WESTERN SAHARA

	CLIMATE
	Western Sahara has a hot, dry, desert climate. Rain rarely falls, but cold air from the Atlantic Ocean produces thick fog and heavy dew along the coast. A hot, burning wind blows from the southern desert in winter and spring.

A Country in Turmoil

The earliest inhabitants of Western Sahara were Berbers (BUHR-buhrs), the earliest known people of northern Africa. By the eleventh century C.E., an alliance of Berber tribes, including some from Western Sahara, conquered Morocco.

During the fifteenth century groups of Arabs arrived from Yemen in Arabia. At first the Arabs and Berbers clashed, but the two peoples eventually intermarried, and a new "Sahrawi" (sah-RAH-wee), or Saharan, culture developed.

During the late nineteenth century, rival European nations competed to control African lands. In 1884 Spain took control of the area as a protectorate, calling it Spanish Sahara. The Sahrawi people fought a war against Spain, and it was not until 1934 that the Sahrawi fighters were finally defeated. In 1956 the neighboring nation of Morocco became independent from France and Spain. The Sahrawi people also demanded freedom from Spanish rule, and an independence movement was formed.

The new Moroccan government claimed the right to rule the country on the grounds that it had been part of Morocco in precolonial times. Its wish to control the territory increased after valuable deposits of phosphate were found in the early 1960s. In 1970 Spain banned the independence movement, which only helped strengthen the demand for independence among many Sahrawi people. As a result, the POLISARIO Front independence movement was formed. POLISARIO Front is an abbreviation of Popular Front for the Liberation of Saguia el Hamra and Rio de Oro, the Spanish names for the northern and southern regions of Spanish Sahara.

In 1973 another neighboring country, Mauritania, argued that the country should become part of its territory. In 1975 the International Court of Justice said that neither Morocco nor Mauritania should have sovereignty over Spanish Sahara.

In 1975 King Hassan II, ruler of Morocco( led 350,000 unarmed Moroccan citizens into Spanish Sahara to stake his country’s claim. The Moroccan government also encouraged other Moroccan civilians to settle in Spanish Sahara and sent Moroccan troops to occupy the towns in the north. Many Sahrawi families fled as refugees across the border to Algeria. Four huge refugee camps were set up, where today over 170,000 people live.

In 1976 Mauritania and Morocco persuaded Spain to give up control of the country. They also agreed to divide the country, now called Western Sahara, between themselves. Mauritania took over the southern third of the country. At the same time the leaders of the POLISARIO Front declared that Western Sahara was an independent state, naming it the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic and setting up government headquarters in Algeria. POLISARIO Front soldiers also launched guerrilla attacks against Moroccans and Mauritanians.

By 1979 the pressure from POLISARIO Front attacks was so great that Mauritania gave up claims to Western Sahara. Morocco did not. During the 1980s the Moroccans built a huge sand and rock wall across the desert, separating the northwest region from the rest of Western Sahara. The wall was designed to keep out the POLISARIO Front guerrillas, to mark out the area of Moroccan settlement, and to protect the Moroccan-run phosphate mines.

In 1990 United Nations troops were sent to Western Sahara to help keep the peace. In 1991 a referendum was planned to ask the people of Western Sahara whom they wanted to govern them. However, nobody could agree on who should be entitled to vote.

By the year 2000 the problem of who should rule Western Sahara was still unresolved. Morocco still claims the territory, and its government runs the country on a day-to-day basis. However, the POLISARIO Front government in exile still claims the right to rule. An agreed list of voters has not been drawn up, and the referendum—which Morocco now firmly opposes—has still not been held.