Western Sahara: A Sahrawi spring? Not likely | The Economist

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suburbs of Laayoune, Western Sahara’s biggest city, is a full-blow tent better suited to travel in the desert. Painstakingly erected on the roof, it is a symbol of protest. Under cover of the jaima, a group of human-rights activists are eating a late dinner of fish on skewers washed down by sweet tea. Talk turns to rumours doing the rounds on the internet that the UN’s secretary-general, Ban Ki Moon, is planning to replace his envoy for Western Sahara, Christopher Ross, with Colin Powell, a former American secretary of state. “It will make no difference,” says a gloomy American-educated campaigner.

Since the early 1970s the Polisario, a nationalist movement, has been fighting for the independence of Western Sahara, a Spanish colony until 1975. But the kingdom of Morocco, which has occupied most of Western Sahara since the Spaniards’ departure, insists that it is the rightful owner. The UN brokered a ceasefire 21 years ago, but the referendum that was meant to follow never happened. The Sahrawis, according to the UN, had a “right to self-determination”; the disputed area was a “non-self-governing territory”.

But the Moroccans refuse to budge. The territory has long been physically divided by the berm, a land-mined embankment stretching 2,700km (1,677 miles) built by the Moroccan army in the 1980s, separating Polisario-run land in the east from a much larger Moroccan-controlled area in the west, including Laayoune (see map). Within the chunk they control, the Moroccans have a big phosphate mine. They also catch plentiful fish off the coast. Many Sahrawis, for their part, have resided since the 1970s in Polisario-run refugee camps in Algeria.

Since becoming the UN envoy in 2009, Mr Ross, an American diplomat, has overseen a string of meetings between the Moroccan government and the Polisario that were meant to build confidence. But in May the Moroccans declared he was biased in favour of Algeria, Morocco’s bitter regional rival, which backs the Polisario. Mr Ross, it was surmised, would feel obliged to step down.

Under a Moroccan plan unveiled in 2007, the residents of Western Sahara, including tens of thousands of Moroccans who had been encouraged by their government since 1975 to settle in the territory, would vote either for full integration with Morocco or for autonomy within the kingdom. The Polisario disagreed. Any referendum, it insisted, should include the option of outright independence. It also argued that only indigenous Sahrawis should be able to vote. To make matters trickier, Algeria refuses to allow a census of the population in the camps on its territory.

One reason why Mr Ross has alienated Morocco was his effort to monitor human rights as part of the UN mandate. Tensions over the issue had been rising since Moroccan police and soldiers dismantled a camp of protesters at Gdeim Izik, just outside Laayoune, nearly two ears ago. Some protesters and police were killed in the ensuing riots. Sahrawis living on the western side of berm say that they have since been banned from holding protests or setting up their jaimas anywhere in the desert. Hence the tent on the roof.

Some of the Sahrawis sipping tea under it claim that the Arab spring began not in Tunisia but in Western Sahara, with the construction of the camp at Gdeim Izik. Since the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, political freedom has expanded within Morocco itself. But in Western Sahara, say the pro-independence campaigners, things are worse.

On a night-time drive through Laayoune during the holy Islamic month of Ramadan the streets are deserted, a rarity in any Muslim country and a million miles from Rabat, the bustling Moroccan capital. Muhammad, a human-rights campaigner, points out the heavily armoured military and police vans stationed every couple of hundred metres along Boulevard Mekka, the main road which bisects Laayoune.

The number of police and soldiers patrolling the streets has steadily risen in recent years, he says, and it has become more and more difficult to hold protests. He recounts meeting activist friends from Norway before and after he was given a beating by the police and dumped in a nearby river. When he came back, his Scandinavian friends no longer recognised him.

Mr Ban now says Mr Ross will stay. The rumour about Mr Powell, say the secretary-general’s people, is false. The glum campaigners may be right: expect nothing to change