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“Whenever I say I’m from Western Sahara or I was born in a refugee camp, people are like ‘oh, where is that?’ Lots of people here didn’t know about Western Sahara. And I take that opportunity to explain to them about the struggle of my people and our struggle for self-determination.”
Gaby Alamin is a Sahrawi-Australian woman living in Melbourne.
While she juggles being a mother, a university student and an educator, she also makes time to advocate on behalf of her family and her people who have been fighting for independence for generations in northwestern Africa.
However, her presence in Australia is unique as she says she’s not aware of a single other Sahrawi woman in the country.
“What I understand is that I’m the only Sahrawi woman in Australia. And I think because of the geographical location, the distance between Australia and North Africa. So it’s very hard for us and for my people to migrate to Australia.”
Her people, native to the disputed Western Sahara region, have been living under an illegal military occupation by Morocco since 1975.
Despite the United Nations recognising their right for self-determination and promising a referendum to finally decolonise the region in 1991, the Sahrawi people are still waiting for the chance to vote for either independence or integration with Morocco.
Ms Alamin’s parents fled amid the violence in 1975 and she was born in a refugee camp in neighbouring Algeria where about 165,000 Sahrawis reside in hopes of one day returning to their homeland.
“In the refugee camps where I was born and raised, life there is really difficult and the conditions are quite harsh. It’s the desert. Sometimes the temperature reaches 50 degrees. One of the things that is amazing about the camps: we have a great sense of community. People are always uplifting and they always have a hope to go back to their home country, to western Sahara and to have a better future.”
Dr Randi Irwin, a lecturer at the University of Newcastle has conducted anthropological research with Sahrawi refugees in the refugee camps and can attest to the harsh conditions there.
“The refugee camps are in the hottest part of the Sahara Desert, known as the Hamada of the Sahara. But in the wake of that, Sahrawis have found ways to make life in the desert more livable. So you have some Sahrawi who are trying to come up with alternative housing formations and they’re really trying to prepare in the best way that they can for the referendum and for possible decolonisation.”
The occupied Western Sahara, which is about the size of the United Kingdom, is the last African colonial state yet to achieve independence, often called ‘Africa’s last colony’.
The region was colonised by Spain as the Spanish Sahara between 1884 and 1976.
A Sahrawi resistance movement known as the Polisario Front was born in 1973 to fight against the Spanish colonisers in what became the beginning of a campaign for independence that has lasted over 50 years.
The Sahrawi people were preparing to transition into an independent state from Spanish control when their neighbours Morocco and Mauritania decided to claim the region for themselves citing historical ties to the land.
Kamal Fadel is the Australia and New Zealand Representative for the Polisario Front, which is now recognised as the legitimate representative of the Sahrawi people by the United Nations.
He says those early days of a long and bitter war were incredibly difficult for the local people.
“The invasion was brutal, the occupation was brutal and people faced the Moroccan army coming in and using force to occupy the territory, but bombarding the Sahara with prohibited napalm and cluster bombs. And then when they occupy the territory, all those people who have someone in the Polisario or who have sympathies with the Polisario were arrested, detained, disappeared of course in secret detention centres inside Morocco.”
The invasion and de facto annexation of Western Sahara by Morocco and Mauritania in the 1970s was condemned by the international community as a breach of international law and a bypassing of the International Court of Justice’s Advisory opinion on Western Sahara.
This advisory opinion rejected the notion of terra nullius, saying the land did indeed belong to the Sahrawi people despite their nomadic existence prior to Spain’s colonisation.
This opinion became one of the key legal precedents for the Mabo decision which established native title in Australia, as it was cited throughout the case and referenced by High Court justice Gerard Brennan.
Tracey Cameron, a Gamilaraay language teacher at the University of Sydney, says she sees direct parallels between the struggles of her people and those native to the Western Sahara.
“Being an Aboriginal person, I think that it’s important to be aware of what’s going on everywhere. That assimilation policy type of thing, and that segregation type of policies as well, as well as denying indigenous people of the area access to education and the poverty that the people who are the original inhabitants of the country face as a result of being put into that situation and having a whole level putting on top of everyone. Very similar to what has happened and continues to happen here in Australia, so I could see huge parallels. So yeah, very similar.”
While Mauritania left the Western Sahara in 1979 after years of war, Morocco now controls three-fourths of the region, with the Polisario Front’s Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic controlling 20 to 25 per cent.
Morocco has also transferred hundreds of thousands of settlers into the occupied region in what is considered a direct violation of Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention.
However, the Kingdom of Morocco recognises the entire region as its Southern Provinces or the Moroccan Sahara and its representatives have often branded the Polisario as a terrorist organisation, despite their UN recognition.
Alex Radojev, honorary consul to New South Wales for the Kingdom of Morocco, says the Polisario Front are guilty of human rights abuses.
“I think Polisario are regarded by most people in the Western Sahara region as close to terrorists. Polisario are armed and they have been aggressive towards Morocco and the Moroccan people for many, many years. But when you have the Polisario supporting the arming of children one has to really question the intent behind these camps and the real intent of Polisario.”
He says Morocco is willing to give some autonomy to the region but draws the line at independence.
The Polisario Front claims they have never targeted civilians and their war against Moroccan military forces is legitimate and founded upon the right for occupied people to resist their occupiers.
They also responded to claims they had been training child soldiers in refugee camps, calling them “baseless allegations” that have not been supported by international agencies such as the United Nations and the European Union that operate within the camps.
Meanwhile, claims of human rights abuses and an alleged extreme crackdown on dissident media by Moroccan forces in the Western Sahara have been widely documented by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Reporters Without Borders among others.
Evidence of these alleged abuses have been made available by independent local media such as Equipe Media.
The group operates despite what Reporters Without Borders has called “the Moroccan regime’s constant repression of local journalism” and a “systematic policy of denying entry to foreign journalists and deporting those who manage to get into the territory.”
Co-founder of Equipe Media, Mohamed Mayara, says he has been beaten, arrested and tortured for his work.
He says this is a strategy to scare people from speaking out and exposing these alleged crimes.
“We always put ourself in danger. The consequences is very severe. We are working in direct contact with the occupiers and of course Morocco criminalises the work we are doing in Western Sahara, so therefore we can count more than seven journalists that have been arrested and condemned with false charges in order to terrify others.”
He says he has been assaulted, dismissed from his former job as a teacher and harassed with repeated death threats due to his work.
Still, he considers himself lucky.
“And I’m lucky because yes, I was really dismissed from my job and I was intimidated but my colleague is still behind bars. So could you imagine, seven of my colleagues are behind bars for 14 years, six years in a solitary confinement just because they were journalists, they carry the cameras, they try to report on the situation there.”
Human rights groups are calling for an expansion of the mandate of the UN peacekeeping mission in the Western Sahara which still lacks critical human rights monitoring and reporting components unlike almost any other UN mission around the world.
Meanwhile, after studying hard in the refugee camps in Algeria, Gaby Alamin got a scholarship to study in Costa Rica at 15 years old and from there moved to Australia eight years ago in her early 20s.
She has achieved Australian citizenship and now works at a pre-school while studying a bachelor of education in hopes of being a teacher.
While she still tries to visit her family in the refugee camps every couple of years, she says she’s been so grateful to have found a better life for her and her son in Australia.
“I have the opportunity to access education, access healthcare, and simple thing like my son can have a playground because in the refugee camps there was not even a single playground. So when I was child, I used to play in the street. I used to make toys out of recycled items such as plastic bottles or I’d make sandcastles. And another thing that is I’m very grateful for to be here in Australia is having the running water and electricity. That’s something that we don’t have in the camps.”
While the status of the long-promised UN referendum for self-determination of the Sahrawi people remains unclear, Ms Alamin and her people still believe they will be able to choose their own destiny in the years to come.
“I do believe that as long as there is a will, there is a way. My people, they have been struggling for 50 years now. And what’s amazing about them is that they’re not giving up. I’m hopeful, I’m really hopeful that the next generations, my son, my grandchildren don’t have to go through the same thing that I went through – being refugees. And instead, I hope that they have chance to live as normal people in a place that they call home and homeland and never be refugees again.”
