Djimi el Ghalia constantly looks in the rearview mirror as she drives her old Ford Fiesta in El Aaiún at the start of the road to Smara, a nationalist stronghold. “A motorbike and a car are following us, as usual,” explains this Sahrawi activist in Spanish with a marked Maghrebi accent. She spent 16 of her 63 years in a secret Moroccan prison accused of sympathising with the Polisario Front. Police vehicles from the National Security and Auxiliary Forces remain parked on several corners. “Now it is very difficult to raise one’s voice and there are very few protests in Western Sahara. Some young people participate in small demonstrations, for a short time and far from the police presence,” she explains after arriving home, dressed in the traditional Sahrawi melfa, while serving tea with the desert ritual. “Plainclothes officers videotape the protesters. Then they make a personal file on each one,” she says.
“The supporters of Tindouf [sede del Frente Polisario en los campamentos de exiliados del suroeste de Argelia] “Morocco has only been able to organise sporadic gatherings with a handful of participants. There is no state of siege here,” says the wali or governor of the El Aaiún region, Abdesalem Berkate, in refined French, who maintains that the protests have been fading away over the last decade. “Morocco has forced a change against fatalism. The State has made an exceptional effort in the Sahara in infrastructure, job creation, subsidies and tax exemptions,” explains the highest representative of the executive power apparatus that emanates directly from the royal palace in Rabat in his official office.
Following the massive arrival of new Moroccan residents, El Aaiún is approaching 500,000 inhabitants, half of the estimated population of the Sahara, according to the forecasts for the 2024 population census. The Spanish National Statistics Institute recorded 50 years ago the presence of nearly 75,000 Sahrawis, along with 30,000 Spaniards, before abandoning the territory and ceding it the following year to Morocco and, briefly and in part, to Mauritania.
The peaceful sit-in that led to the bloody Agdaym Izik uprising, in which Sahrawi demonstrators and security forces lost their lives in November 2010 near El Aaiún, marked the latest major turning point in tensions. Nationalist activists such as Djimi el Ghalia admit that there have been no mass protests since May 2013.
Economic retaliation
“Economic reprisals have been applied ever since. Most people fear losing their so-called national promotion card, which provides a small financial aid, if they participate in the protests,” says El Ghalia. To get it back, they must sign a commitment not to attend demonstrations again, he says, and young people risk losing the scholarships and transport vouchers, which are generally granted to all residents of the Sahara to study in Moroccan schools. “This is the worst oppression,” he warns, “without this aid, most people cannot survive.”
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Like the rest of the authorities, Mulay Hamdi Ould Errachid, mayor of El Aaiún since 2010 and a member of Parliament for the Istiqlal party (Moroccan nationalist), maintains that the stability of Western Sahara is based on the economic development promoted by the Rabat government in the last half century. Born 77 years ago in the capital of the territory, the mayor relies on an interpreter in his statements, in which he mixes Castilian with Hassani, the dialectal variety of Arabic spoken by the Sahrawis, to describe the government’s investments in the city, such as the new university hospital, the Faculty of Medicine or the ring road infrastructure. “This was the 53rd province of Franco’s Spain, but apart from some public buildings, Spain only left barracks and shacks when it left in 1976,” he argues in a municipal headquarters that still bears the stamp of colonial architecture.
In its 2023 report, Amnesty International said that Moroccan police dispersed several protests, coinciding with the first visit to the territory by the UN envoy for Western Sahara, Staffan de Mistura, in September last year. Two dozen protesters were arrested in El Aaiún and four activists were detained in Dakhla so that they could not attend an interview with De Mistura.
The pro-self-determination activist for the Sahara El Ghalia was able to meet him. “We spoke at the headquarters of MINURSO [Misión de Naciones Unidas para el Referéndum del Sáhara Occidental] “He was in El Aaiún when the authorities finally allowed him to come,” he recalls, “and he asked us to help him think about how to resolve the conflict.” Being silent does not mean that the situation is normal, they also told the UN envoy. “If it is difficult for us, as activists of the Sahrawi cause, to protest, it is even more difficult for the majority,” admits El Ghalia.
More than 300 missing persons, like her and her husband, were released in 1991 after long years of detention without trial and without their families being informed of their whereabouts. “Through the Instance of Equity and Reconciliation [organismo creado por Mohamed VI al inicio de su reinado para pasar la página de la represión bajo el rey Hassan II]Morocco recognized us as victims. They gave us a lot of money as reparation, but that is not enough. We still live under the years of lead [la etapa de máxima represión en los años setenta y ochenta]despite exercising peaceful dissent,” the Sahrawi activist emphasizes.
A Minurso spokesperson revealed in an exchange of messages that the number of armed incidents between the Moroccan army and Polisario Front militants analysed by the UN – around the earthen wall or embankment dividing the territory of the former Spanish colony – has decreased, although Moroccan drone attacks continue in a low-intensity conflict following the collapse of the ceasefire in November 2020. Western Sahara remains one of the territories most contaminated by landmines and unexploded ordnance in the world. Minurso has recently been able to restart demining operations, which were suspended four years ago.
The UN is trying to prevent a new escalation of the conflict, the same source said, as well as “creating a favourable space for the political process led by the Secretary-General’s envoy for Western Sahara”. Since last April, when he met with the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Naser Burita, in Rabat, De Mistura has not taken any new steps towards mediation.
Occasional minority gatherings
Independent observers in El Aaiún note that there have been few demonstrations recently, and that those that do take place are few and far between. Many Sahrawis have withdrawn from politics, such as Abdelá al Hairach, 65, a nationalist teacher who focuses on helping sub-Saharan migrants at the head of the Association for Immigration and Development. “The authorities have opened a new immigration detention centre in a place that has not yet been declared,” he says in fluent Spanish, which he learned during his childhood in colonial Sahara. “In El Aaiún there are between 2,000 and 3,000 sub-Saharan migrants in transit, but there are many more on the coast waiting for a boat, which costs from around 3,000 euros to cross illegally to the Canary Islands,” says El Hairach.
—Do you think Morocco will establish a system of full political autonomy for the Sahara?
—We have been with Morocco for almost 50 years now. I think it is impossible for us to have an autonomy like that of the Basque Country or Catalonia in Spain. It is a lost cause—replies the Sahrawi professor.
“We hope for a shared future among peoples,” says Djimi el Ghalia, “but Morocco must respect our will to be able to choose what future we want. If the Sahrawi people want autonomy, we will applaud them, but if they want independence, that will be their decision.”
At the headquarters of the Association of Generations of Peace, former students of the Colegio la Paz in El Aaiún, a Spanish educational centre in the capital of the Sahara that continued to teach after Spain left the territory, a dozen Sahrawis around 60 years old form an unusual forum for public debate. They are the board of directors of the association. A chorus of voices with the sonorous Spanish that is still heard in the Sahara. Around a table, one can talk about everything, except politics.
“Our statutes make it clear that our aims are cultural and educational,” explains Bashir Bussola, 65, secretary of the association, an economist trained at the University of Salamanca. “We are representatives of civil society that was educated in Spanish in El Aaiún,” he points out in a central house in what was once the Spanish quarter, with a characteristic semi-spherical dome.
“But politics always comes up in our conversations,” says Gajmula Ebbi, 62, a graduate in Hispanic Philology from the University of Rabat, half-jokingly and half-seriously. “It’s inevitable,” adds this former student of the Colegio de la Paz, who went into exile with her family in the Tindouf camps and fought in the ranks of the Polisario Front between 1975 and 1992, before returning to El Aaiún to become a member of the Moroccan Parliament for 14 years for the Party of Progress and Socialism.
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