Historical Dictionary of Western Sahara Third ... - Scarecrow Press

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INTRODUCTION • xlix fore, Spain occupied Daora, Smara, and a few other locations well inland, signed border treaties with France starting in 1900 (with the final agreement coming in 1912), ended the seemingly perpetual cycle of ghazzis among the Saharawi tribes in 1934 in concert with Paris, and, finally, merged the administration of its desert possession with Spain’s other small colonies on the northwest African coast and placed them under the authority of a governor-general based in Tetuan in northern Morocco. In 1946, this administrative evolution continued when Spain gave Western Sahara its own governor-general as part of a reorganization that saw the establishment of Africa Occidental Española (AOE), a counterpoise of sorts to the much larger French presence in neighboring Algeria, Mauritania, and Morocco. Through all this, the Saharawi people carried on much as before, albeit without the possibility of engaging in raids. They could still not be said to be living under direct Spanish rule, since the vast majority of Western Saharans still led nomadic lives which only infrequently brought them into contact with Madrid’s isolated outposts and enclaves. But all this changed fairly rapidly with the independence of Morocco from France in 1956. Motivated by nationalistic feelings stemming from the successful anticolonial efforts in Morocco, some Western Saharans, Mauritanians, and Moroccans organized themselves into the Army of Liberation (in Arabic, the Jaich at-Tahrir), which aimed to expel both France and Spain from the entire region. It presented a substantial challenge to the armies of France and Spain, and was all the more frustrating for the colonial powers in that both Spain’s colony was used as a sanctuary by the guerrillas fighting the much more powerful French army and the Moroccan monarch at the time, King Mohammed V, proved either unable or unwilling to halt the incursions into Western Sahara and Mauritania from southern Morocco. Consequently, France pressured Spain into joining a short and brutal counterinsurgency campaign, code-named Operation Ouragon (Hurricane) which defeated the Army of Liberation in February 1958. This, in turn, brought about additional changes in the daily lives of the Saharawis, since many were forced to become refugees in surrounding countries and, for those still in Western Sahara, were now increasingly obliged to live under direct Spanish rule in the developing population centers of the colony. The late 1950s and early 1960s brought additional changes to the Saharawis’age-old manner of living. In the first place, the entire Sahel region
l • INTRODUCTION was afflicted by a severe drought between 1959 and 1960, decimating livestock herds and radically accelerating the ongoing process of sedentation on the part of the population. Secondly, Spain began to try to offset some of the costs associated with administering its desert colony by exploiting the vast reserves of phosphate which had been known to exist near the settlement of Bou-Craa for some time. The opening of the phosphate mines—which were highly labor intensive from the start—added still more impetus to the gradual abandonment of nomadism on the part of the Saharawi people, as more and more of them flocked to the territory’s towns (such as Bou-Craa and the capital of El-Ayoun) to partake in the enhanced employment opportunities which the mines produced. Since these new arrivals were obliged to live under the watchful eye of the Spanish police and army, and because the economy of Western Sahara sharply expanded during the middle and late 1960s, the Saharawis were politically quiescent, and the dictatorship of Generalissimo Francisco Franco in Madrid doubtless felt that it could remain in Western Sahara indefinitely. Any signs of dissent—such as the one offered by Mohammed Sidi Ibrahim Bassiri’s Harakat at-Tahrir Saguia el-Hamra wa Oued ed-Dahab between 1967 and 1970—were ruthlessly crushed, and the entreaties of the United Nations starting in 1964 to grant self-determination to the territory were simply ignored. INCREASING ANTICOLONIAL FERMENT The elimination of Mohammed Sidi Ibrahim Bassiri’s shadowy nationalist movement in June 1970 (and Bassiri’s probable murder in prison) turned out to be the opening shot in what was to become a long-running dispute over the status of Western Sahara, not only involving the people of the territory itself but also the governments of Morocco and Mauritania, both of which claimed the entire colony as their own, relying on the supposed historical ties between it and their own countries and by the ethnic and tribal affinities that straddled the long, poorly policed frontiers of the area. Having largely mollified both Morocco’s King Hassan II and Mauritania’s President Mokhtar Ould Daddah with a variety of economic and diplomatic concessions that did not endanger Madrid’s grip on Western Sahara in the least, Generalissimo Franco had managed by and large to ensure that the territorial claims of Rabat and
Page 1 and 2: Historical Dictionary of Western Sa
Page 3 and 4: Editor’s Foreword While nearly al
Page 5 and 6: Preface As was the case in the seco
Page 7 and 8: Reader’s Notes The Western Sahara
Page 9 and 10: Acronyms and Abbreviations AMD Alli
Page 11 and 12: ACRONYMS AND ABBREVIATIONS • xix
Page 13 and 14: Chronology c. 5000 BC Beginning of
Page 15 and 16: 1578-1603 Moroccan Sultan Ahmed el-
Page 17 and 18: continues his resistance until 1919
Page 19 and 20: er 20: UN General Assembly calls fo
Page 21 and 22: CHRONOLOGY • xxxi Morocco, Maurit
Page 23 and 24: CHRONOLOGY • xxxiii down several
Page 25 and 26: CHRONOLOGY • xxxv Council unanimo
Page 27 and 28: CHRONOLOGY • xxxvii period.” No
Page 29 and 30: CHRONOLOGY • xxxix they would sup
Page 31 and 32: CHRONOLOGY • xli could be disband
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Page 43 and 44: liv • INTRODUCTION bringing the c
Page 45 and 46: lvi • INTRODUCTION decide its fut
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Page 49 and 50: lx • INTRODUCTION sponsor, Algeri
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Page 53 and 54: lxiv • INTRODUCTION THE FUTURE By

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