Waiting for ‘istiftah’

I have a friend who tells me there is a website that focuses on problems in Africa and that this organisation wants to publish about the Sahara situation. She asked me to write something for this publication.

I am confused about what to write, whether I should write about the politics. Everybody knows what our problem is – half of us Sahrawi live under colonisation in what everyone calls the Moroccan Occupied Territory, and the other half of our peoples live in these refugee camps where I live. It has been thirty-eight years now, and we all feel that the world sees what has happened to us but says nothing. We have thousands of foreign visitors who come to our refugee camps. They try to help us, with projects such as for us women, for children’s schools, and for our small hospitals. We hear from them that in the western world, everyone describes our political problem as ‘the forgotten conflict’, or they call us ‘the last African colony.’

Or should I talk about the economic problem we face? All our natural resources, like fish and phosphates, are being stolen from us by Morocco, but also by many of your governments who sign commercial contracts with Morocco to extract these resources. But is this not illegal, to take our resources when the United Nations has laws that say this is wrong? No one is asking how Morocco is allowed to do this, or maybe they are just ignoring it.

Or should I speak about our traditions? Now many of our traditions have gone because the Moroccan traditions are invading ours. Most of us in the refugee camps have relatives in the Occupied Territory, and we hear how traditional Sahrawi culture is being changed by the Moroccan presence in our land.

Or I could write about our life as refugees here in the Tindouf camps. So let me choose this. I was born in October 1986 and have lived all my life in these refugee camps. Morocco invaded my country, Western Sahara in 1975. This means that I was born during the height of the war between our leadership, the Polisario, and the Moroccan invasion forces. I have grown up knowing every day that I am living in another land than my homeland. And I also know that the Algerians got their independence after 130 years of French colonisation.

But I cannot understand how one Arab Muslim country can invade and colonise another Arab and Muslim country – us, the Sahrawi people. From the beginning I have never been able to believe that this could happen. We are all from the same ‘ummah,’ which is an important word for Muslims and means ‘community’.

So I grew up playing in the rocks and sand of the Algerian desert because there are no parks for children to play in. And when we are children we have to study hard to get good grades because it is how we get the chance to spend the hot desert summer months in Europe with host families, offered by charities to refugee children. When we went as children to these countries, then we really began to understand we were refugees, because they had things that we did not have, that all we had was that we were just alive. And we would wish we could be like them, because these European families we stayed with live in their own countries and can be with their whole families, not divided by an invading army like we are.

When we read the history of other countries getting their independence, we feel jealous. And when we returned each summer back to these refugee camps, we tried to do things that helped us forget that we are refugees.

When we finish our schooling, there are no jobs, no future, for us here, because a refugee camp cannot offer economic opportunities. So there is no other choice but for some to try to migrate overseas or to join our small army.

And the women stay in the camps to raise their families, to stay near their fathers and husbands. We women have a slightly better chance to find jobs here in the camps than the men. The NGOs give a few of us jobs as nurses, secretaries, and teachers, but otherwise we depend upon humanitarian aid.

This is how we spend our life here. We wait for ‘istiftah’, which means self-determination in Arabic. This was supposed to have been given to us during decolonisation. I think we will wait a long time for this, because everyone is ignoring that international law is being broken by Morocco.

EXTRA LINKS

http://goo.gl/Vcgz3
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=diq34lzSmD4
http://goo.gl/879uX

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*Fatimetu is a young Saharawi woman studying English in the refugee camps.