Morocco’s Guerrillas, Faced With Grim Conditions, Drift Back to the Other Side : Morocco’s Rebels Deserting to Other Side

After 12 years as a guerrilla fighter, Cherif Hassana put his turban on the end of his rifle and surrendered to Moroccan soldiers. Bachir Hammed slipped away from a guerrilla-sponsored soccer team during an overseas tour.

With the declining fortunes of the Marxist-led Polisario independence movement in the Western Sahara, more and more guerrillas are deserting the movement and drifting back across the desert to join the Moroccan side.

Moroccan officials say the deserters are arriving at an average rate of about 10 a week.

A group of foreign reporters met many of them on a recent government-sponsored tour of the Moroccan-annexed Western Sahara.

Usually talking in the presence of Moroccan officials, they painted a grim picture of conditions in refugee and guerrilla camps in the Polisario Front’s Algerian sanctuaries.

The Algerian-backed Polisario Front claims that more than 165,000 refugees are living in tent camps around the Algerian oasis of Tindouf after fleeing “Moroccan oppression.” The Moroccans say about two-thirds of the refugees are not even from the disputed territory.

All deserters interviewed had fled before May 16, when Algeria and Morocco made their surprise announcement of resumed diplomatic relations after hovering on the brink of war over the Sahara for more than 12 years.

“It must have been a terrible shock (to the Polisario),” said Cherif Hassana, 35, who fought in the Polisario’s ranks for 12 years, rising to the rank of major and deputy company commander. “For all these years, the Algerians promised they would never establish relations with Morocco until the Sahara had become independent.”

Like many other deserters, Hassana claimed he was recruited by force in 1975, at the end of Spanish colonial rule in the Western Sahara. He previously served as an enlisted man in the Spanish colonial army.

“I was on leave in my family’s tent in the desert,” he said. “Polisario men came in Land Rovers and grabbed me.”

He said he gradually became disillusioned and began looking for opportunities to escape.

“It was not easy,” he said. “We were all under constant supervision, even the officers. Many who tried to escape were killed by their own units or by the mines in the desert.”

He said he managed to get away while on patrol near Morocco’s 1,500-mile defensive wall.

Bachir Hammed, 23, was sent to France as captain of a Polisario soccer team purporting to represent Hawza, a desert settlement 100 miles inside the Moroccan wall.

Hawza has been under Moroccan control for more than five years, but the team was welcomed to French cities with Communist-led city councils eager to promote the Polisario, Hammed said.

He slipped away while passing through Paris and took a taxi to the Moroccan Embassy.

“Most of us realized long ago that Polisario is losing the war,” said Abderrahman Kharbouch, 32, a guerrilla platoon commander who fled across the desert. “But everyone is afraid and tends to keep his feelings to himself.”

The highest-ranking deserter to reach Moroccan lines thus far is Mohammed Ramdan, 34, former deputy chief of the Polisario diplomatic mission to the Organization of African Unity. The OAU has recognized the Polisario as a full-ranking member.

Fadli Rguibi, 38, walked across the Moroccan border near Figuig under cover of darkness. Now a Moroccan soldier, his only regret is that he had to leave his wife and daughter behind in Algeria. The wife, he said, will probably be forced to marry someone else.

“The Polisario leadership insists that all men must have two or three wives because so many men got killed and they want to keep up the birthrate,” he said.

Numerous deserters claimed that wives of deserters or men killed in battle were forcibly married to other Polisario men.

Boucheiba Buchara, 38, said he had to leave his wife and two sons in the camps.

“God knows what happened to them,” he said. “I’m sure if I ever meet my wife again, she will be married to someone else.”