Pablo San Martín - Western Sahara: The Refugee Nation

Figure 1: Western Sahara map

My first image of the Western Sahara dates back to the early 1980s, when I was only a child. I was watching TV, the news, and I remember the presenter saying something about a war in a former Spanish territory, which looked very different from the exuberantly green and perpetually wet northern Iberian valleys of my childhood. But what really captured my attention were the images of guerrilla fighters with yellowish turbans, waving their Kalashnikovs and departing defiantly for the battlefield, crowded in the back of old open Land Rovers. I also recall Land Rovers reconverted into sorts of artisan assault vehicles, with machine guns fixed to their tops. Those images were, at least as I evoke them now, whitish and blurred, probably because of the collusion of the sirocco of those distant wide white lands of the greatest desert on earth and the black-and-white TV of my sitting room.

Whitish and blurred also describes some of the last and most powerful images that Liman can evoke from his homeland. It was the end of 1975, when, with his family, he had to flee the city of El Aain, capital of the then Spanish Sahara, to seek refuge in the desert. Spain, with dictator General Franco moribund in hospital, had hastily abandoned its colony without organizing the self-determination referendum that the United Nations (UN) had been demanding for over a decade. Taking advantage of Spains weakness, Morocco from the north and Mauritania from the south sent their armies to occupy a deserted territory inhabited by fewer than a hundred thousand Saharawis, but with immense natural resources. The UN officially opposed the occupation but did nothing to prevent it and the still-young Saharawi liberation movement, the Frente por la Liberacin de Saguia el-Hamra y Ro de Oro (Frente Polisario), which had been fighting against Spanish colonialism since 1973, was unable to stop their much more powerful expansionist neighbours. That the native Saharawis overwhelmingly supported the independence of the territory was palpable, as a UNs visiting mission had just confirmed. The Moroccan and Mauritanian troops were not precisely welcomed as liberators from European colonialism but, on the contrary, they encountered unexpectedly stiff resistance. For the new occupying powers virtually every Saharawi immediately became suspected of being a secessionist and within a few months, many hundreds of Saharawis had been killed or had disappeared and approximately half of the total population had been displaced. It all happened under the passive and indifferent gaze of the international community.