Toby Shelley
Journalist and writer, Hitchin, UK
Western
Sahara – from Refusal to Assertion
Firstly, my sincere thanks to the university and to the ministry of
foreign affairs for giving me the opportunity to be here. I look
forward to hearing the presentations of the other speakers, some of
them old friends and colleagues, the others – I hope – to become new
friends and colleagues.
I have been asked to speak on the question, “Who are the Sahrawis?”
There are many ways of approaching this. We could look at the how and
why and when of the interaction of Arabs and Berbers and sub-Saharan
Africans that formed the people who call themselves Sahrawis. We could
go into the jurisprudence and geometry and sheer nonsense that define
the recognised geo-political limits of the Western Sahara. There may
still be some whose pooled knowledge of oral history could be combined
into a narrative history of the Sahrawi tribes.
But what I would like to do is touch a little on a number of aspects of
Sahrawi identity by looking at how the struggle the people who call
themselves Sahrawis have waged against imperial pretenders has moulded
them, looking particularly at the transformation of their resistance
from a Refusal – a defence of things as they were – to an Assertion –
that is a demand for a future that is neither a return to the past nor
an external imposition but rather a collective act of
self-determination. That transformation was rapid and apparently
unexpected by Spain whose very process of colonisation had provided its
conditions. The resilience and adaptability of the Sahrawis has also
been a shock to Morocco and, I suspect, those in the international
community who believed a nation of just a few hundred thousand souls
would wither in the cold winter of occupation and exile.
The exposure of the inhabitants of the Western Sahara to colonialism
was late and light, for centuries largely confined to European trading
enclaves along the coast. Indeed the inhospitality of the desert and
the lack of obvious material wealth made the sea journey south to West
Africa far more attractive, relegating the Western Sahara to a staging
post for richer fields of plunder.
But, as we know, colonialism abhors a vacuum, so the turn of the
Western Sahara came when Spanish pretensions drove the kingdom to seek
a hollow echo of the opulent empire it had lost in the Americas. The
Berlin Congress of 1885 sliced and diced Africa and threw some scraps
to Spain which established a clutch of precarious outposts along the
coast but did little else because it had not the interest, the wealth,
the military or the wit to do so. The enclaves at Tarfaya, Dakhla and
La Guera clung to the sea for safety. Fort Mackenzie at Tarfaya,
although British-built rather than Spanish, symbolises the European
position in the Western Sahara. Built in 1872, it stands not on shore
but in the sea, linked to the land by a causeway, built by workers from
the Canary Islands to protect its inhabitants from their trading
partners. With the airplane these pinpoints grew in importance as
staging posts for French aircraft on their way to West Africa.
Local reaction varied, ranging through curiosity, indifference and
suspicion. Those Spaniards and others who did venture a little way into
the interior were sometimes held hostage, sometimes welcomed as guests.
But overwhelmingly the message from the locals was to leave them be. An
enduring image of the period is Michel Vieuchange, the young French
explorer who travelled to the inland religious and cultural settlement
at Smara dressed as a woman and then hidden in a basket because he knew
he would be killed if discovered – in fact he died anyway. Then there
are the pilots who came down, 121 of them lost to crash landing,
hostage taking and execution.
So who were these unwelcoming locals? They called themselves Sons of
the Clouds, the Blue Men, a loose network of nomadic tribes. They
shared use of Hassaniya, a relatively pure Arabic. There was something
of a division of labour among the tribes and when needed there was
cooperation and consultation in the form of the djemaa or ait al
arbain, gatherings of leaders.
Ma el Ainin, an iconic leader of the Sahrawis in the late 19th century
(though not himself a native of the Western Sahara), a marabout who
founded Smara and who initiated the first coherent, unified Sahrawi
resistance to French ambitions to the north, south and east of the
territory, visited Mecca in the 1850s. Writing of a discussion with
fellow pilgrims from other lands, he says he heard them tell how they
were ruled by monarchs without whom there would be chaos but when his
turn came he said: “In my land … no monarch reigns. The people govern
themselves with the assistance of chosen chiefs who they consult on
matters of importance”. [1]
Now that description of independence and isolation from the Moroccan
sultanate to the north was given a century and a half ago and doesn’t
surprise us, even if it directly contradicts Moroccan claims that the
Saharan tribes gave allegiance to the sultan. But let us jump forward
to five years ago when I sat talking in Layoune to a leader of the
Sahrawi civil rights movement, a man in his early 30s, brought up in a
town – not from a still-nomadic family. His first sight of Moroccans
was when he accompanied his father to the town of Goulmime, many miles
away in the lea of the Anti-Atlas. His second view of them was from
behind his mother’s skirts as their troops occupied Layoune. To him
Moroccan were as foreign – more foreign – than the Spanish who lived
around him, to whom his father had hired camels to bring materials to
build the town of Layoune, and whose language was spoken by many
Sahrawis.
If Spain was indolent in its colonising, France was not, consolidating
and expanding the boundaries of its empire in the midst of which sat
Spain’s token possession, a refuge and source of kindred fighters for
those who harried the French advance. It was the French against whom Ma
el Ainin organised resistance and the mockery camel borne raiders made
of the ruler-straight frontiers was echoed by the very draughtsmen of
those lines on the map as French troops engaged in hot pursuit of their
tormentors.
In the 1980s I was fortunate enough to meet two old men and a woman –
surely long dead now – who told me how they had fought side by side
against the French in Mauritania. For their part, French forces ignored
the border as it suited them, most notoriously in 1913, marching into
Smara and destroying Ma el Ainin’s council chamber, damage that can
still be seen today.
So how did the parties define each other? For this purposes of this
talk I went back through an excellent volume of extracts of writings
about the Western Sahara called ‘Relatos del Sahara Espagnol’ [2]. From
the earliest days of Spanish colonisation and right up to the 1970s,
the people of the Western Sahara are referred to in tribally specific
terms – an encampment of the Ualed Delim or a group of riders from the
Ualed Bu Sbaa – by their relationship with the writer – guide or trader
or captor – or generically as Arabs or nomads. Occasionally they are
distinguished from ‘people from the north’. In a not-very-thorough
review I found one reference to Sahrawis in 1945 and, from the context
that reference, I think, it does not suggest recognition of a single
Sahrawi people or nation.
Turning the optic over to the locals, how did they view the colonial
powers? An elderly gentleman now living in one of the Sahrawi-populated
towns officially within Morocco recounted how he went off to war. He
had a modest herd of camels and went to market – I think in Goulmime –
to do some business. There he met a friend who told him fighters were
gathering for a major offensive. So, he sold the camels he had with him
there and then and went off to war. And where did you fight? And who
did you fight and why did you fight? The where question was easy enough
but the who and why made no sense. He was not fighting the Spanish or
the French but the Rumi, a term used across the Arab world to denote
the Romans as symbols of European interference and this was in 1957.
I recount this as a cautionary tale. The old fighter did not recognise
distinct nationalities among the aggressors he was resisting at the
same time that Spain (and, I believe, France) did not see themselves as
fighting a single nation in the Western Sahara. The old man’s reading,
while functional for his purposes at the time, was incomplete. Equally,
at this point, the late 1950s, we are only a handful of years away from
the first obvious stirrings of modern Sahrawi nationalism. In the light
of later events, perhaps if the Spanish had looked harder at this point
they might have found other terms with which to describe their
subjects, terms recognising a nascent collectivism, nationality.
One old fighter’s recollections are not a basis for solid conclusions.
But the indications are that the people of the Western Sahara employed
short-term pragmatism in their dealings with colonial powers. France
had the military power and determination to impose itself, Spain
apparently did not. So the Saharan tribes, whether individually or
after consultation with each other I do not know, made
live-and-let-live deals with Spain. One elder, now living in the
refugee camps, told me the Spanish were told they would not be
prevented from moving into the interior on various conditions, one
being that the locals kept their guns.
But things changed. Spain’s attitude towards its notional colony is
transformed and that transformation either kick starts or accelerates
the evolution of resistance from Refusal to Assertion, from rejection
of outside interference to the demand for a Sahrawi state for a Sahrawi
nation.
In the 1930s Spain, of course, was devastated by political strife and
civil war. Then came the global disruption of the Second World War.
Only when peace of a kind was restored to Europe could Madrid begin to
exploit a crucial discovery in the desert. Penetration of the interior
in the 1930s was accompanied by prospecting. The prize in mind was oil
but Spain made little progress there and black gold was only to become
an issue in the Western Sahara at a later date. What Manuel and Jose
Alia Medina realised in 1947 was that the territory was rich in white
gold, phosphates, a crucial precursor to chemical fertiliser and
surfactants.
From a tawdry emblem of faded imperial glory, the Western Sahara became
a promise of future wealth. The importance of the find at the time for
Spain and in the future for covetous Morocco was fairly stated by
Rezette, a pro-Moroccan commentator, who said:
“It took the discovery of the
phosphates to bring the Spanish Sahara out of oblivion and place it in
the forefront of the international scene… Spain, the mistress of all
this wealth, was able to rig up as fruitful an operation as that of the
great international oil companies who ‘invented’ the emirates of the
Persian Gulf.
“Morocco, master of the Spanish
Sahara’s phosphates, by adding them to its own reserves, was able to
become first producer in the world and to play a determining role in
setting the price of this raw material …”
[3]
The economic imperative meshed with a new military imperative. The
Spanish possession of Ifni in southern Morocco was under threat as the
Army of Liberation, bands of loosely allied Moroccan and Sahrawi
irregulars, extended their attacks from French-held territory to
Spanish possessions. To the astonishment of the French, the Spanish
governor withdrew his forces back to the old coastal enclaves and the
new town of Layoune. His fears proved well founded as guerrilla attacks
built up. Colonial order was restored through a 1958 French-led
Franco-Spanish military operation, the success of which was bolstered
by assistance from the king of newly independent Morocco, frightened of
autonomous forces on his doorstep, and a breakdown in relations between
the Sahrawi and Moroccan units of irregulars.
By the early 1960s Spain had more authority in the Western Sahara than
it had ever had. The budget was multiplied many times over to provide
the infrastructure for the planned phosphate industry and provide for
the needs of Spanish workers and their families coming in. From under
2,000 Spaniards in 1958, the colony had 10,000 in 1967. By the early
1970s Layoune had a population of 40,000, requiring schools and medical
facilities and so on.
Perhaps the development of the territory could have gone on
irrespective of the local population but it did not. In part this was
because additional labour was required as the economy developed. But in
larger part it was due to the wave of droughts across the region in
1960s and early 1970s that compounded losses of livestock during the
fighting in 1957 and 1958. Encouraged by the Spanish administration,
the Sahrawis became increasingly sedentarised with a clear majority
living in towns for most of the year at least by 1974.
In short, the social conditions were in place for the people of the
Western Sahara to begin to see the territory and themselves
differently. Employment and education opportunities were limited and
many lived in grinding poverty in shacks around the towns but
nonetheless the occasion arose for new relations to overlay those of
clan - relations of co-worker, classmate, neighbour, customer.
As Tony Hodges put it: “With its administrators and bureaucrats,
soldiers and policemen, laws and regulations, schools and hospitals,
Western Sahara started to look, to settled Sahrawis like a country …” [4]
Political impetus for change followed on inexorably, drawing momentum
from Spain’s omissions and commissions, its decisions and its
indecision. Educating children of the settled clans was dangerous but
so was denying them education available to Spanish children. Exploiting
local labour was necessary but provoked new ways of looking at the
world – it’s no surprise that young, skilled workers formed a core of
saboteurs in the early years of Polisario. Then there was the adoption
and formalisation of the djemaa or council of tribal elders by Spain.
Granting some degree of autonomy might divert international attention
from the colonial status of the territory, which came under UN scrutiny
in 1960, as well as venting the population’s grievances, the thinking
went. And cooption, not to say bribery, of tribal elders would put
Madrid in control of the mechanism for inter-tribal decision making.
Of course, this was a dangerous game with only one likely outcome. By
creating a formal pan-tribal body Spain was incarnating the notion of a
Sahrawi nation. At the same moment, by dithering about the powers
attributable to the djemaa it was causing resentment at the body’s lack
of authority, and a consequent demand for more authority, more power,
more self-determination, ultimately more independence. Indeed by 1975,
the visiting UN mission declared that most of the cooptees to what had
been devised as Spain’s tool to manage the natives were in favour of
independence. Mercer, author of the much under-rated book ‘Spanish
Sahara’ [5],
shows the Spanish to have been truly playing with fire. He says they
actively inculcated a sense of Sahrawi nationalism that they hoped
would be friendly to them by warning of a godless red threat from the
surrounding countries, which were winning independence one-by-one.
With their kinship ties across the borders with Mauritania and Algeria
and with the slice of the geographic Western Sahara handed over to
Morocco in recompense for its help in defeating the 1957-58 uprising,
the people of the territory knew about events in the wider region.
Hodges points to the importance of access to cheap, imported transistor
radios in further spreading understanding of the international
political environment. Ramon Mayrata underlines the role of the simple
transistor, writing about the keen attention paid to newscasts while
the International Court was sitting:
“In a few months, helped by a little
transistor, the Sahrawis had begun to identify distant countries, to
distinguish their interests in the region, to recognise their own niche
in the international puzzle that had always been alien to them.”
[6]
Another stimulus came from the exposure of small numbers of young
Sahrawis to travel and education beyond the territory. Bassiri, leader
of the first movement to explicitly and coherently call for an
independent Sahrawi state for a Sahrawi people, and the founding
leadership of Polisario shared the experience of growing up as
semi-refugees in the area to the south of the Anti-Atlas that was
administered by Morocco. Bassiri was educated in the Middle East and
then in Morocco before returning home. To the intense irritation of
Moroccan officialdom, a number of Polisario’s founders were educated in
Moroccan schools and universities where they were politically
radicalised. [As an aside to this aside, this amputated area of the
Western Sahara remains a hotbed of nationalism to this day]
In retrospect, it seems astonishing that Madrid did not see what was
coming. But, as the UN Mission remarked as late as October 1975, when
it noted the overwhelming support for an independent state, “It was all
the more significant to the Mission that this came as a surprise to the
Spanish authorities who, until then, had only been partly aware of the
profound political awakening of the population.” [7]
Urbanised Sahrawis had begun forming pro-independence political cells
in the mid-1960s. Bassiri turned these into a coherent movement that
advocated not only independence but also social change, including an
end to the already weakened system of social control through tribal
elders. That he could include radical social initiatives in his
programme, albeit ones with the momentum of history behind them, was
probably due to his standing within the traditional community as a
Koranic teacher. He was proposing change from within the indigenous
community, not as an outsider.
In 1970 Bassiri was disappeared by the Spanish as hundreds of Sahrawis
were by the Moroccans in later years. But the activists of his Harakat
Tahrir soon migrated to a precursor of the Polisario Front and then to
the Polisario itself. In a small population in a small group of small
towns, the transition was probably easy enough. The Harakat Tahrir had
been decapitated and its demonstration of popular strength bloodily
suppressed in Layoune but it did not take long for activists to
re-establish contact with each other. At the same time, supporters of
the more Spanish friendly PUNS movement were also recruited to
Polisario.
The founders of Polisario returned to the Western Sahara from
universities in Morocco, many of them having lived for years, as I
mentioned earlier, under Moroccan rule in the Tarfaya Strip. Like
Bassiri, despite their semi exile and time spent outside of the Western
Sahara, they found acceptance at home. Morocco has painted them as
misguided youths, radicalised by Guevarist ideology. But, as a
Polisario representative in Europe remarked to me, “if they had gone to
nomadic camps and spoken the language of atheists, they would have been
killed on the spot.”
What is remarkable about the Sahrawi nationalist movement is that a
system of control by elders, underpinned by tribal and clan loyalties
and roles, willingly gave way to a leadership that was young, had spent
years outside of the territory, and that proposed new forms of social
organisation. Yet it appears this is what happened, perhaps because,
like Bassiri, they had the credentials to earn a hearing, perhaps
because they advocated armed struggle and that was recognised as a
young man’s game, perhaps because older Sahrawis also recognised the
writing was on the wall for traditional society.
An activist from the Polisario’s first women’s cell told me of meeting
with members of the djemaa to persuade them to back Polisario. And,
when push came to shove, a majority of djemaa appointees, even under
the guns of the Moroccan army, opted for Polisario.
The UN Mission looked at the composition of Polisario’s support. The
Spanish authorities, it seems, put the movement down to young hotheads.
What the Mission found was support among all sections of the
population, especially women, workers and the youth but including older
people, among them sheikhs and notables. Geographically, the support
was stronger in the north of the territory. Indeed, what the Mission
members did not know was that Polisario had to scramble to pull
together popular protests for the visitors’ benefit in the south.
The political programme of the Polisario was labelled socialist and
that certainly won it some friends in Europe. However, as I have argued
elsewhere, even if the Front used the language of the day, when
appropriate, its programme was pragmatic and tailored to the realities
of its community rather than ideology. That was how it won mass
support. Nationalisation of natural resources is standard practice in
any country winning independence. A leading role for the state in the
economy was uncontentious where capital accumulation was minimal and
the economy undeveloped so no-one would be expropriated with the
exception of the departing colonial power.
Doing away with the djemaa had already been propounded by Bassiri. The
institution had almost served out its purpose anyway, in its
institutionalised form demonstrating its toothlessness under colonial
rule and yet helping to mould the idea of a Sahrawi nation. After the
Moroccan invasion, both sides would claim majority support from djemaa
members as a means of winning support from the more traditionalist and
to claim popular backing in the international arena. Noticeably,
Polisario emphasised its respect for the Islamic institutions.
By the time of the Spanish betrayal in 1975 and the Moroccan and
Mauritanian invasion of 1976, the people of the Western Sahara had
clearly and decisively moved from Refusal to Assertion, transformed
from a collective of interconnected clans into a nation demanding a
state.
But, three decades and more into occupation and exile, they have not
been able to move to Realisation of their demand. Has that time been
wasted? Has the social change of the missing years eroded or changed
the assertion of national rights? Has the experience of exile for one
half of the Sahrawis and occupation for the other half crippled the
nation building project?
The proto-state established in the refugee camps in Algeria, housing a
fluctuating 160,000 or so Sahrawis, certainly took the project of
nation building on a step. It put flesh on the bones of the claim that
there was an identifiable people capable and willing to run their own
affairs. The world at large and, more importantly, the Sahrawis
themselves could see a national army rather than a ragbag of tribal
raiding parties, a congress rather than an ad hoc parleying between
elders, decision-making bodies comprised of Sahrawis rather than
colonial administrators, and a social organisation that created
well-run camps with food and medical and educational provision from the
parched, diseased, dispossessed and strafed refugee columns. The
assertion of nationhood gained recognition from scores of states.
Refugees idealise the homeland and the occupied romanticise liberation
movements in exile. Each emotional response is useful because it
sustains hope but each is dangerous because it builds illusions that
can turn to despair when reality sets in. Communication between
communities is the means through which to maintain perspective and
avert the dangers of illusion and disillusion. And communication was
precisely what Morocco prevented throughout the Years of Lead when
disappearance was used not just to deal with suspected activists but to
instil a climate of terror. The 1,500 km armoured berm epitomised the
project of breaking the will of the Sahrawis, telling them that nothing
short of surrender would reunite families.
And let us be clear about the extent of the separation. Until the voter
identification programme for the aborted referendum of
self-determination took place, bringing tribal elders from both sides
of the Wall together and allowing the exchange of messages and news,
the information flow was almost non-existent. Despite the dangers, some
fled the occupation, crossing the wall and surviving the mine fields.
The old or infirm from the occupied territories might be permitted to
visit Mauritania. Those deemed reliable could go to the Canaries. But
these exceptions were virtually the only conduits for communication. I
have met numerous individuals who had no news of loved ones for a
quarter of a century, brothers in their thirties who had never met.
The limited relaxation after the death of King Hassan, combined with
the voter registration process, a small number of UNHCR-organised
family visits, and the advent of the mobile phone and internet have
re-established communication and, to some extent, removed it from
Moroccan control. Prisoner releases and demonstrations are photographed
and videoed and transmitted to the camps or posted on the internet.
Polisario leader Mohamed Abdelaziz can and does phone civil rights
leaders in the occupied territories. We must assume that the two-way
contact constitutes a reality check for both parties.
If the proto-statehood of the SADR has contributed to the evolution of
Sahrawi national identity, can the same be said for the people of the
occupied territories? Locked-down, depleted by flight of the young and
arrests, perhaps 100,000 souls amid a tide of Moroccan settlers, for
years their status was that of victims and martyrs and they themselves
looked outside for salvation.
That changed in 1999 with the eruption of a nationalist civil rights
movement that has added a new dimension to Sahrawi identity. With
Morocco’s refusal in late 2002 to countenance a referendum of
self-determination even under conditions that stacked the dice in its
favour, and with the ceasefire holding, the refugee camps were, in
effect, disarmed – deprived of both the gun and the ballot box. Here
was – here is – a crisis for Polisario, what might have been a cul de
sac for the nationalist project. Except that the baton has been taken
up on the streets of Layoune and Smara and among Sahrawis students and
even by Sahrawis in the amputated part of the Western Sahara that is
recognised internationally as part of Morocco – the town of Assa was
hit by school strikes and demonstrations and detentions just a month
ago.
A year ago I spent a few days with Sahrawis living in Nouadhibou in
northern Mauritania. The screen saver of choice in a Sahrawi internet
café was no longer a fallen fighter but the portrait of a young
woman whose eye had been taken out by Moroccan riot police during a
Sahrawi student protest in a Moroccan university. Of course, that’s not
because the martyred fighter is any less iconic but rather that Sahrawi
identity has developed further. There are new heroes and heroines, not
replacing the old but joining them and, in so doing, deepening the
Sahrawis characterisation of themselves.
Morocco’s rejection of the Sahrawi right to self-determination is
cynical and calculated. The refusal of members of the Security Council
to implement international law is shameful and equally cynical. It has
lengthened the suffering of the Sahrawis by many years.
However, there is a silver lining to the cloud. That is that the
Sahrawis of the occupied territories and Sahrawis living in what is
called southern Morocco have used the time to make an invaluable
contribution to their nation’s identity. Where Polisario and the exile
community have built and run a proto-state, the people under occupation
have built a civil society defending prisoners and detainees,
supporting unemployed graduates and teachers posted into exile in far
flung Moroccan provinces, helping landmine victims, protesting about
the exploitation of natural resources, liaising with the foreign press
and human rights groups, winning international human rights prizes, and
asserting that their overarching right is that of deciding their own
future. International scrutiny – limited though it has been – and the
technological revolution in communications means this has been done in
the view of their kinfolk in the refugee camps.
So, when we ask the question Who are the Sahrawis? the answer is one
that changes over time as the people who call themselves Sahrawis
re-forge their identity in the heat of new challenges and opportunities.
That process has moulded the Sahrawi as fighter, the Sahrawi as
empowered refugee rather than victim refugee, the Sahrawi as
statebuilder, the Sahrawi as diplomat, and now the Sahrawi as
progenitor of a civil society.
The timing of the contribution of the people of the occupied
territories and the Sahrawis living in Morocco has been important as
well as the content of their actions. The no peace-no war situation has
largely disempowered the refugee community, creating frustrations and
anger that could transmute into despair as Morocco and its backers
hope, but the upsurge in activity inside the territory since 1999 has
renewed the struggle for self-determination just when it was needed.
Where it was the people on the inside who looked outside for sustenance
during the years of lead, now the roles are reversed.
For now, the activists of that civil society under occupation are a
brake against an overmighty Moroccan state, but as one leading figure
remarked to me a few years ago, Polisario’s leaders have proved to be
good soldiers and diplomats, but those achievements in themselves are
no guarantee that a Sahrawi state would be a desirable place to live,
for that guarantee you need a strong civil society
Notes
1. El pais que no conoce sultan ni dinero in ‘Relatos del Sahara
Espanol’ ed Ramon Mayrata, Cuentos de Clan, Madrid, 2001
2. Ibid
3. ‘Western Sahara and the Frontiers of Morocco’, Robert Rezette,
Nouvelles Editions Latines, Paris, 1975
4. ‘Western Sahara: the roots of a desert war’, Tony Hodges,
Lawrence Hill & Co, Westport, 1983
5. ‘Spanish Sahara’, John Mercer, George Allen & Unwin,
London, 1976
6. In Mayrata op cit
7. ‘Report of the United Nations Visiting Mission to Spanish Sahara,
1975’, United Nations, New York, 1975
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