THE STRUGGLE FOR THE WESTERN SAHARA Part I: Prelude by Barbara Harrell-Bond Superpower involvement The contest IS !letween the SahrZwi (Polsaro Front) and 'Vorocco ~*dhlchclaims the region as part of 1 ti hstorc empre The American Universities Field California State University/Fullerton Staff, Inc.,founded in 1951, is a non- California State UniversityINorthridge American profit, membership corporation of Americ/an educational institutions. It Dartmouth College Universities employs a full-time staff of foreign East-West Center area specialists who write from abroad and make periodic visits to University of Hawaii at Manoa member institutions. AUFS serves Indiana Universitv the public its seminar pro- Institute for Shipboard Education grams, films, and wide-ranging pub- lications on significant develop- University of Kansas ments in foreign societies. Michigan State University University of Missouri INSTITUTIONAL MEMBERS University of Pittsburgh University of Alabama/Birmingham Ramapo College of New Jersey University of Alabama/Tuscaloosa Utah State University Brown University University of Wisconsin System AUFS Reports are a continuing Associates of the Field Staff are series on international affairs and chosen for their ability to cut across major global issues of our time. the boundaries of the academic dis- Re~orts have for almost three ciplines in order to study societies in decades reached a group of their totality, and for their skill in col- readers-both academic and non- lecting, reporting, and evaluating academic-who find them a useful data. They combine long residence source of firsthand observation of abroad with scholarly studies relat- political, economic, and social trends ing to their geographic areas of in foreign countries. Reports in the interest. Each Field Staff Associate series are prepared by writers who returns to the United States periodi- are full-time Associates of the cally to lecture on the campuses of American Universities Field Staff the consortium's member institu- and occasionally by persons on leave tions. from the organizations and univer- sities that are the Field Staff's spon- sors. THE AUTHOR BARBARA E. HARRELL-BOND is a the Afrika-Studiecentrum, Leiden. Ap- social anthropologist who has conducted pointed a Senior Research Fellow at the research in England and in West Africa. School of Law, University of Warwick, in Her special interests are family, urban 1976, Dr. Harrell-Bond joined the Field problems, law, and the history of the im- Staff in 1978 to report on West Africa. position of alien law in colonial Africa. She received a B. Litt. and D. Phil. in anthropology from the University of Oxford. Her publications include Modern Marriage in Sierra Leone: A Study of the Professional Group and Community Leadership and the Transformation of Freetown (1801-19761, the latter being co-researched and written with two historians, Dr. Allan Howard and Dr. David Skinner. She has also published widely in academic journals, lectured in a number of universities including the Uni- versity of Illinois (Urbana), the University of Helsinki, and the University of ,981,American Universities Field Warsaw, and was a Visiting Scholar at Staff, Hanover, NH 1981INo. 37 by Barbara Harrell-Bond THE STRUGGLE FOR THE Africa [BHB-7-'811 WESTERN SAHARA Part I: Prelude Few Americans took much notice of the conflict involves major commer- these countries made over the the Reagan administration's first cial and strategic interests with Spanish colony. policy statement on the Western behind-the-scenes"superpower" in- Saharan conflict on March 26, 1981. volvement. After visiting refugee camps just While the Carter administration had inside the Algerian border-where made some attempt to link U.S. arms Yet the war has resulted in the crea- 150,000 civilians, mainly women and sales to Morocco with progress tion of a large refugee population, children live in exile- Andrew Young toward a negotiated settlement of exiles from the Western Sahara. It is asked, "How do we get on the oppo- the territorial dispute, the new not known just how many SahrZwF site side of people who seem to administration declared that the there are, either in the country or as practice so well what we preach?"* Sahara issue would be dropped. As refugees. In 1974 the Spanish census counted fewer than 80,000 but these My thoughts echoed his sense of Morris Draper, Deputy Assistant shame as I watched women making Secretary of State for Near Eastern nomadic people were generally unwilling to cooperate and many re- spoons and knives and beating and South Asian Affairs put it, cooking pans out of salvaged war "Arms sales to Morocco would in the mained uncounted. Some contem- porary estimates contend that only materials-their "made in U.S.A." future be based on the same criteria marks still clearly visible. Inside the as 'for other friends.' "1 about 25,000 Sahrswiremain in the coastal cities occupied by the tents, sitting on pillows on the floor, Spain's refusal to grant self-deter- Moroccan army and that more huddled against the bitter winter mination to the people of this SahrZwi live outside the Western cold in blankets that are in scarce ex-colony and its invasion by Sahara than within the territory. The supply, I found it painful to accept, Morocco and Mauritania after a province of Tan-Tan in Morocco is over and over again, their generous secret agreement with Spain in 1975 almost entirely SabrZwiand the 1978 hospitality. The Sahriiwi refugees have not received major coverage in census there counted 81,900. in 1977 rarely have meat to eat themselves, U.S. newspapers. Not many Ameri- Mauritania gave the figure of 47,000 but a guest is always given meat with cans are even aware that for six years for the two regions bordering the his cous cous. While being shown the U.S., while officially neutral, has Western Sahara and most of this around their hospitals and schools, I continued (along with France, South population is thought to be SahrZwT was embarrassed to be asked by Africa, and the Soviet Union) to There are also SalyZiwi among the each woman I met, "What do the supply arms and give support for population of the Algerian wilaya of women in your country know about Morocco's claim which, as U.S. Bechar. us, the SabrZwT women?" Our Representative Stephen Solarz re- parochialism contrasted starkly with minded the House Committee on It is not known when the term their compelling interest in all Foreign Affairs in 1979, "the over- SahrZiwi was first applied to the aspects of Western society -from whelming majority of countries in the people of the Western Sahara, but the roles of men and women, to world oppose as a contradiction of Spanish colonial documents have working conditions, management of the very principle of national self- consistently used this term to refer to education and health, and politics. determination." the "tribes" that populated the region. Spain always emphasized the The Western Sahara? "If the name distinctiveness of these people from This three-part Report is not merely of this Colorado-sized territory in the populations of Morocco and, an account of an unknown war in the northwest Africa evokes any image further south, Mauritania as part of northwest corner of the African at all," Solarz noted, "it is likely to be their efforts to refute the claims continent which risks escalation and one of nomads along with their tents internationalization. It is also about a and camels against a background of unique social experiment being con- blinding sunlight and endless sand *Accent marks for the term SatyZwT ducted by a nation in exile, refugees engaged in the ancient and timeless must be applied to this typeface by struggling not only to exist but also confrontation between men and hand; thus they are used only on page to create the preconditions for a nature." Few would recognize that one. model African society-self-reliant, egalitarian, and unified. The Reports which the ALPS invaded to force the Early History of the Western Sahara are based on observations during an Moroccans to concentrate on pro- Among the arguments in favor of extended visit to all the refugee tecting their own borders. Today, the Morocco's claims to the Western camps inside Algeria and a number Moroccan armies are confined to the Sahara have been assertions that the of days spent traveling in a Land triangle of territory encompassing El local population is "too small" to Rover over hundreds of kilometers of Aaiun, Bu Craa, and Smara and to form a nation or that there is no desert from which the Arm6e de the southern coastal city of Dakhla, Sahrawi population distinct from ~ibhration Populaire Sahraoui the area they invaded after Mauri- other nomads who populate the (ALPS) has ousted Moroccan tania in a 1979 treaty withdrew its Sahara desert. occupying forces.3 It included a 200 claim to any part of the Western While much work remains to be done kilometer trip into southern Morocco Sahara. on the prehistory of the region, there is evidence of hominid habitation of the Western Sahara dating back at least one and a half million years.4 The population has included both black and white people since the Neolithic period. Skeletal evidence and cave paintings indicate that these early desert people included a strong Negroid element resulting from a migration northward and westward into the Sahara which began about 5500 B.C. These people had settled the area long before the arrival of the Berbers. Our group 780 kilometers inside Southern Morocco. Traveling through the liberated zones of the Western Sahara. There is also support for contempo- energy which led the Sanhaja through the Atlas which would lead rary Saharan beliefs that "white" [known by this time1 as the overland to "Guinea" (all the coast pre-Arab Sanjaha Berbers took Almoravids, to conquer from Ghana to what is today Liberia), the source control of the desert by pushing out a to N.