At the height of the Cold War, Soviet proxies Algeria and Cuba created the Polisario Front as the self-styled leadership of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR). They cared little for the Sahrawi people, most of whom preferred to be part of Morocco, and instead sought to use the Sahrawi issue to undermine Morocco, one of the most stalwart, moderate, and Western countries in the Arab world.
The Polisario began a low-grade war with Morocco in 1976 that killed 7,000 Moroccan soldiers, 4,000 Polisario guerrillas, and several thousand civilians. Polisario attacks displaced tens of thousands of others. After Morocco built a 1,500-mile-long berm and trench system, the Polisario conflict ground to a halt; infiltration became too difficult. In 1991, the U.N. Security Council established the United Nations Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara (MINURSO) to organize a census and referendum to determine the Western Sahara’s region’s preferred status. U.N. officials hoped that with the Soviet Union’s collapse, the diplomatic impediment to the conflict’s resolution would finally end.
The Polisario began a low-grade war with Morocco in 1976 that killed 7,000 Moroccan soldiers, 4,000 Polisario guerrillas, and several thousand civilians.
It did not and, over the past thirty-five years, not only has MINURSO failed to complete its mission, but it never really began it. Algeria’s military junta understood that a free and fair referendum would expose their fraud and delegitimize their Polisario proxy, so they threw obstacles in front of any census, flooding proposed voter rolls with people who never lived in the Western Sahara and who, in many cases, were not even Sahrawi.
As the largest donor to the United Nations, peacekeeping, and the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the United States has an interest in cutting the flow of funds to missions that are impossible to fulfill. In the case of the Sahrawi, the cost is human. The Algerian government and its Polisario clients claim 173,000 refugees live in camps in Algeria’s isolated Tindouf province, 1,000 miles from Algiers and the country’s coastal population. The real number is probably closer to 40,000, though the Algerians inflate the number to bilk donors and embezzle aid.
In 2007 the European Union’s Anti-Fraud Office detailed Algerian theft of aid destined for Sahrawi refugees. Diplomats, meanwhile, report seeing goods donated for the Tindouf camps resold in markets in Algeria and across the Sahel. Meanwhile, as many as half of the Tindouf camps’ residents are technically not refugees from the Western Sahara but, rather, moved to the camps from elsewhere in Algeria, Mali, or Mauritania.
The 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees was very specific as to the definition of refugees, but a generation of well-meaning diplomats and humanitarian workers allowed an expansive understanding to become standard, applying refugee status to almost anyone who crossed borders or claimed it. Many European states, for example, apply refugee protection to economic migrants and ignore the return of those same migrants to their original countries for vacations or even permanent residences once they qualify for European social service support. For the Sahrawis, refugee status created a moral hazard by perpetuating a problem rather than allowing its natural resolution.
The Polisario is a totalitarian movement that essentially hold camp residents hostage.
Although the UNHCR does not directly run the Tindouf camps—it allows a Polisario refugee council to do that—it both supports them with supplies and maintains a suboffice in the province. That should end. The Polisario is a totalitarian movement that essentially hold camp residents hostage. The U.N. operates a flight from Tindouf into Laayoune, the capital of the Western Sahara, in theory for family visits. Because the Polisario know that many camp residents would prefer to settle in the Western Sahara and the Moroccans would facilitate such settlement, they often hold family members hostage: If a mother wants to visit her parents in Laayoune, for example, the Polisario will hold her infant children hostage pending her return. This leads many Tindouf residents to flee into Mauritania, then hop the iron ore train from Zouérat to the port city of Nouadhibou and then flee north into the Western Sahara.
When solutions exist to refugee problems, the UNHCR should facilitate them; with budgets so tight amidst a massive decline in U.S. contribution, the U.N.’s refugee agency should not contribute even indirectly to their preservation. With the United Nations endorsing Morocco’s autonomy plan for the Sahara, there is no reason to maintain the fiction that the Sahrawi cannot go home. Morocco now has a decades-long record showing generous treatment and integration of returnees.
This does not mean amnesty. The UNHCR screens and prevents former Assad regime soldiers who have blood on their hand from its protection in Lebanon. Likewise, those Polisario henchmen who have kidnapped, killed, or committed acts of terrorism should face justice in Morocco if they return; if they wish to remain in Algeria, so be it. But it is time for the United Nations, UNHCR, and donor nations to recognize that the best way to protect real refugees is to stop wasting money on those capable of returning but cynically prevented from doing so.
