Dakhla would be a great place for a day trip from Spain’s nearby Canary Islands if it had ferry service, but a deep sadness soaks into its bones. The war with the Polisario is frozen, but it is not over.
The Polisario was founded as a popular movement in 1973 to resist Spain’s colonization in what was then known as Spanish Sahara. Its primary sponsors were Fidel Castro, Muammar Qaddafi and Soviet-backed Algeria.
In the fall of 1975, the Moroccan government orchestrated the Green March, a nonviolent yet Godzilla-size demonstration. Hundreds of thousands of citizens crossed the border on foot and walked several miles inside Spanish-occupied territory, demanding that General Franco’s forces withdraw. Spain left later that month, Franco died less than a week later, and the war between the Polisario and Morocco was on.
Thousands of refugees fled across the Algerian border and set up a constellation of camps, mostly outside the desert city of Tindouf, but—as expected of the proxies of Castro and Qaddafi—Polisario leaders soon turned those camps into prisons.
The conflict could have escalated into an American-Soviet proxy war, but Moscow was content to let Cuba, Libya and Algeria handle it, and Washington figured correctly that Morocco could win on its own.
Tens of thousands of Sahrawis still live in the camps, some as willing refugees but most as hostages. If they want to go home—and most of them do—they’ll have to escape and risk imprisonment, torture and occasionally murder.
The so-called Moroccan Wall—a 10-foot-high barrier in the desert made of sand, stone, fencing and land mines—separates Western Sahara from Polisario territory. Every Moroccan-Algerian border crossing is closed, and the Polisario, in cahoots with the Algerians, hunts down everybody who runs.
* * *
Abdelatif Bendahane knows Africa better than just about anyone. He was the director of African Affairs at Morocco’s Foreign Ministry and works today as an unofficial adviser to the president of Burkina Faso.
He and I talked politics over coffee.
“Morocco was once an empire from Tangier to Senegal,” he said as he leaned back expansively. “The nomadic tribes in the Sahara always had good relations with the sultan in Rabat. Mauritania used to be part of the Moroccan Empire. There was no such entity as Mauritania before 1960. Today it’s independent, so some think it’s plausible that Western Sahara might also one day become independent.”
France ruled what is now Mauritania until 1960, and the French left Morocco in 1956 after 44 years of occupation, but the Spanish held onto their in-between piece of the Sahara until 1975. Morocco has no designs on Mauritania, but it chaps Rabat’s hide that its reacquisition of Western Sahara in the wake of the Spanish withdrawal hasn’t been recognized internationally, partly because the conflict is a relic of the now long-dead Cold War and also because from Morocco’s point of view, the region has been liberated after a long colonial occupation.
The only reason the conflict still simmers is that Algeria won’t let it go.
“The problem is between Morocco and Algeria,” he said, “not between Morocco and the Polisario. Without Algeria, the Polisario wouldn’t exist. Algeria’s government used to be leftist and socialist. It’s not anymore, but their hegemonic ambitions are exactly the same. To this day there is no settled border between Algeria and Morocco. They want a federation with Western Sahara so they will have an Atlantic seaport. They believe this might actually happen.”
But it can’t happen unless somebody first forces out the Moroccans. And the Moroccans are no more likely to leave the Sahara than the United States is to leave California. Franco’s Spain never considered Western Sahara an integral part of its territory, but Morocco does, right or wrong. “Imagine if Spanish speakers in the U.S. voted to secede,” he said. “Washington would never accept it.”
But since no country in the world recognizes Moroccan sovereignty over the area, Rabat is making a compromise offer of autonomy under the umbrella of sovereignty. The Sahrawis could run their own affairs, and unlike under Polisario rule, they could do so democratically. Morocco could hold on to territory. And the stability Western Sahara currently enjoys as an extension of Morocco’s wouldn’t be lost.
It’s the best deal the Polisario is ever going to get.
But Algiers thinks it’s all a zero-sum game, that any gain for Morocco comes at the mathematical expense of Algeria. That’s nonsense on stilts. All countries are better off with friends and allies as neighbors rather than enemies, but the Algerian regime, reheated Soviet leftover that it is, hasn’t figured that out yet.
There was a brief period when Western Sahara might have slipped from Morocco’s grasp had things gone a bit differently. The Polisario was once much more popular than it is now, but it’s hard to gauge how popular or not the Polisario is today because no vote has ever been held on the question.
The Polisario won’t accept a referendum on the status of Western Sahara if everyone who lives there gets to vote, and Morocco won’t accept a referendum on the Polisario’s terms because it would disenfranchise anybody who didn’t live there before 1975, including all the Sahrawis who were forced out of the territory by the Spanish occupation.
The Sahrawis hold their own local elections, however, and they vote for their own representatives in the Moroccan capital, but Polisario Secretary-General Mohamed Abdelaziz writes letters to Ban Ki-moon asking the U.N. to put a stop to it. (The man really does take his opinions and style from Castro and Qaddafi.)
“The Polisario might have won the vote on their terms if it was based on their restricted voter list during the reign of Hassan II,” Bendahane said. “Western Sahara was a police state back then. Today it’s different. The Polisario would suffer a crushing defeat if everybody could vote. That’s why there has not been a vote.”
“What do the other North African countries think of all this?” I said.
“Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and Mali are all with Morocco,” he said. “Mauritania fears Algerian power and splits the difference, supporting both sides more or less equally.”
In some ways the status quo should be fine from Rabat’s point of view because Morocco will never leave the Sahara and no one will ever force out Morocco. But the cold war with Algeria makes the creation of a functioning and stable North Africa all but impossible.
* * *
Former Moroccan political prisoner Driss el-Yazami says Morocco was in bad shape during the rule of the previous king, Hassan II, and that Western Sahara under his rule was even worse. “In the ’60s and ’70s,” he said when I met him in his office in Rabat, “we had huge tension between leftists and the monarchy. The leftists wanted to kill the king and were armed by Algeria and Qaddafi. We had disappearances, detention centers, secret trials. Socialist newspapers were censored, and I was sentenced to life in prison.”
He’s out now and is president of Morocco’s National Human Rights Council, which was created by the younger and more liberal King Mohammad VI after his father died.
“In the mid-1990s political prisoners were released, and we began the process of democratization,” he said. “Sometimes it goes too slow, in my opinion, but we’re moving in the right direction.”
The Polisario, though, isn’t moving in any direction. The organization has apparently junked its ideas about Marxist-Leninist economics—it’s hard to build a dictatorship of the proletariat in a refugee camp whose only industry is smuggling—but its totalitarian structure remains intact.
Dakhla native Mohammad Cherif experienced that at its worst. He spent more than a decade with the Polisario—first as a willing recruit, then as a prisoner.
Growing up under Spanish colonialism, he found the Polisario’s demands for independence compelling, and he signed on in 1977. “Their propaganda appealed to a lot of people,” he told me.
He left Dakhla in 1978. After he went through six months of military training, the Polisario sent him to Libya, where he trained for three more years at a military academy.
But he’d barely even finish
ed when he was arrested in 1981 for criticizing the Polisario leadership and was scurrilously accused of collaborating with Moroccan security. “They use that tactic against people whenever they have trouble in the camps.”
The guards tossed him down a hole, slammed a grate over the top and left him there for five years.
“I had no name in the hole,” he said. “They called me by a number.”
They permitted him no contact whatsoever with the outside world. He used a bucket for a toilet and had his hands tied behind his back at all times. “They wouldn’t let me sleep,” he said. “For five years I hardly slept. The guards banged on the grate every hour at night and forced me to yell out ‘I’m here.’” Whenever they dragged him out, usually to torture and interrogate him, they put a sack over his face so he couldn’t see anything or anyone else.
Their questions rarely even made sense.
“They hanged me from the ceiling by my wrists and ankles and whipped me,” he said. “I had to make up stories just to get them to stop. They’d leave me alone for a month to let my body heal, then start again.”
Pressure from his family, some of whom were senior Polisario members in good standing, finally got him out of that hole. He asked if he could rejoin the army, but there was no chance they’d give him a gun, so they sent him instead to the Polisario embassy in Algiers and then on to Spain’s Canary Islands, where he managed to escape to the Netherlands.
“The Polisario are not the representatives of the Sahrawi people,” he said. “They are the torturers of the Sahrawi people.”
* * *
For decades the Polisario shipped Sahrawi children to Cuba for indoctrination at the primary source. Maghlaha Dlimi was one of them, but she’s home now in Dakhla, and she agreed to meet me for coffee and talk about it.
I was keenly interested in what she had to say, partly because I had just returned from Cuba myself, which ties with Qaddafi’s Libya as the most repressive country I’ve ever visited. It says a great deal about the Polisario and its ideological severity that those two countries were its principal backers when it was founded.
“They sent me to Cuba when I was 10 years old,” she said. My flawed Spanish is about as good as her flawed English, so we hobbled along in both languages. “First to the Isle of Youth, then to Santa Clara, then to Camaguey. This was in the 1980s. I got there on a Russian boat from Algeria with 3,000 other kids.”
She took Spanish lessons in the camps before heading over. Children who struggled with the language went to Algeria, Syria, Libya, Russia or Yugoslavia—all communist or communist-aligned countries.
Ostensibly she went to Cuba for school because better teachers were available than in the refugee camps, but that wasn’t really the reason.
“I had no idea until I got there,” she said, “but the real purpose was to indoctrinate me with communist ideology. We also received military training, girls as well as boys. None of us wanted to stay. We wanted a real education.”
She didn’t get one. Nor did the other Sahrawi children. Castro’s education of children from across the ocean wasn’t a charity mission. He used them as pawns in one of his grand adventures in Africa. Western Sahara was but his latest. Havana’s men, including Che Guevara, trained guerrillas in Eritrea, Ethiopia and the Congo. Cuba even sent soldiers into Angola.
“The Polisario wanted to impose a communist structure on nomadic populations,” she said. “I don’t believe that has changed. The same people are the leaders today as when I was young. There are still Sahrawi children in Cuba right now.”
She wanted to study journalism and translation in school, but they wouldn’t let her. “I got good grades, but they said no. Only kids who were part of the Polisario cadre could choose what to study. They forced me to study education and teach Spanish.”
The leadership eventually sent her to Spain, and she managed to escape through the Moroccan embassy in Madrid.
Her cousins are still there, but her brothers and sisters made it out. Her oldest brother fled first, in 1997, then organized escapes for everyone else.
“It’s impossible for an entire family to get out at once,” she said. “And when one family member leaves, they keep a close eye on the rest. We don’t dare tell anyone we’re planning to leave, not even our parents. There is no family intimacy in the camps. You never know if one of your brothers or sisters will rat you out to the guards.”
* * *
The Polisario is the self-styled representative of the Sahrawis, but Khallihanna Amar has a much stronger case since he was elected to the local community council in Dakhla.
He, too, is one of the Polisario’s former prisoners.
They scooped him up the first time he tried to escape from the camps in 1995. “They interrogated me for a month,” he told me. “Over and over again they asked why I was trying to leave and where I was going.”
Surely, I said, the Polisario has an ass-covering excuse for not letting prisoners leave that makes at least some vague sense ideologically. They still refuse to admit they’re holding even a single soul hostage.
“Of course,” he said. “If you try to leave, they accuse you of being a counterrevolutionary and a Moroccan agent. My father was accused of collaborating with the Mauritanian resistance and sent to a re-education camp. And for my second escape attempt, I paid a smuggler to take me to the Mali-Mauritanian border. Traffickers there smuggle humanitarian aid, cigarettes and everything else. I worked my way up the coast and walked past a minefield to the Moroccan border. The Moroccan soldiers saw me coming and grabbed me.”
Western Sahara is not a police state anymore, but not everyone who followed the conflict in the early days when it made headlines is aware of that yet. Dakhla isn’t exactly a hotspot for foreign correspondents. It’s more than 1,000 miles down the West African coast from Tangier and pinned in the middle of nowhere by the Atlantic Ocean on one side and a Mars-like desert bigger than the United States on the other. It takes 20 hours to drive there from Rabat, about as long as it takes to drive from Seattle to Los Angeles. Aside from European kitesurfers, hardly anyone ever goes there.
I had to wonder, though, if I was being fooled by cosmetic relaxation that didn’t go very far. It happens. My thoughts kept returning to Cuba, not only because the Castro regime backs the Polisario but also because I had recently been in Cuba myself and know all too well how many people visit on holiday and think everything’s fine when it’s not. It’s at least theoretically possible that repression in Western Sahara is simply less obvious than it used to be—as in Cuba—and therefore more insidious.
The lack of men with guns on the streets does not by itself mean it isn’t oppressive. I didn’t see men with guns in Havana, but Cuba has the worst human-rights record by far in the western hemisphere. I was sitting across the table from a man who had been elected to the local community council in a multiparty election, though, so how bad could it be?
“When I came back,” he said, “I found that I still had all my social, political and economic rights. And I got elected to the council. So, no, I’m not being oppressed. No one here is oppressed. But there are young people who know nothing about the camps and who demonstrate against Morocco because the Sahara is not independent. They are like me when I was 14 and Che Guevara was my hero. I didn’t listen to anybody back then.”
Morocco’s government isn’t like Cuba’s. It holds free and fair elections with a range of parties to choose from across the political spectrum. The Polisario runs an asteroid belt of actual police states in the camps across the border inside Algeria, which itself is smothered by a Soviet-style regime. That’s where you’ll find the Cuban analogue in North Africa, which makes perfect sense because the Polisario is partly a creature of Castro.
“Conditions in the camps are miserable,” Amar said. “People are living in tents and mud buildings built by Moroccan slave labor. Food is only available depending on what kind of relations people have with the leadership. There are constant epidemics. And they’r
e out in the middle of nowhere.”
Try to imagine living like that in the hottest place in the world. The climate in Dakhla is near perfect, thanks to the cool winds off the Atlantic, but go just a few miles inland and you’ll feel like you’ve stuck your face in front of an open oven on broil.
“What do people do all day in the camps?” I said.
“The Polisario gave us a schedule to occupy our time and our minds,” he said. “Men get military training. Woman are organized into committees for education, distribution of humanitarian aid and social relations.” The disgraceful use of child soldiers in sub-Saharan Africa is well documented, but they’re up north, too, out in the desert. “Children begin military training at age 10. They are taught how to take apart an AK-47 and put it back together blindfolded.”
Morocco’s human-rights record is far from perfect. Freedom House ranks the country as “partly free” rather than “free.” But the Polisario’s patron states stomp on human faces with boots as a matter of course. It’s fine and good to be skeptical of the Moroccan government, its reforms and its claims, but that goes double for Cuba, Algeria and the Polisario.
“We want American guarantees to Morocco so we can fix this,” Amar said. “People here have suffered a great deal since the mid-1970s. We want peace and security and to have our families together again. What purpose has been served all these years by keeping our families hostage in those camps?”
North Africa is so close to Europe. The two continents can see each other across the Strait of Gibraltar. Yet they are politically, socially and economically thousands of miles apart.
The entire Sahara-Sahel region is unstable. Egypt is ruled again by a military dictatorship. Libya is on the verge of total disintegration, à la Somalia. Algeria is mired in a Soviet time warp. Northern Mali was taken over by Taliban-style terrorists so vicious they prompted the French to invade. At the time of this writing, U.S. troops are hunting Nigeria’s al-Qaeda-linked Boko Haram across the border in Chad.
Tower of the Sun: Stories From the Middle East and North Africa Page 26