Le Monde Diplomatique: Western Sahara conflict goes on
Colin Murphy on Aminatou Haidar's expulsion: "Her expulsion marks a new turn in the Western Saharan conflict, a conflict that, largely ignored by the international media, has been ongoing for almost 35 years."
There may have been three police vehicles trailing us, but Aminatou Haidar was upbeat. As she posed for photographs outside the disused prison where she had once been detained and, she says, tortured, an armour-plated police van drove slowly past. “I am always followed by the police,” said Haidar, with a shrug. “But at least, I have some level of protection, because they are afraid of doing something obvious against a person who is very well-known internationally.”
That was a year ago, in the desert city of Laayoune, in the Moroccan-controlled territory of Western Sahara. Haidar is now even better known, having since won two major American human rights awards. Yet that protection proved to be short-lived.
Last week, Haidar was expelled from Western Sahara by the Moroccan authorities, and her passport confiscated. She was put on a plane to Lanzarote, where she has refused to leave the airport and has started a hunger strike, demanding to be allowed return to her family in Laayoune.
Her expulsion marks a new turn in the Western Saharan conflict, a conflict that, largely ignored by the international media, has been ongoing for almost 35 years. (Since a ceasefire in 1991, the conflict has been political, not military.)
Sometimes referred to as “Africa’s last colony”, Western Sahara was, till 1975, a colony of Spain. When Spain withdrew, the UN’s International Court of Justice ruled that Western Sahara had the right to self-determination. In response, Morocco invaded. Many of the indigenous people, the Sahrawis, fled east, across the border, into Algeria, and built refugee camps. They’re still there. Their liberation movement, the Polisario Front, established a government in exile and fought back against the Moroccans. Within Western Sahara, expressions of support for self-determination, or of Sahrawi culture or identity, were outlawed.
In 1991 Morocco agreed to hold a referendum on the territory’s status, and a ceasefire was agreed. The UN sent in peacekeepers, under the rubric of the Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara. In an Orwellian twist, those peacekeepers are still there, 18 years later, but the referendum has never happened.
The US, a traditional ally of Morocco, backs a Moroccan “compromise” on the issue that offers Western Sahara “autonomy” under Moroccan control. Barack Obama’s election raised hopes of renewed US engagement, and a less Morocco-leaning policy on the issue; visiting Morocco recently, Secretary of State Hilary Clinton emphasised that US policy remained as it had under the Bush and Clinton administrations.
Amidst this political stasis, Western Saharan activists, unable to call openly for self-determination, have mobilised under the banner of human rights, attracting sometimes-violent attention from the security forces, but also support internationally. Aminatou Haidar has been foremost amongst them, receiving the Robert F Kennedy Human Right Award in Washington DC last year, and the Civil Courage Prize in New York last month.
I met Haidar when I visited Laayoune last year, with the charity Front Line, which supports her work in defence of human rights. She told me of the four years in the late 1980s that she spent mostly blindfold, in a Moroccan “black site” prison, sharing a cell three metres square with nine other women, for helping to plan a pro-independence rally, and of her further spell in prison in 2005, during which she went on hunger strike.
Other activists told stories of imprisonment, abuse and torture by Moroccan security services. In a house in the town of Smara, a teenage boy stripped off his trousers to show welt on his leg, the result, he said, of beating by police for Sahrawi sloganeering. In Laayoune, a young man told of his arrest for painting political graffiti. In prison, he said, he was stripped naked and forced to watch as another man was raped by officers with a bottle, in order to force him to confess.
During a week in Western Sahara, we were followed every time we left our hotel. Travelling from Laayoune to Smara, we were stopped at a multitude of checkpoints. Our hotel rooms were broken into.
Aminatou Haidar told of how, going on holidays with her children to the Moroccan resort of Agadir, she was stopped at checkpoints 13 times. Yet despite this petty intimidation, it seemed that there was official recognition that Haidar was too well known to be overtly harassed. Earlier this month, however, that changed, when Morocco’s King Mohammed VI signalled a new, tougher line in a major speech. “It is time to stop outlaws taking advantage of [Morocco’s] civic freedoms to agitate from within,” he said. “You are either a patriot or a traitor.”
Then, returning from the US, via the Canaries, on November 13, Haidar signalled her response when, filling out the landing card at the airport in Laayoune, she refused to write her nationality as “Moroccan”. Deciding that she had thereby waived her citizenship, the Moroccan authorities duly confiscated her passport, and threw her out, putting her on a plane back to Lanzarote.
With a growing international outcry, and Haidar’s self-imposed threat to her health, Spain has intervened; this weekend, there were signs that Spain might broker a compromise to enable her return to Laayoune, despite the hard line being articulated in Moroccan statements, which accused her of being an agent for “well known adversaries of Morocco’s territorial integrity” (apparently, a reference to Algeria and the Polisario Front).
The controversy, arising from the technicalities of a landing card, would be farcical were the wider issue not so serious. In refugee camps in the desert, some 140,000 or so people rely chiefly on humanitarian aid to survive. In Western Sahara itself, indigenous culture and identity, and its champions, are repressed, often violently. The world is barely watching, and so the situation continues.
Africa's last colonySince 1975, three quarters of the Western Sahara territory has been illegally occupied by Morocco. The original population lives divided between those suffering human rights abuses under the Moroccan occupation and those living in exile in Algerian refugee camps. For more than 40 years, the Saharawi await the fulfilment of their legitimate right to self-determination.
Since 1975, three quarters of the Western Sahara territory has been illegally occupied by Morocco. The original population lives divided between those suffering human rights abuses under the Moroccan occupation and those living in exile in Algerian refugee camps. For more than 40 years, the Saharawi await the fulfilment of their legitimate right to self-determination.
