A Future on Hold
Karen Thomas presents the struggles for Sahrawi identity, past and present, in North Africa.
War on Want volunteers were bemused to receive a pair of second-hand ice-skates when they launched their latest toy appeal for the Western Sahara. But, as 165,000 Sahrawi exiles endure a twenty-sixth blistering summer in Algerian desert refugee camps, the unwanted ice-skates are strangely evocative – symbols of a frozen peace process and of a desert nation whose future is on ice.
The people of the Western Sahara – Sahrawis – lay claim to a barren but strategic stretch of phosphate-filled desert sprawling between Morocco, Algeria and Mauritania, a region whose long Atlantic coastline contains prime fishing grounds.
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