in the occupied territories, the older ones among them also entitled to vote. But there may be three times as many new Moroccan settlers — many of them, it is claimed, deliberately introduced to dilute Sahrawi votes.
Minurso set up an identification commission to separate qualified voters from pretenders. Minurso deputy head Frank Ruddy, an American who resigned in disgust, later charged that the territory Morocco occupied was ”a Colorado-sized prison camp” where security men prevented independence supporters from registering and led Minurso by the nose. ”Morocco’s thuggery reminded me of the days of apartheid in South Africa,” he said.
But obstacles were overcome and in late 1999 Minurso completed its identification of voters: 86 000 in all. But then came a flood of 131 000 appeals, nine out of every 10 sponsored by Morocco. Annan threw his hands in the air, reporting to the Security Council last June: ”Judging from [Minurso’s] experience with both parties, whose concerns and attempts at controlling the identification process have been the principal cause of the difficulties and delays encountered, the appeals process could be even lengthier and more cumbersome and contentious than the identification itself.”
Annan blamed both sides. I asked a senior Minurso official, who asked not to be named, who deserved the blame. ”There is no question that Morocco is at fault,” he shot back, insisting that the 86 000, with a small margin of error, were correctly identified. The Moroccans were abusing the appeals process. ”They think we are stupid.”
Maybe not. Perhaps Morocco’s game has worked. In his June 2001 report Annan introduced Baker’s draft ”framework agreement” that would give the occupied territory limited autonomy under Morocco and an independence referendum five years later — but then giving all, including Morocco’s freshest settlers, the right to vote.
The Baker plan signalled the end of a decade of UN work to fulfil a promise to the Sahrawis that they could determine their own future. Annan praised Baker’s plan as ”what may be the last window of opportunity for years to come”. The Security Council (the US, France and a few more Moroccan supporters apart) was less than impressed. But paralysed it is still considering Baker’s plan as well as new alternatives that include partition or a complete UN withdrawal.
The Minurso mandate expires on July 31. If the Security Council does not extend the mandate, Minurso leaves. After that, a return to war?
If Minurso stays, Annan seems determined to steer it away from its original purpose and the international community’s promise: a referendum for the Sahrawis to decide their future.
If the international community fails to fulfil its promise, would it sweep the Sahrawis under the hamada rug forever?
The Mail & Guardian team was hosted and its travels sponsored by the Polisario Front/the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic/Sahrawi sympathisers