by NITHYA NAGARAJAN
Based on an interview with Mustafa Mohamed Lamin al-Kattab, representative of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Saguía el Hamra and Río de Oro (Frente POLISARIO) for the Mashriq (Near East). Original publication in ENXERGAR, nº5, of Fundación Moncho Reboiras, Galicia in the Spanish State, March 2023.
“…We live in a world of hypocrisy. We need to think, imagine a new world.
…We need to build new concepts of struggle for the new generation. Class struggle. Liberation. Justice.
…We need to fight, we need to solidarize, we need to meet, we need to
find the relations between our struggles and fight in the best way so
that they don’t corner us.”
As we enter the Palestinian refugee camp of Shatila in Beirut, Lebanon, the phantoms of the 1982 Israeli-backed Phalangist massacre greet the visitor in the “cemetery of martyrs.” Beyond, we notice the jumbled wires of stolen electricity, mangled, crisscrossing, and cutting the skyline. Below, human bodies, generations of family persevering in their hope to return, are also mangled, one on top of the other in jungles of concrete.
Tindouf’s Saharan desert topography in southwest Algeria could not be more different, even if to the naked eye, both the Saharawi and Palestinian refugee camps seem as worlds without horizons. The youth, precarious, jobless, hopeless, emigrating out of desperation, endure the suffocation of imperial powers that deny both peoples their right to self-determination. This makes it all the more tragic that the dominant factions of the Palestinian national movement are pitted against the “Palestinians of the Maghreb,” one of the most silenced liberation movements in the world, that of the Saharawi people.
Balfour and Madrid Once Again
As mediatic eyes center on Ukrainian refugees, the plight of the Saharawi and Palestinian refugees is obfuscated: the scandalous double standards of the Western powers on full display. Western Sahara is a key point for Western colonization and imperialism in the Maghreb and on the African continent, an important geopolitical pawn in the current conflicts promoted by the US and NATO. While decrying the illegality of the Russian invasion of the Ukraine, European governments, including the Spanish one, are bowing down to their North American masters in Palestine and the Sahara.
The Spanish government’s 2022 decision to support Moroccan claims in the Sahara is “another 1975 Madrid Agreement” for the Saharawis. Equally, the US decision in 2020 to recognize Morocco’s sovereignty over Western Sahara in exchange for normalizing its relations with Israel is “another 1917 Balfour Declaration” and “a new 1975” for Palestinians and Saharawis. Just as other colonized territories achieved some nominal form of independence under the guise of the bourgeois nation-state, Palestinians and Saharawis continue to endure dispossession and colonization. The “right of return” is their central claim.
Anti-Colonial Internationalisms and Ideological Ruptures
The US decision highlights the similarity between the reactionary regional forces that both struggles continue to face, some 45 years after George Habash, the leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), visited the refugee camps in Tindouf in the 1980s. Habash told the youth of the Saharawi People’s Liberation Army, “when you fought the reactionary monarchy in Morocco, you also fought the enemies of the Palestinian Revolution”; he denounced King Hasan II’s betrayal in accepting the 1978 Camp David Accords that normalized the relationship between Egypt and Israel; he pointed to the close alliance of Morocco with the United States, which militarily supports the colonization of both peoples; he denounced the Moroccan monarchy as a key pillar in the Maghreb along with the Jordanian and Saudi monarchies, as crucial material and ideological drivers of Western imperialism and Zionist colonization. Identifying the common enemies that thwart the self-determination of their peoples was the basis of the solidarity built between the leaders of the POLISARIO and the PFLP, Al-Ouali Mustafa Sayed and G. Habash respectively.
While the POLISARIO and PFLP do not have the same ideological roots, both drew inspiration from pan-Arab liberation movements centered in Beirut and Damascus, promoting anti-imperialist conceptions of ‘national liberation’. Founded in 1973, after the establishment of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), the POLISARIO sought to avoid the mistakes that led to the fragmentation of the Palestinian National Movement, by enshrining in its constitution in exile the principle of unity as the central maxim in the liberation struggle, not only internal unity but pan-Arab and African unity against colonial domination. The same principle that underpins the iconography of the PFLP flag, symbolizing the ‘liberation of Palestine, runs through the Arab world’. For Habash, breaking the yoke of colonial oppression requires the unity of the internationalist working class. When al-Ouali wanted to meet with Habash, Habash is said to have given him only 20 minutes. However, the meeting lasted four hours and since then an enduring friendship and commitment has been sustained between the two movements.
The Moroccan occupation of Western Sahara changed the terms of the struggle from one explicitly against European colonization into an inter-Arab conflict. From the era of the Egypt of Gamal Abdel-Nasser, who “despite his errors” was a central point of reference for pan-Arab unity, the Camp David Accords gave way to the Egypt of Anwar Sadat, who normalized the vision of a Greater Israel, just as the 1975 Agreements and the occupation sought to build a Greater Morocco. Both regimes, which share an expansionist vision (as stated in their constitution/basic law), seek to redraw the territorial limits of their nation-state through military occupations. The Arab world was divided between those who fell into the pro-imperialist Western camp and supported the Accords and those who opposed it. The contradictions and divisions necessary to sustain regional geopolitical instability and neocolonial domination were ensured by the outgoing European powers, materially fueled by Saudi petrodollars that managed to attract most Arab regimes into their sphere of influence, except the governments of Algeria, Libya, Syria, among others.
With the fall of the Soviet Union, American and Western ideological propaganda altered international politics by changing the venues and methods of political struggle. It changed the permissible forms of struggle, “peaceful not associated with violence,” for national liberation movements. The POLISARIO and the PLO, who upheld the right to armed struggle, were forced to adopt a defensive posture: “We are not terrorists, we are simply fighting for our liberation. We are building justice.”
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