Western Sahara, the long forgotten

The last few weeks have been a setback for the Saharawi cause in Spain. The Polisario Front seems to have lost the support of the Executive. On a political level, this has manifested itself both practically - the Minister of Foreign Affairs has ordered to stop recognising the "diplomatic passports" issued by the Polisario Front - and symbolically - the SADR flag was not included in the institutional event of Africa Day on May 25. The setback has been even harder on a legal level, as the Supreme Court has ruled that those born in Western Sahara before November 1975 no longer have automatic access to Spanish citizenship. This comes on top of a recommendation by Foreign Affairs not to visit the Saharawi refugee camps in Algeria in view of a possible terrorist attack last winter, which was interpreted by the Polisario as an attempt to isolate the organization. 

The conflict in Western Sahara, which has been stalled for over four decades, has been a headache for most governments in the Spanish democracy. On the one hand, as the administering power in 1975, Spain has a moral responsibility towards the inhabitants of its former colony - or province, as it was called in Franco's time - to whom it promised a referendum on self-determination that was never held. On the other hand, relations with Morocco are essential for any Spanish government, especially in a context such as the current one in which the Moroccan authorities do the "dirty work" of controlling migratory flows from sub-Saharan Africa. Moroccan irredentism over the former Spanish territories is non-negotiable, so in order to maintain a cordial relationship with the southern neighbours most Spanish leaders have opted for pragmatism and have limited themselves to lukewarmly protesting against Moroccan abuses.  

Let us remember that Morocco occupied the Sahara at the end of 1975 together with Mauritania - with the blessing of Spain, which was facing the Franco succession - causing the forced displacement of several tens of thousands of Saharans, who have since been living in various refugee camps along the border with Algeria. The Polisario Front, an armed organization that emerged in the 1970s and claimed to represent the Saharan people, organized resistance to the invaders with the support of Algeria. Since then, Morocco had erected a 1,700-kilometre-long wall of sand and anti-personnel mines to prevent Polisario and the Saharan refugees from gaining access to the occupied territories. Moreover, successive Moroccan executives have promoted campaigns of colonization and repopulation in the hope of altering the demographic balance in the face of a hypothetical referendum. Meanwhile, the UN mission for the region, MINURSO - by the way, the only UN mission without a mandate to denounce human rights abuses - has limited itself to observe impassively and postpone indefinitely the organization of the referendum. 

At the international level, the Polisario and SADR are becoming more and more isolated. Morocco has been able to move skilfully both on a diplomatic and economic level, gaining support in the UN and the African Union and securing investment from large European companies, despite the restrictions imposed by the EU. Phosphates, sand and modest amounts of oil are extracted from the occupied territories of the Sahara, and its territorial waters contain rich fishing grounds. In recent years, Morocco has won several contracts with foreign companies for the exploitation of these resources, despite the fact that this goes against international law. As usual, business and realpolitik have ended up prevailing in diplomatic and commercial relations. Morocco controls the territory and its resources and has been able to exercise its soft power, while the Polisario, recently challenged for its lack of internal democracy, can only appeal to international law, human rights and the 1974 ruling of the International Court of Justice. Although the moral arguments are powerful for the Spanish and Western civil society, which has organized numerous solidarity and support campaigns for the Saharawi refugees, governments are often guided by strategic and economic criteria.

The main obstacle facing SADR is international indifference, even among Arabs themselves. The Polisario has no support among Arab countries beyond Algeria. The popular movements in the Middle East and North Africa, always attentive to the Palestinian cause, have hardly paid any attention to the Moroccan occupation of the Sahara, even though the situation of the Saharawi refugees is objectively much worse than that of the Palestinians. In fact, SADR or the Polisario Front are quite unknown among Arab civil society, perhaps because of lax media interest or the subtle pressures of the Moroccan monarchy. I have personally met human rights activists from several Arab countries who had never heard of Western Sahara and who did not believe me when I told them about the occupation and the construction of the wall. Similarly, as the years go by, less and less Spaniards are aware of the problem of the Sahara, as it is not usually taught in schools and institutes.  

The situation is undoubtedly difficult for the representatives of the SADR and the Polisario, who, in addition to international isolation, have to cope with a certain internal dissidence represented by the Saharawi Initiative for Change and, recently, the Saharawi Movement for Peace.  The latter has been accused by means akin to the Polisario of being a tool at the service of the interests of the Moroccan monarchy, since they seem to support the autonomous solution advocated by Rabat. As if this were not enough, the Coronavirus crisis has paralysed many of the humanitarian aid programmes that Spanish civil society was carrying out in the Saharawi refugee camps. One of the most famous, "Holidays in peace", through which every summer many Spanish families took in Saharawi children, has been suspended until at least next year. Fortunately, COVID-19 does not seem to have reached the refugee camps, which risked an unprecedented health crisis given the shortage of doctors and infrastructure. 

Western Sahara, unfortunately, seems to be no more than an annoying obstacle to Spanish-Moroccan relations. Regardless of the political nature of the Polisario Front or relations with the SADR, the Spanish state has been ignoring thousands of people who, until 1975, were full Spanish citizens, since after all, the Franco regime boasted of having no colonies but provinces. Despite the fact that realism and strategic and economic interests usually take precedence in international relations, it is difficult to assimilate the disinterest of Spanish governments in a people whose territory has been occupied, whose culture is prosecuted and whose original inhabitants are subjected to all kinds of humiliation by the Moroccan authorities.