The following information is from a generally reliable source but has not been corroborated by third party sources. I find the information herein important. Ed
WESTERN SAHARA / SITUATION REPORT
13/07/12
On July 2, SADR President and Polisario General Secretary Mohamed Abdelaziz, in his capacity as commander in chief of the SADR armed forces, presided over a graduation ceremony for special forces trainees at the Smara camp near Tindouf. After the usual military parade and martial arts display, SADR Defence Minister Mohamed Lamine Bouhali delivered a speech in which he proclaimed that a return to armed struggle had become “unavoidable”. The special forces graduation ceremony, he said, was a reflection of “the spirit of the youth, who are convinced that what has been taken by force [i.e. the independence of Western Sahara] can only be restored by force.” Bouhali’s remarks were reproduced in a dispatch by Polisario’s SPS news agency[1], and subsequently picked up on by Algeria’s APS. Although not entirely without precedent, the SADR Defence Minister’s statement about the inevitability of war is unusually categorical and comes after an extended period in which Polisario leaders had by and large dropped any references to armed struggle[2].
Discussing Bouhali’s speech with us, a leading member of one of Polisario’s civil society organisations initially dismissed the surprisingly bellicose tone as a mere rhetorical flourish, dictated by the context in which it was made (i.e. a passing-out ceremony for supposedly elite troops). When pressed, the source conceded that there was perhaps something more to it than that: with nothing to show for all their efforts to push the Western Sahara question forward via United Nations channels, the Polisario leadership finds itself under pressure from the increasingly frustrated youth in the camps, who have raised the slogan of a resumption of armed struggle; in response, members of the leadership from time to time take up the same slogan by way of demonstrating their undiminished and uncompromising radicalism.
The source goes on to argue that “nobody in the Tindouf camps” really believes in a return to armed struggle, for the simple reason that “the Sahrawi refugees, and especially the youth, are not motivated by this option”. And if some young dissidents – by which the source seems to mean the Youth of the Sahrawi Revolution group which emerged in the camps last year in the early days of the Arab Spring– go on about the need to go back to war, it is only in order to embarrass the present leadership. This rather dismissive attitude towards the young dissidents is perhaps above all indicative of the source’s own pro-leadership inclinations, and it would no doubt be a mistake to write off the challenge of the Youth of the Sahrawi Revolution and other such groupings altogether. Despite the leadership’s attempts to quash the movement[3], there were renewed clashes between young protesters and Polisario security in the camps on July 8, according to as yet unconfirmed reports from pro-Moroccan news sources[4].
Nonetheless, the source’s basic evaluation of Bouhali’s comments – that they were intended to ward off pressure from below and do not reflect a sincere conversion to a pro-war line – appears to be essentially correct. Polisario’s leadership is well aware that there can be no return to armed struggle without Algiers’ assent. During Polisario’s 13th congress in December of last year, a source quoted General Secretary Mohamed Abdelaziz as admitting, in private, that a return to war could not be envisaged because “as soon as the first shot is fired” against the Moroccans, all of Polisario’s friends – including Algeria – would withdraw their support for the Saharawi cause. There is no indication that Algeria has become any more inclined to support military action since then. Indeed, Sahrawi sources told us in June that Algiers is now starving Polisario of arms: it stopped supplying heavy weaponry some time ago, and now only provides side arms, essentially for policing purposes.
Worse still, the confused and highly dangerous situation which has opened up in northern Mali seems to be causing the Polisario leadership to look over its shoulder at Algiers more anxiously than ever. In the run-up to the 19th African Union assembly being held this month in Addis Ababa, a member of Polisario’s National Secretariat confided to us that the Front’s leadership fears moves to have the SADR’s membership suspended[5]. The source claimed that certain parties – whom he did not name[6] – had been lobbying the diplomatic missions of various African countries with documents containing what they claimed was proof of the involvement of Polisario members in armed groups active in northern Mali. According to the National Secretariat member, these lobbyists, while recognising that some countries such as South Africa will remain steadfast in their support for Polisario, believe that Algeria would not oppose the SADR’s suspension from the African Union if confronted with proof that members of Polisario and of the SADR’s armed forces have been implicated in the takeover of northern Mali by Tuareg separatist and radical islamist groups.
A North African diplomat at AU headquarters in Addis Ababa asserts that in the northern Mali conflict, Polisario had been rooting for a victory by the Tuareg-separatist MNLA[7] – a loosing bet, as it turns out, the MNLA having been swiftly sidelined by the Tuareg islamist Ansar Dine group and its allies AQMI and MUJAO. The North African diplomat adds that, although there have been no formal discussions on the question of the SADR’s membership during the preparatory meetings for the AU assembly, non-official documents written by various “observers and analysts” attacking the SADR’s full membership of the African Union as anomalous have indeed been doing the rounds. These anti-SADR screeds highlight allegations of Polisario involvement not only in northern Mali but also in last year’s Libyan conflict, when Sahrawi military personnel were said to have fought on the side of the Qaddafi regime. If these allegations were backed up with incontrovertible evidence, the diplomat argues, the SADR would find itself in a “very difficult position” within the African Union.
END
Ambassador Edward M. Gabriel
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additional point on WS situation report
According to a Saharawi journalist in Tindouf, Polisario’s security services have for the past few weeks been imposing a nighttime curfew in the refugee camps (8 p.m. to 6 a.m.), for “security reasons” relating to the “fight against organised crime, theft and armed attacks”, which are said to have increased noticeably of late.
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[1] Strikingly, SPS published the dispatch in Arabic only, neglecting to translate it into English, Spanish or French.
[2] One Saharawi source alluded to a somewhat similar declaration by an unspecified member of the Polisario leadership in early June, but we have not been able to track this down in the public record.
[3] In January of this year, the Youth of the Saharawi Revolution set up a small ‘protest camp’ near the seat of the General Secretariat of the Polisario Front in the Tindouf camps, which was broken up by Polisario security forces; three of the protesters were arrested and detained by the SADR Gendarmerie.
[4] www.sahara-news.org
[5] In mid-June, the same source told us that a delegation of African foreign ministers visiting Tindouf had asked Polisario’s leaders to keep a lower profile than usual at the African Union gathering in July 9. According to the source, members of the Polisario National Secretariat interpreted this as a first step towards a possible challenge to Sadr’s full membership of the African Union.
[6] Similarly, addressing a meeting of political commissars of the Polisario Front on June 9, General Secretary Mohamed Abdelaziz accused the Moroccan intelligence services of « attempting to compromise the struggle of the Saharawi people by linking it to terrorism and drug trafficking. »
[7] It may be recalled that a member of the Saharawi National Council, speaking to us shortly after the fall of Timbuktu at the beginning of April, described the victory of the rebellion in northern Mali as a “major event” from the point of view of the Saharawi people. On the one hand, it would be to the SADR’s advantage to establish solid relations with a new Tuareg state – it would no longer be a matter for the Saharawis of choosing whether (or how) to deal with armed islamist groups but rather of building relations with legitimate structures representing the Tuareg people. On the other, if the Tuaregs were able to exercise their right to self-determination, then the case in favour of the Saharawis exercising the same right could only be strengthened.