Pedro Canales
Journalist
Spanish society as a whole, political class and citizens alike, has reacted in recent days to the Sahara issue. It was enough for President Pedro Sánchez to declare himself in favour of exploring the path of regional autonomy proposed by Morocco “as the most suitable way” to resolve the conflict that has been going on for almost half a century for hurricane winds to rise.
However, beyond the sentimental reactions of some, and the calculatedly political reactions of others to rise up against the Spanish government, the reality is that the option of a referendum on self-determination, which the United Nations promoted in the 1990s, is not viable. Holding a referendum of a population dispersed in the desert is very difficult; but holding a referendum of a population dispersed in the world is simply impossible.
Who would vote, how would you vote, and what would be asked of the people: would you agree to return to the territory of Western Sahara in the event that the regional autonomy option proposed by the Kingdom of Morocco is approved? Or are you willing to return to the territory of Western Sahara, if the option of independence of the territory with the constitution of a new state is successful? Would this be a consultation in the abstract on the future of the territory, or a consultation that entails a commitment to return to the territory?
In any of the possible scenarios for the exercise of the right to self-determination, to which some countries, political parties and civil society organisations cling so strongly, consultation is unfeasible.
Among other reasons, this is due to the existing dispersion of Sahrawi citizens throughout the world. In this half-century of conflict, the situation has changed radically.
The Sahrawi population of origin is widely dispersed, although the two most important groupings are in the Tindouf camps (some 140,000 citizens) and the territory of the former Spanish provinces (another 150,000 or so). The rest of the Sahrawi citizens of origin, some 100,000 more, are scattered around the world, either as immigrants or as citizens of other countries where they have acquired nationality. In Mauritania, some 20,000 Saharawis are said to be settled mainly in the north of the country, where Saharawi ancestral tribes also live; in Spain, no fewer than 18,000 Saharawis are resident, the vast majority with Spanish nationality, and many of them in the Canary Islands; the Saharawi diaspora is also very numerous in France, Italy, Germany, the United States and other Western countries. There are also numerous Sahrawi citizens in Cuba and in several Latin American countries. To these figures must be added the thousands of citizens who have arrived in the territory of the former Spanish Sahara from other Moroccan provinces or other countries, and who now constitute two generations born there, so that their rights as citizens are unquestionable.
In addition to the problems inherent in the possibility of creating a new state in a territory of 252,000 square kilometres with a total population of native Saharans and citizens from other parts of Morocco, Algeria and Mauritania, totalling half a million people, there is the specific pragmatic problem: on what basis can a dispersed population, with aspirations so far apart, and with a very high rate of young people seeking to improve their lives and their future in other lands, be brought together? The only possible cohesion is to affirm political and administrative links with an existing neighbouring state. With Mauritania, the experience has failed; the Mauritanian government has disengaged from the occupation of part of the territory ceded to it by Spain in 1975. The only viable possibility is that this “terra nullius”, as the Hague Tribunal described it, which is colonial absurdity, because if the territory was populated it cannot be “land without owner”; but this “terra nullius” will become part of the Moroccan state, which has always been present in the territory as part of the history of the Almoravid Empire.
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