A cease-fire without end in Western Sahara

On a rocky hilltop deep in the Sahara, five soldiers warm themselves around a charcoal brazier, sipping tea and dreaming of a war that doesn’t come.

Their enemy, the Moroccan army, crouches behind fortifications just 30 miles to the west across a moon-flooded plain. But the two sides’ guns have been silent for 15 years.

For the five soldiers, that is 15 years too long.

They belong to the Polisario Front, a well-armed and increasingly impatient force of indigenous Saharawis who want independence for their homeland -- the vast Western Sahara region that Morocco has occupied since the Spanish colonial administration left in 1975.

A cease-fire has been in place since 1991 on this forgotten front, overshadowed by conflict in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. But restiveness is growing among Polisario troops and the 160,000 Western Saharans living in dusty refugee camps in the desert of southwestern Algeria.

A promised U.N. referendum to decide Western Sahara’s fate remains just that -- a promise. After 15 years of lobbying for the vote, which Morocco stubbornly rejects, patience among Polisario fighters is wearing thin.

“I know that land, stone by stone,” mused Ali-Taleb Najem, a graying veteran. “When it’s time to attack, we’ll know what to do.” He has spent most of his life campaigning in this desert and says he has breached the Moroccan lines more than once.

Saleh Ahel-Baidan, a shy 18-year-old with a wispy mustache, joined the fighters only a few months ago. He has never seen his enemy, but says stoutly: “I’m looking forward to it.”

For now, chances of a new war seem low, but the stakes would be high. The California-size territory hugging North Africa’s Atlantic Coast is rich in minerals and possibly in offshore oil -- potential wealth that enticed Morocco to invade when Spain left.

The disputed territory pits Morocco against Algeria, even as the U.S. wants the two neighbors to work together against Islamic extremists. Algeria backs Polisario because it wants to check Moroccan expansion, and looks for access to Western Sahara’s resources and ports.

For now, the Algerian government shows little appetite for supporting another war as it continues to pin its hopes on international pressure to get Morocco to hold a referendum. Polisario leaders in the refugee camps are unlikely to start a war without Algeria’s permission.

The stalemate is increasingly grating in the refugee camps.

“There’s some slipping of the sense of hope and future,” especially among young people, said Janet Lenz, who works for Christ the Rock Community Church in Wisconsin, overseeing charity work in the camps.

“Their parents gave up everything to the cause with the idea of getting back to the homeland. The young generation doesn’t even know the homeland.”

Even their parents would hardly recognize it. Morocco has poured money and settlers into the desert, building towns and roads. Moroccans, lured by tax breaks and government jobs, outnumber the estimated 50,000-90,000 Saharawis still living there.

That doesn’t deter those in the camps.

“We’re just waiting for the order -- we want to attack,” said Hamdi Mohamed, a lanky career Polisario soldier in a crisp olive uniform who commands a battalion on the border. He blames the U.N. intervention for thwarting Western Sahara’s shot at independence.

During the 1975-91 war, Polisario built on the Saharawis’ camel-raiding heritage to stage surprise attacks on Morocco’s sluggish conventional army. When Morocco retaliated with its modest air force, Polisario fighters would slip away into the desert.

After casualties on both sides rose into the thousands, Morocco built a 1,600-mile-long wall of sand, leaving the two armies facing off across a mine-ridden no man’s land. Polisario raiders occasionally crossed the wall before the 1991 cease-fire put fighting on hold.

Mohamed blames the lack of international attention to Western Sahara on the fact that “we have had a clean war, without any suicide bombings or killing civilians.”

Saharawis widely complain that they play by the rules, but that it has gotten them nowhere.

Refugee camps are well-organized, and their society is egalitarian. The Saharawi Arab Democratic Republic, an exile government led by Polisario, is a democracy recognized by about 60 countries that Saharawis consider a blueprint for a free Western Sahara.

Women’s rights are respected, literacy is more than 90%, and many people study at universities abroad -- mainly in Spain, Cuba and Algeria -- through scholarship programs.

Although a new war seems remote, the U.N. isn’t taking chances. The Security Council routinely extends the 300-soldier peacekeeping mission installed in 1991, largely to monitor the cease-fire.

Morocco has 160,000 soldiers -- the bulk of its army -- in Western Sahara. U.N. mission officers believe Polisario’s ranks number in the thousands, in small groups armed with assault rifles, anti-aircraft missiles and Soviet-made tanks supplied by Algeria and Libya.

Minding the truce, Polisario’s men perform field exercises and scout Moroccan positions -- in case they’re called into action.

“I like my job, and it’s what I know,” said Mohamed, the battalion commander.