Jen Wilton writing in Roar:
Sahrawi youths, having been denied a homeland by Morocco for years, are getting increasingly frustrated in their refugee camps in the Algerian Sahara.
“As a member of the Sahrawi Students Union, I know that we have some young people who get frustrated,” explains Jalihena Mohamed, the 25-year-old representative of the Polisario Front’s youth organization. He is referring to the younger generation of Western Saharan refugees, many of whom grew up in the refugee camps in Algeria: “They have waited a long time for a solution that hasn’t come yet.”
Tens of thousands of Sahrawi people from Western Sahara have lived in exile in refugee camps in the Tindouf province in western Algeria for almost four decades. The Moroccan government controls most of Western Sahara. A three-meter high wall, built in the 1980s to hinder Sahrawi soldiers, separates Moroccan-controlled Western Sahara from the areas to the east and south (the ‘Liberated Territories’) that are controlled by the politico-military organization Polisario Front (“Popular Front for the Liberation of Saguia el-Hamra and Río de Oro”). The wall is flanked by the world’s longest minefield and it is heavily guarded by Moroccan soldiers...[continue reading]
