A Nation Lost In The Desert

Monday, Feb. 01, 1999 By ROD USHER/TINDOUF
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They live in brightest Africa. Blinding summer light blasts temperatures up around 55[degrees]C; on winter nights of clear starry skies it's near 0[degrees]C inside their tents. September and March bring continuous sandstorms to flay faces and grit the bread. A clue to the toughness of their surroundings is that almost the only creatures who share them by choice are varnish-brown cockroaches. But there is something worse than living with extreme weather, no running water or proper sewerage, no soil to grow crops, 100% unemployment. Where Africa's Saharawi people live is not "home."

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They squat precariously in "the desert of the deserts," the flat stony Hamada region of the Sahara in western Algeria, near the military outpost of Tindouf. About 165,000 people live on hope and foreign aid in four refugee camps of faded canvas tents or adobe huts that become summer ovens which dissolve into mud in the rare years of rain. About 100 km farther west lies the border of what they have always called their country, Sahara al-Gharbiyah, or Western Sahara, where Spain first set up a trading post in 1476.

When the Spanish abandoned the colony in the mid-1970s--busy rediscovering democracy after 40 years of Franco--Mauritania and Morocco sought to carve up the country they bordered, an expanse of desert and Atlantic coast twice the size of England. The Saharawis resisted in a guerrilla war that lasted 16 years, followed by another seven years of uneasy cease-fire. They saw off the Mauritanians but northern neighbor Morocco has proved more resilient, demanding that Western Sahara be incorporated into the kingdom of Hassan II. That insistence, highlighted by Hassan's 1975 "Green March" into the territory, has left Western Sahara as the site of Africa's last big decolonization struggle.

If you add to the refugees in the Algerian desert those who have remained in Moroccan-occupied Western Sahara and those in exile elsewhere, the total Saharawi population would fit into several football stadiums. Yet their guerrillas, the Polisario Front, fought Morocco, with a population of more than 28 million and modern armed forces, to a stalemate--again proving the lesson of Vietnam: superior weaponry doesn't beat motivation. But King Hassan II has made the conquest of Western Sahara an issue of national pride. And if that were not enough, there is the fact that it contains some of the world's richest phosphate deposits, and, off its 1,200 km of coastline, superb fishing grounds.

The struggle has lasted so long that more than half those in the refugee camps--60% are under 18--have never seen "home." The cease-fire in force since 1991 is increasingly shaky, but recent events have given the Saharawis some hope that a political solution may at last be in sight. United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan visited the area twice late last year, and recently President Clinton has been telling concerned members of Congress--a group of 12 congressional staffers visited the camps before Christmas--that the U.S. wants action. In a letter to Republican Representative Joseph R. Pitts Clinton wrote: "Recent progress...lends hope that this crucial issue will soon be resolved."

The issue should have been resolved on Dec. 7, the latest date set by the U.N. for a referendum. The question: Do you want Western Sahara to be incorporated into Morocco or to become an independent nation? But while the government in Rabat has agreed in principle, argument over who should have the right to vote led to yet another postponement, to December this year. The Saharawis, who have been hanging on this vote since the cease-fire, call their nation-in-waiting the Saharawi Arab Democratic Republic. Says M'Hamed Khadad, the S.A.D.R.'s U.N. coordinator, "We want a referendum because we know how the vote will go. Morocco doesn't want one, for the same reason."

Only Saharawis will be eligible to vote, but who can legally define a Saharawi, given their Berber-Arab semi-nomadic history? It is this Catch-22 that keeps the camps in the desert, where visitors are advised not to drink the water trucked to steel bins among the tents, and where a green vegetable or a flashlight battery is a prize.

There are all shades of Saharawis, the majority pale-skinned. In the camp schools some children have near-blue eyes and pale or reddish hair, but there are also Saharawis whose skin is the jet of Central Africa. Years ago the U.N. set up identification committees, and just over 147,000 people have presented themselves to Saharawi elders and U.N. officials claiming status as tribal members. To qualify to vote they had to meet criteria based largely on parentage and a 1974 Spanish census. Only about 85,000 are thought to have made the cut. Morocco insists another 65,000 people should vote, being connected tribally to a small number of Moroccans included in the Spanish census. The Saharawis say this is an attempt to stuff the ballot boxes, but in November Kofi Annan announced that he had persuaded them that these 65,000 can now go before the I.D. committees. The result: more delay.