The East Timorese of Western Sahara
The East Timorese of Western Sahara
March 02, 2001By Scott Burchill
1975 was an extraordinary year for revolutionary upheavals in the Third World. The Khmer Rouge marched into Phnom Penh in April just two weeks before the US puppet regime in Saigon collapsed. The Pathet Lao took control of Laos the following month and later in the year Mozambique, Cape Verde, Sí£o Tome and Angola achieved their independence from Portugal. In November, after weeks of covert subversion, Indonesia formerly invaded and occupied another Portuguese colony, East Timor.
At the very moment that Indonesian forces began to parachute into Dili, the dilution of colonial power in Africa triggered an event of striking historical similarity in the deserts of the Western Sahara.
Two years earlier the Frente Polisario (Fretilin) had been formed by the indigenous people of the Western Sahara (East Timor) to campaign for Spain’s (Portugal) withdrawal from its colonial outpost. But before a UN-sponsored act of self-determination could be held, neighbouring Morocco (Indonesia) invaded in November 1975 and occupied the northern phosphate-rich sector of the country. Later in the month the departing colonial power, Spain, agreed to a partition of the territory between Morocco and Mauritania, which had also staked a claim. Faced with fierce guerrilla resistance from Polisario, Mauritania withdrew its claim on the territory in 1979, allowing Morocco to occupy the southern part of the region as well, where it remains today.
Despite its violation of international law, protests from the UN, and a reluctance to participate in an internationally-supervised referendum on self-determination planned for 1992 – which it knows it would lose – Morocco’s ongoing occupation prevents Africa’s last colony from achieving its independence.
The crimes committed against the Saharawis are all too familiar to the people of East Timor. Morocco has breeched a UN negotiated ceasefire, transmigrated people in order to stack any forthcoming independence ballot in its favour, and imprisoned hundreds of Saharawis in appalling conditions in Moroccan jails on suspicion of supporting Polisario. Human rights abuses, including terrifying attacks on Saharawi civilians, have been commonplace over the last 25 years. Many people have fled to safety in Algeria, with over 180,000 in refugee camps. And just as Indonesia maintained its occupation of East Timor with the help of US and UK supplied high tech weaponry, so too does Morocco maintain its "defensive wall of sand" against Polisario guerrillas with the support of US-supplied detection technology.
Unlike Indonesia’ occupation of East Timor, no country recognises Morocco’s illegal occupation of Western Sahara. Though the Saharawi republic is acknowledged by more than seventy countries and is a member of the Organisation of African Unity, it remains technically a non-self governing territory of the United Nations. Like its fellow former Iberian colony, its chance for independence was thwarted by an aggressive and avaricious neighbour.
Australia played an honourable role in contributing a signals contingent to a peacekeeping mission in the Western Sahara (MINURSO) from 1991 until 1994, but has since lost interest in the operation. To the great powers allegedly concerned by ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, the humanitarian crisis in the Sahara barely flickers on their radar screens. The UN, tired of Morocco’s prevarication on the registration of voters, seems too exhausted to bring the ballot on with the same dedication it demonstrated elsewhere in 1999. And yet the need is equally urgent.
Like the East Timorese before them, the people who live on the north-west coast of Africa contend with an even more powerful force than neighbourhood terrorism. They confront what a South American victim of torture described as the "blind indifference of a merciless, unfeeling world."
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