Polisario Front
The
Polisario,
Polisario Front, or
Frente Polisario, from the
Spanish abbreviation of
Frente Popular de Liberación de Saguía el Hamra y Río de Oro ("Popular Front for the Liberation of
Saguia el-Hamra and
Río de Oro") is a
Sahrawi movement working for the independence of
Western Sahara.
The beginnings
Polisario is a successor of the
Harakat Tahrir in the late
1960s, led by
Bassiri, which hoped to gain independence for the
Spanish Sahara through peaceful protest. In
1970, Spanish troops under
Franco's regime destroyed the movement following the
Zemla Intifada, and killed most of the leadership including Bassiri. This pushed Sahrawi nationalists into supporting a violent struggle.
In 1971 a group of young Sahrawi expatriates in the universities of
Morocco began organizing what came to be known as
The Embryonic Movement for the Liberation of Saguia el-Hamra and Rio de Oro. After attempting in vain to gain backing from several Arab governments, the movement eventually relocated to Spanish-controlled Western Sahara to start an armed rebellion. The Polisario was constituted on
May 10,
1973 with the express intention of militarily forcing an end to
Spanish colonization. Its first general secretary was
El-Ouali Mustapha Sayed. On
May 20 he led the Khanga raid, Polisario's first armed action, in which a Spanish post was overrun and
rifles seized. Polisario then gradually gained control over large swaths of desert countryside, and its power grew from early
1975 when forcibly recruited Sahrawi auxiliaries of the
Tropas Nomadas began deserting to the Polisario, bringing weapons and training with them. At this point, Polisario's manpower included perhaps 800 men and women, but they were backed by a vastly larger network of supporters. A
UN visiting mission headed by
Simeon Aké that was conducted in June 1975 concluded that Sahrawi support for independence (as opposed to Spanish rule or integration with a neighbouring country) amounted to an "overwhelming consensus" and that the Polisario Front was by far the most powerful political force in the country.
Invasion
While Spain started negotiating a handover of power in the summer of 1975, in the end the Franco regime decided to throw in its lot with Western Sahara's neighbours instead. After Moroccan pressures through the
Green March of
November 6, Spain entered negotiations that led to the signing of the
Madrid Accords between Spain, Morocco and
Mauritania. Thus, immediately upon Spain's withdrawal in 1975,
Moroccan and
Mauritanian troops invaded and occupied the Western Sahara and expelled most of its native population. This brought widespread international condemnation, since the
World Court at
The Hague had
found in favor of Western Sahara's self-determination just weeks before.
The Polisario kept up resistance and rebased in
Tindouf in the western regions
Algeria. For the next two years the movement grew tremendously as Sahrawi refugees flocked to the camps and Algeria supplied arms and funding. Within months, its army had expanded to several thousand armed fighters,
camels been replaced by modern
jeeps and
19th century muskets by
assault rifles. The reorganized army was able to inflict severe damage through
guerrilla-style
hit-and-run attacks against occupation forces in Western Sahara and in the occupying countries, but took care not to strike at civilian targets.
Polisario strikes back
The weak Mauritanian regime of
Ould Daddah, whose army numbered only around 5,000 men, was unable to fend off the guerilla incursions. After repeated strikes at the country's principal source of income, the
iron mines of
Zouerate, the government collapsed into internal disorder. Not even overt
French Air Force backing proved enough to save it, and the regime fell in
1978 to a coup led by war-weary military officers, who immediately agreed to a cease fire with the Polisario. A peace treaty was signed
August 5,
1979, in which the new
Nouakchott government recognized Sahrawi rights to Western Sahara and relinquished its own claims. Mauritania withdrew, but the area it had occupied was now additionally taken by Morocco, and the war went on.
From the mid-
1980s Morocco largely managed to keep Polisario troops off by building a huge
berm or sand wall (the
Moroccan Wall), staffed by an army roughly the same size as the entire Sahrawi population. This stalemated the war, with no side able to achieve decisive gains, but artillery strikes and sniping attacks by the guerillas continued, and Morocco was economically and politically strained by the war. Today Polisario controls the part of the Western Sahara on the east of the Moroccan Wall, comprising about a third of the territory, but this area is economically useless, heavily mined, and almost uninhabited.
Cease-fire and the referendum process
A
cease-fire between the Polisario and Morocco, monitored by
MINURSO (
UN) has been in effect since
September 6,
1991, on the promise of a referendum on independence the following year. The referendum, however, stalled over disagreements on voter rights, and numerous attempts at restarting the process (most significantly the launching of the
2003 Baker plan) seem to have failed. The Polisario has repeatedly threatened to resume hostilites if a referendum cannot be held and claims that the current situation of "neither peace, nor war" is unsustainable. Pressures on the leadership from the refugee population to resume fighting are apparent, but to date the 14-year old cease fire has been respected.
In
2004, a breakout organization, the
Front Polisario Khat al-Shahid announced its existence, in the first break with the principle of "national unity" (i.e. working in one single organization to prevent factionalism). It remains of minimal importance to the conflict, however, and Polisario has refused dialogue with it.
On
February 27 1976, the day after Spain formally ceded its colony, Polisario proclaimed the
Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR). It has a
government in exile, a parliament and a judiciary. Its
constitution states that Western Sahara will be founded as a multi-party democracy with a "market economy and free enterprise". Abdelaziz is president. The SADR is a member of the
African Union, but not of the
United Nations. It is currently recognised by
45 countries, and has been acknowledged as a state by over 80 states although about 35 have since withdrawn recognition; nearly all of these are
African or
Latin American. Some countries have not recognised the SADR, but do recognise Polisario as representative of the Saharawi people. Still other countries do not recognise Polisario at all, but also do not recognise
Morocco's unilateral annexation of the area. No state has formally recognized Morocco's annexation of Western Sahara. The SADR and Polisario are both based in the vast Sahrawi
refugee camps south of Tindouf, but has its symbolic temporary capital of
Bir Lehlou in north-eastern Western Sahara, rather than the constitutional capital of
El Aaiún.
The Polisario is first and foremost a
nationalist organization, with the
independence of Western Sahara as its main goal, and it believes ideological disputes should be left for a democratic Western Sahara to deal with. It views itself as a "front" encompassing all political trends in Sahrawi society, and not as a party. As a consequence, there is no party programme. The Sahrawi republic's constitution however gives a hint of the movements ideological context: in the early 1970s Polisario adopted a vaguely
socialist rhetoric, but this was abandoned relatively quickly. In the late 1970s, all references to socialism in the republic's constitution were removed, and by 1991, the Polisario was explicitly
free-market.
After independence, the Polisario will either function as a party within the context of a
multi-party system, or be completely disbanded. This will be decided by a Polisario congress.
Polisario has consistently opposed
terrorism, condemning suicide bombings and even sending condolences to Morocco after the terrorist strikes in
Casablanca in 2003.
The Polisario's organizational structure should not be confused with that of the Sahrawi republic, although the two frequently overlap. The organizational order described below applies today, and was roughly finalized in the 1991 internal reforms of the movement.
The Polisario is led by a general secretary. The first general secretary was
El-Ouali, followed by
Mahfoud Ali Beiba as interrim secretary upon his death. In 1976,
Mohamed Abdelaziz was elected and has held the post ever since. The general secretary is elected by the General Popular Congress (GPC), regularly convened every four years. The GPC is in turn composed of delegates from the Popular Congresses of the refugee camps in
Tindouf, which are held biannually in each camp, and of delegates from the women's' organization (
UNMS), youth organization (
UJSARIO), workers' organization (
UGTSARIO) and military delegates from the SPLA (see below).
Between congresses, the supreme decision-making body is the National Secretariat, headed by the general secretary. The NS is elected by the GPC. It is subdivided into committees handling defense, diplomatic affairs, etc. The 2003 NS, elected at the 11th GPC in
Tifariti, Western Sahara, has 41 members. Twelve of these are secret delegates from the Moroccan-controlled areas of Western Sahara. This is shift in policy, as the Polisario traditionally confined political appointments to Sahrawis within the
diaspora, for fear of infiltration. It is probably intended to strengthen the movement's underground network in Moroccan-controlled Western Sahara, and link up with the rapidly growing Sahrawi civil rights activism.
According to The European Strategic Intelligence and Security Center
(ESISC) Polisario's " "leftist' ideology" [...] was to have a powerful influence on the way in which the Polisario was to be organized.
In 1976, the Polisario Front bestowed upon itself a structure that was to remain unchanged. It was run by its Secretary-General assisted of an executive of nine members, themselves belonging to a "Politburo" of 21 members of whom three were more particularly charged with the "mass organizations" encompassing three "categories" of Saharawis: workers, peasants and women. With 19 elected officials of the "Basic People's Committees", the members of the Politburo formed the "National People's Council". Basically, each group of ten people was organized into a cell and each camp had its own military and political hierarchy.
It was a question therefore of the most classical kind of Marxist pyramid structure [...] . It hardly mattered that there was no plethora of "workers" in the Saharawi ranks or that the "peasants" were really an under-represented class [...] as the Marxist-Leninist vulgate emanded that revolution could only by accomplished by the working class reinforced by the poor peasantry [...]. What was important was to believe in it and to look good to the States sponsoring the cause (mainly, at the time, on the left) and to the sympathizers who were starting to appear in Europe."
[*The European Strategic Intelligence and Security Center (ESISC) report on the Polisario]According to
Pierre Olivier Louveaux, who went to the camps under cover of a humanitarian mission, the Polisario is now controlled by a few people who put their personal interests first in the conclusion of the conflict [...]. The Polisario leaders periodically exchange the various positions of responsibility between themselves. It is difficult to know whether there exist, within the leadership, different political tendencies or conflicting interests. It seems that the leaders, in total or only in part, are hugely benefiting from the current situation to consolidate their political, social and economic power. The fact that they consider themselves as leaders of a State with territory and population, and at the same time as refugees needing humanitarian aid to survive reveals a duality that they skilfully exploit."
[Le Sahara Occidental aujourd'hui]The Sahrawi Popular Army of Liberation, SPLA, is the Polisario's army. Its commander-in-chief is the general secretary. The SPLA's armed units are considered to have a manpower of possibly 6-7,000 active soldiers today, but during the war years its strength appears to have been significantly higher: up to 20,000 men. It has a potential manpower of many times that number, however, since both male and female refugees in the Tindouf camps undergo military training. Women formed auxiliary units protecting the camps during war years.
It is equipped mainly with outdated
Soviet-manufactured weaponry, donated by the sympathetic Algerian government, but its arsenals display a bewildering variety of materiel, much of it captured from Spanish, Mauritanian or Moroccan forces and made in
France, the
United States,
South Africa or
Britain. The SPLA has several armored units, composed of old tanks and somewhat more modern armored cars and halftracks. It has used
Land Rovers and other originally civilian vehicles extensively, mounting machine guns and employing them in great numbers, relying on speed and surprise. On
3 November 2005, Polisario signed the Geneva Call, committing itself to a total ban on
landmines. Morocco is one of
40 governments that have not signed the
1997 mine ban treaty. Both parties has used mines extensively in the conflict, but some mine-clearing operations have been carried out under MINURSO supervision since the cease fire agreement.
The Polisario traditionally employed
ghazzi tactics, i.e., motorized surprise raids over great distances, but after the construction of the Moroccan Wall this changed into more conventional tactics, with a focus on artillery and other long-range attacks. In both phases of the war, SPLA units relied on superior knowledge of the terrain, speed and surprise, and on the ability to retain experienced fighters. The SPLA is considered well organized, and its desert warfare tactics were groundbreaking. The
United States Army is reported to have studied Polisario tactics in preparation for the 1991
Gulf War.
Support for the Polisario came mostly from African countries, Morocco's traditional rivals within the Arab world, and from third world non-aligned countries. The main political and military backers were Algeria and, a distant second,
Cuba. For some years
Libya's support was strong, but this has declined. Valuable contributions also came from the strong Spanish solidarity organizations and from some other third world liberation movements. Ties with the
Fretilin liberation movement were exceptionally strong and remain so after
East Timor's independence.
The
United States firmly backed Morocco against Polisario during the
Cold War, but Polisario never received counter-support from the
Soviet Union or the
People's Republic of China; both rival powers preferred ties with Morocco and refused to recognize the SADR. In the
1990s, world interest in the conflict seemed to expire as the Sahara question gradually sank from public consciousness with the implementation of the cease-fire. Libya withdrew support in the early 1980's, after forming a brief political union with Morocco, and its support of the Polisario today is verbal and infrequent. Support from Algeria remains strong, but the government seems to have barred Polisario from returning to armed struggle, attempting to curry favor from the US and
France and to mend the inflamed ties with Morocco.
In
2004,
South Africa announced its formal recognition of the SADR, delayed for 10 years despite unequivocal promises by
Nelson Mandela as
apartheid fell. The recognition came since the announced referendum for Western Sahara never was held.
Kenya and
Uruguay followed in
2005, and relations were upgraded in some other countries.
*
Morocco's foreign relations*
History of Western Sahara*
Independence Intifada*
Politics of Western Sahara*
Zemla Intifada*
The Association for a Free & Fair Referendum in Western Sahara*
Western Sahara (pro-Polisario view)
*
Western Sahara Online (pro-Moroccan view)
*
Michael Palin's visit to Smara Refugee Camp*
The European Strategic Intelligence and Security Center (ESISC) report on the Polisario*
ESISC's critical report on the refugee camps durign the last floodings*
France Libertés - Report: International Mission of Inquiry - The Conditions of Detentions of the Moroccan POWs Detained in Tindouf (Algeria)*Toby Shelley,
Endgame in the Western Sahara (Zed Books 2004)
*Tony Hodges,
Western Sahara. The Roots of a Desert War (Lawrence & Hill 1983)
*Jarat Chopra,
United Nations Determination of the Western Saharan Self (Norwegian Institute of Foreign Affairs 1994)
*Leo Kamil,
Fueling the Fire. U.S. policy & the Western Sahara Conflict (Red Sea Press 1987)
*Anthony G. Pazzanita & Tony Hodges,
Historical dictionary of Western Sahara (2nd ed. Scarecrow Press 1994)
