Middle East International 24 June 2005

Renewed unrest in Western Sahara

Both the Moroccan government and Sahrawi nationalist leaders were surprised by the scale of recent unrest in the territory. Rabat must now fear that the Sahrawi population there has firmly embraced the nationalist cause.

Sahrawis living under Rabat's rule in the Western

Sahara and southern Morocco have issued a rude reminder to the Moroccan government and the international community that despite the diplomatic deadlock and a military cease-fire, they will not allow their situation to be forgotten. From Dakhla in the south of the territory held by Rabat, up to commercial capital Laayoune and cultural capital Smara, into the southern Moroccan towns of Goulmime and Tan Tan, and as far as the universities of Agadir and Rabat, Sahrawis demonstrated and rioted for a week at the end of May and beginning of June.

This was not the first time Sahrawis under Moroccan rule had demonstrated. In autumn 1999 a sit-in in Laayoune evolved into a period of spontaneous protest and violence that took activists and authorities alike by surprise and kick-started the strategy of building a nationalist civil society movement in the territory. Two years later trouble broke out in Smara. There were solidarity actions by Sahrawi students in northern Moroccan universities then, but the recent unrest has been qualitatively different from its predecessors.

The protests were sparked by complaints against the transfer of a Sahrawi prisoner from jail in Laayoune. Previously, unrest had been limited to single towns. This time complementary demonstrations erupted across the region as activists mobilized newly organized committees in Dakhla, where for years the community had been too embattled to organize, and in Assa in southern Morocco, where iconic agitator Ali Salem Tamek has mobilized much of the Ait Oussa tribe.

The numbers mobilized also appear greater than before and photographs show that women came onto the streets in numbers. While there were reports of stone-throwing and petrol bombs, the protestors remained disciplined for the most part, although a university campus in Rabat saw much bloodshed on both sides.

Civil rights activists who in 1999 and 2001 were caught out by the popular protests that sprung up were better organized this time, sending delegations to police stations and hospitals to check up on the arrested and injured. For this, a number of them faced intimidation from the security forces, but there are stories of activists being defended by the populace. Three well known Laayoune organizers were stopped by police vehicles only to be released when a crowd gathered. A young man waving a flag of the Polisario's putative Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic from a Dakhla rooftop was defended by the community when police came to get him down.

Political statement

But, most strikingly, this time the protests were explicitly political. In the past, the Moroccan press and authorities have argued that Polisario agents provocateurs had exploited protests over social issues. This time it was clear to all that the Moroccan flag was being burned and the SADR flag raised to the echo of Polisario slogans.

The impact of the protests was felt far beyond the territory. They received widespread coverage in the press in Spain &emdash; the former colonial power &emdash; and embarrassed a government that has been cosying up to Rabat since it came to power in April 2004. The embarrassment was heightened when a Spanish human rights delegation was turned back at Laayoune airport. The events were chewed over at a seminar of experts sponsored by the Spanish Foreign Ministry in the first week of June in a mountain retreat outside Madrid. They will almost certainly feature in the next report to the Security Council from Kofi Annan. For Polisario, the timing was useful. With little progress at the diplomatic level and the issue looking likely to slip off the Security Council radar, popular action has thrust it back into prominence. If the events were cast as Polisario-inspired, they would demonstrate the movement's influence; if they were portrayed as spontaneous, then they proved what Polisario has always argued.

The movement's press service has been working overtime, carrying demands that the UN monitoring force, MINURSO, stop sitting on its hands and protect the people of the territories, and that Spain and the UN fulfil their obligations to assist the Sahrawis. The EU has been reminded of Polisario objections to Brussels providing sophisticated electronic tracking equipment to Rabat for deployment in the territory. For Morocco the timing was unfortunate. The kingdom is seeking to deepen oil company involvement in the waters off Western Sahara and negotiate a new fishing agreement with the European Union. Both oil companies and European states will be all the more wary of any presence in Western Sahara now. Also, just when Western Sahara had slipped so far from the attention of the UN that James Baker had not been replaced as special envoy and Alvaro de Soto had not been replaced as head of MINURSO, the unrest pushed it back up the agenda and will have sparked consideration of successors for one or both men.

Furthermore, the demonstrations by Sahrawis coincided with a growing propensity of Moroccans to take to the streets, with those around El Hoceima complaining about lack of compensation for earthquake damage, Islamists demonstrating against the US, and a march against unemployment.

Rabat caught off-guard

Rabat could not have predicted the timing of the unrest in Western Sahara and southern Morocco but everyone knew it was coming. The government had even recently convened a meeting of pro-regime Sahrawi notables to devise a strategy to cope with nationalist agitation in southern Morocco, links between Sahrawi nationalist groups and the Moroccan far left, and the increasingly frank reporting by elements of Morocco's independent press. Time will tell whether Rabat's reaction turns out to be more subtle than the security crack-down seen so far. L'Economiste, an intelligent mainstream publication, has again blamed social exclusion of Sahrawis and lack of integration for driving young people into rebellion. But the rhetoric of social development, employment generation and so forth has been ongoing at least since the 1999 riots. If there was an opportunity for Morocco to avert a nationalist politicization of the Sahrawis under its rule, that opportunity may now have shrunk considerably.

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