Pain and hope, the daily life of Saharawi refugees

FERNANDO IÑIGUEZ

It might look like the setting for the latest doomsday movie, or a staging of a dystopia, and it's actually not one of the worst places in the world. Surely in Sudan, Yemen, Mali and on the borders of Ukraine with Russia they are much worse, dodging bombs and famines, which no human being wants to experience.

The Saharawi refugee population camps are located in one of the most inhospitable places on the planet, a barren, rocky place, in the harsh sun and scorched by high temperatures for almost the whole year and which the international Spanish actor, Javier Bardem, described as "the antechamber of hell" when he visited it in 2008.

The curse in the form of no desire of Islam says, "may Allah not send you to the hamada". And it is in the Algerian hamada, near the city of Tindouf, in the southwest of the vast Maghreb country, where since 1975 nearly a quarter of a million people have lived without a country, without luck or benefit and who have been denied the right to to choose your destiny.

Adobe houses in the Dajla refugee camp (Southern Algeria). Author of all the photos that illustrate this information: Fernando Íñiguez

The story is there: Spain occupies Western Sahara, on the Atlantic coastal strip, for much of the 1975th century. In the 1976s, the UN urged him, like all the Western powers that colonized so many regions in Africa, to begin a process of decolonization and surrender to the true inhabitants of the territories, in this case, the Saharawis. To do this, it forces Spain to promote a self-determination referendum among the native population. Spain does not do it and his government, while the dictator Franco is dying in his grave, signs with Morocco and Mauritania the delivery and distribution of the territory between those two countries. The north for Morocco, the south for Mauritania (Madrid Agreements, November XNUMX). In February XNUMX, Spain lowered its last flag, definitively leaving the territory and shamefully abandoning the Saharawis to their fate.

In those months, many Saharawis flee to Algeria, to that terrible hamada to take refuge. Others do not have time to leave or choose to stay in the occupied cities, and others, in the ranks of the Polisario Front, the liberation movement founded in 1973 when Western Sahara was still a Spanish colony, start a war against the new occupying countries. .

As a result of all this, with all the twists and turns that history gives of itself, years of wars, withdrawal from Mauritania, signing of peace agreements in between and new unfulfilled promises of referendums, nearly a quarter of a million Saharawis continue to live , as was said at the beginning, in those camps in a precarious way and always waiting for the return to their stolen land.

Life in a refugee camp inland, in the middle of the desert in 2022 is no longer what it was when they were created between 1975 and 1976. The sense of provisionality of those first years, with the hope that it would be a short-term situation to return soon to the usurped land, it becomes more and more in a sensation of almost definitive settlement. The tents and small cloth tents that housed the first refugees have been transformed, first into adobe houses made right there, and in recent years, into cement brick constructions brought from other corners of Algeria.

The improvement in the quality of life is reflected in the various WHO vaccination campaigns, which have drastically reduced the high infant mortality rate at the beginning and almost completely eradicated the plagues and pandemics of that time.

In the camps they live, basically, from international humanitarian aid. The Saharawi organizational institutions, however, manage it in the best possible way. But you don't just live on that. The Saharawis are not in the camps with their arms crossed while they wait for the next solidarity caravan that arrives from afar with clothing, food, medicine, household goods, or various technical material, but rather they have developed a small market economy that allows them to trade with the neighboring regions of Algeria and Mauritania. They keep goat and camel breeding, which provides them with milk and meat and, with the help of various Solidarity Associations, mainly Italian and Spanish, they have built orchards, small farms, poultry farms and even a small fish farm.

In recent years, Algeria has provided them with power lines, and access to mobile telephony with the usual internet connection is now frequent, which implies a more global worldview with the rest of the world that they did not have until a few years ago. And in the current dwellings in the camps there may be televisions and, in many cases, even air conditioners.

The young Saharawis are moved by what other young people in the world are. This is what globalization has. They were born in the camps and are now almost a second generation refugee. Fewer and fewer have lived in Western Sahara, currently illegally occupied by Morocco. That produces a certain rootlessness, even in cultural matters. The haul, the traditional music of the desert, for example, which the first refugees brought as a sign of identity with their warlike harangues and praises to Allah, has been replaced in their playlist for the latest news from reggaeton international or the systematic trap: every time more urban. And men also want to see themselves in sneakers and designer jeans. Dress up and cut your hair like Cristiano Ronaldo and embed diamonds in your ears. Young women would like to do it too, but women continue to occupy a lower rank in Islamic societies, as the strong religious link with the past has not been lost despite years of refuge.

However, the Saharawi people, with all the external stimuli that could take them away from their first ideal of recovering their land and deciding their own destiny, keeps that spirit of struggle and peaceful resistance alive.

In this landscape that gives the camps an air of an unreal place, the various generations that have been born in exile do not lose hope and yearn to return to that land they have never known, as their parents and grandparents did.

Almost half a century of settlement in a place borrowed by Algeria that they have made their own, and there they continue. It was logical and natural that this part of the Saharawi people tried to aspire to a more comfortable life despite living in refugee camps. With the help of Algeria and Cuba, and in part also from Spain, they have trained doctors, teachers, pharmacists, technicians, filmmakers and journalists, among other professions.

Radio studio in refugee camps

For all this, touring the camps now, which can already be reached by paved roads, conveys strange and contradictory sensations for the visitor from a European country outside the conflict. It is surprising to see those small shops overcrowded with goods, that sell you a latest model electric refrigerator as well as a stove for charcoal embers. Infinite meters of fabric to make a turban, like shiny Nikes identical to those worn by a celebrity international or the latest Hollywood actor in fashion. And in between, all kinds of cans, food, cosmetics, electronics, fruit, clothing, furniture...

It is surprising to see piled up, among the sand, the collapsed house, the esplanade and the gluttonous goat, the remains of rusty Mercedes cars on chassis, as if the last of the scenes of MadMax. Telephone booths, small pharmacies, eating houses and mechanical workshops also dot the daily life of any of the five large camps where that quarter of a million displaced people live, although more than half have already been born there in one of its hospitals. And, so that nothing is forgotten, the names of these camps pay homage to the cities that Morocco has made its own: Smara, Laayoune, Dakhla y Auserd and recently, buoyant, until recently known as 27 February, where the Film School has been built and operates, the result of the project Cinema for the Sahara which organizes almost every year, since 2003, in one of the camps, the FiSahara (International Film Festival of the Sahara) and whose seventeenth edition will be held from October 11 to 16 next. And from that Film School the first promotions of Saharawi filmmakers have already come out, who are beginning to tell their own story, experience, emotions and frustrations with their films and documentaries.

And, as if nothing happened, as if there was no waiting or anguish, or urgency to resolve the situation, the hustle and bustle of the Saharawi boys and girls transform the inhospitable place into an oasis of joy and hope.

The Saharawi refugee population camps are not the worst place in the world, as was pointed out at the beginning, but neither are they the most idyllic, despite the improvements in living conditions in recent years, for these children to grow up and end up losing their smile. Taking away their joy, as was done with their older brothers, parents and grandparents, will be yet another proof of humanity's failure.

In the Saharawi camps you live intensely. There is joy and pain. They live with the bitterness of the enormous injustice perpetrated against their determination as a people and culture, but with the hope that they are convinced that one day they will return to their land and those "provisional" settlements will be forgotten.

Reason is on your side, but that may not be enough.

Fernando Iniguez is a journalist specializing in music. He lived his adolescence in El Aaiún when it was the capital of the Spanish Sahara. He directs and presents the Tarataña program on Radio 3.

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