A popular “outburst of violence” has recently shaken the Tindouf camps. Its manifest ambition is, neither more nor less, than the weakening of the leadership of the separatists and the return to tribal logics.
The atmosphere has airs of guerrilla warfare and lifts the veil through clashes on the inclinations of each other with the sole sworn goal of a stranglehold on smuggling and various traffics under the control of the separatist leaders.
Coming back to the Tindouf camps, this is how, after burning down the gendarmerie center at the Dakhla camp at the end of March, located 200 km from the administrative headquarters of the Polisario in Rabouni, then very recently the pharmacy of the offspring of the Minister of the Algerian interior of the polisario, Meryem Salek H’Madathe Sahrawi demonstrators through their protest movements attacked this time the leader of the Polisario militias based in the “Laayoune camp”
According to the Tindouf Autonomist Support Forum (FORSATIN), his vehicle was burned by the many protesters. The operation was meticulously prepared. They intercepted him on his way back to Camp Laayoune, forced him to stop by surrounding him. Afterwards, he was beaten, kicked in particular, and he saw his “service or abuse” vehicle set on fire by the assailants.
The latter reproach him through this act, the arrest of the Spanish national, Mohamed Salem Souid and the beating by his militias of the women of the Spanish national’s family, including his sister.
This targeting of militias and their leaders is not accidental. It indicates the fed up of a sequestered population, against a repression suffered by the militias ruling the camps. The situation is degenerating and security officials are the target of stones, while vehicles belonging to the Polisario are destroyed. The Polisario or what’s left of it, responded by launching a “large-scale arrest campaign” and no figures have been released for the time being.
But it is a banality in these regions. We remember during the 49th session of the UN Human Rights Council (28 February – 1 April 2022) in Geneva, Sahrawi activists had denounced the violations, enforced disappearances and abuses perpetrated by the Polisario in the Tindouf camps, in Algerian territory.
That said, the Polisario leadership is trying in its own way to calm popular anger. She announced in a desperate attempt to rush ahead, an initiative through a so-called National Council, to question certain officials in order to buy time and appease the fury of the demonstrators. Are therefore concerned, the so-called Prime Minister, Minister of the Interior and Justice. They should be heard on the security situation and the chaos that reigns in the camps of the sequestered in Tindouf.
This is one of the concessions made to the demonstrators. But as you can imagine, the latter refuse any truce unless those responsible for these crimes and attacks against them first pay a high price. They accuse this gang which tries to present itself as an “institutional” organization, of being a “terrorist” organization which shares what comes to hand, and practices the theft of food aid, racial discrimination between Sahrawis, torture , violence, the arrest of opponents, and the distribution of positions to families and friends.
Faced with such events, one can imagine, the leader of the ghostly “rasd”, Brahim Ghali or Mohamed Ben Battouche, agreed to come down from his platform and sit down with tribal chioukhs, including those of the tribe of Mohamed Salem Souidwhereas never before had he deigned to do so.
But faced with the uprisings of the camps and the failure to isolate the Souid tribe from the rest of the other tribes, according to FORSATIN and after the attack on a center of the second military district and the theft of weapons, then the destruction of certain Polisario cars, the burning of centers, followed by pharmacies, shops and a pedagogical high school, he could only submit to the diktat of the Sahrawi vox populi. He will have to sit down at the negotiating table of the sheikhs and he should not come out of this without some real concessions.