ROME, Nov 5 (IPS) – Ehmudi Lebsir was 17 when he trudged more than 50 kilometers across the desert to stay alive. Half a century later, the Sahrawi refugee has still not returned to the then Spanish province of Western Sahara.
On November 6, 1975, six days after Moroccan troops entered the area, hundreds of thousands of Moroccan civilians streamed south under military escort. It was called the ‘Green March’ and was in fact an invasion and the beginning of a military occupation of Sahrawi land.
Dubbed “Africa’s last colony,” Western Sahara is about the size of Britain and remains the continent’s only territory still awaiting decolonization. But on October 31 this year, that goal slipped further out of reach.
On the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of Morocco’s invasion, the UN Security Council adopted a resolution that, by endorsing Rabat’s autonomy plan, gave weight to Morocco’s claim of sovereignty over the territory.
The UN has now cast aside a principle it has long held sacred: the right of peoples to self-determination. That was the framework that guided the Sahrawi approach for more than thirty years.
Lebsir speaks to IPS via video conference from the Tindouf camps in western Algeria. Almost 2,000 kilometers southwest of Algiers, this harsh desert, where summer temperatures can reach 60 degrees Celsius, is the closest to home that the Sahrawi people have known for fifty years.
“We were faced with a choice: stay in Algeria as refugees, or build the machinery of a state, with its ministries and a parliament,” recalls Lebsir, now a senior representative of the Polisario Front. It was founded in 1973 and is recognized by the United Nations as the “legitimate representative of the Sahrawi people”.
Upon arriving in Tindouf in 1975, Lebsir was given the task of setting up schools in the camps. He later oversaw cohorts of Sahrawi students in Cuba, spent ten years in the Sahrawi parliament, and served in the SADR ministries of justice and culture.
The Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic was proclaimed in that parliament in February 1976.
“After a century of Spanish presence, we never imagined that Madrid would leave and leave us to our fate,” he says. “There is no way back: either we have an independent state or our people are buried.”
After the Polisario declared independence in 1976, the UN reaffirmed the Sahrawis’ right to self-determination. But the UN Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara (MINURSO), established in 1991, never delivered the vote it was intended to achieve.
Tomás Bárbulo was also 17 when Moroccan troops entered. The son of a Spanish soldier stationed in Laayoune – the capital of Western Sahara, 1,100 kilometers south of Rabat – he had returned to Madrid three months before November 6.
“The Sahrawis have survived napalm and white phosphorus, persecution, exile, the systematic plunder of their natural resources and attempts to erase their identity by the influx of hundreds of thousands of settlers,” the journalist and author says by phone from Madrid.
Bárbulo, whose The forbidden history of the SaharaSpanish (Destino, 2002) is a standard work on the conflict and places the stalemate mainly at the door of “Morocco’s unyielding position, often blessed by the major powers of the Security Council.” The UN, he says, “has capitulated to Rabat.”
Ironically, even the UN does not recognize Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara. The occupied territory has been on the United Nations list of non-self-governing territories since 1963. Legally, the decolonization of Western Sahara remains ‘incomplete’.
‘Open air prison’
The UNHCR estimates that between 170,000 and 200,000 Sahrawis live in Algeria’s desert camps. However, life in the Moroccan-occupied territory itself is more difficult to assess, because Rabat does not even recognize that the Sahrawi people exist.
Understanding the living conditions there is just as difficult. Senior observers such as Noam Chomsky have labeled the area a ‘vast open-air prison’.
In one report When he was released last July, UN Secretary-General António Guterres noted that Morocco has blocked visits by the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) since 2015.
“OHCHR continues to receive allegations of human rights abuses, including harassment, surveillance and discrimination against Sahrawi individuals, especially those advocating self-determination,” he wrote.
Despite restrictions, international rights organizations continue to document abuses. 2024 from Amnesty International report says Rabat curtails “diversity of opinion and the right to freedom of association and peaceful assembly in Western Sahara” and “forcibly suppresses peaceful protests.”
Human Rights Watch indicted that courts hand down long sentences based “almost entirely” on activists’ confessions, without investigating claims that they were extracted through police torture.
At the age of 36, Ahmed Ettanji is one of the most prominent Sahrawi activists in the occupied territory, something he has paid for with 18 arrests and repeated torture.
Speaking by phone from Laayoune, he says the visibility that international NGOs provide is the only thing keeping him out of jail, or worse.
“We mark 50 years of harsh military blockade, extrajudicial killings and every form of abuse,” he said. “There are thousands of disappeared people and tens of thousands of arrests. The economic interests of world powers always take precedence over human rights.”
After fifty years, entire generations have been born in the Algerian desert, with many families only knowing each other through video calls. Still, Ettanji insists that not everything is gloomy.
“People my age, born under the occupation, were expected to be the most assimilated, the most pro-Moroccan. That didn’t happen. The desire for self-determination is still alive among young people.”
‘Autonomous Region of the Sahara’
The autonomy plan that the UN has now effectively endorsed is the only political offer from Rabat in fifty years. It was first launched in 2007 and was supported by the Trump administration in 2020.
How this “Autonomous Region of the Sahara” would actually work remains largely undefined, beyond the discussion of local administrative, judicial and economic powers.
Polisario rejects the plan, but rejection has not brought the Sahrawis any closer to deciding their own future.
For many Sahrawis, the timing of the Security Council’s decision, right on the anniversary of the 1975 invasion of Morocco, felt less like coincidence than calculated cruelty.
People like Garazi Hach Embarek, daughter of a Basque nurse who treated the first displaced families half a century ago and one of the founders of the Polisario Front. The 47-year-old has spent years taking the cause to classrooms, universities, town halls and any forum that will listen.
In an interview with IPS in Urretxu, 400 kilometers north of Madrid, Hach Embarek does not hide her dismay. “Active resistance is extremely difficult and the Moroccan lobby remains very influential,” laments the Sahrawi activist.
“We live in turbulent times, where everything seems to be going well, but this is neither just nor legal. Under the guise of peace, the real goal is simply to legitimize injustice,” she adds, before emphasizing the need “to forge new alliances.”
“Colonialism is far from over, and we are merely the victims of continued misrule in Africa’s last colony.”
© Inter Press Service (20251105171725) — All rights reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service
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