Mohamed Abdelaziz obituary

For 40 years, Mohamed Abdelaziz, who has died in his late 60s, was the central figure in what became known as Africa’s “forgotten war”: the protracted conflict over the arid and sparsely populated Western Sahara region in the north-west of Africa. A co-founder of the Polisario Front (PF), which was committed to fighting first Spain, then Mauritania and principally Morocco for independence for the region, Abdelaziz had also served as president of the self-proclaimed Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR) since shortly after its formation in 1976.

The fight for self-determination of the bedouin Sahrawi people of the Western Sahara is a classic David and Goliath struggle, in which the lightly armed but highly mobile Polisario guerrillas have been pitched against the highly mechanised and US-backed Moroccan armed forces. Abdelaziz was the charismatic figurehead of the Sahrawi cause; an almost mythical figure among his own followers, he adopted a calculated aloofness with the foreign media to create the image of a romantic desert warrior.

For an interview with him in the mid-1980s, at the height of Polisario’s military engagement with the Moroccans, I was taken in the middle of the night at high speed across miles of sand dunes to a meeting in an isolated French colonial villa. Abdelaziz appeared: tall, deep-voiced, with an alleged “battle scar” across his forehead, and dressed in a traditional loose gandoura robe. He then gave a typically exaggerated account of Polisario’s military successes – and a typically evasive response to questions about how he was planning to counter Morocco’s building of a massive sand wall cordoning off the economically useful part of the territory.

The sand wall and Morocco’s obvious military superiority meant that Abdelaziz had little choice but to accept a ceasefire plan proffered by the United Nations, which came into force in 1991. In the 25 years since, the Sahrawi struggle has been a diplomatic one, and not without some stunning successes: the SADR – which actually controls less than a quarter of the territory it claims – has diplomatic relations with 40 states. More importantly, since 1982 the SADR has held full membership of the African Union, which sparked a Moroccan boycott of the organisation that continues to this day. However, any hopes that the 1991 ceasefire would lead to a political settlement have foundered over arguments about who should be allowed to vote in a referendum to determine the territory’s final status, and whether full independence should be an option at all.

The details of Abdelaziz’s early life are themselves part of the propaganda war between the PF and Morocco. According to the PF, he was born in the oasis town of Smara in Western Sahara, but Moroccan sources insist his birthplace was Marrakech, where Abdelaziz is regarded as a traitor. Not disputed is the fact that he was a member of one of the main Sahrawi tribes, the Reguibat, and that his father both served in the Royal Moroccan Army and acted as an adviser to the monarch on Saharan affairs. Abdelaziz is reported to have gravitated towards Sahrawi nationalism while attending university in Rabat, cutting off his studies to help set up the PF in May 1973 to drive the Spanish out of Western Sahara, which Madrid had colonised in the 1880s.

Abdelaziz became one of the PF’s main military leaders, but he was soon fighting Moroccans and Mauritanians rather than the Spanish, who quit the Western Sahara in 1975. In defiance of a ruling by the International Court of The Hague in favour of Sahrawi rights to self-determination, King Hassan of Morocco led 350,000 of his people into the region in what became known as “The Green March”; Mauritanian forces entered the territory at the same time across their northern border. More than 150,000 Sahrawis, including the PF and its leaders, fled east into Algeria, settling in the army garrison town of Tindouf, which would become one of the largest refugee cities in the world. Exile pushed the PF into enforced dependence on the Algerians and, arguably, they became a pawn in the struggle for regional supremacy between Algeria and Morocco. However, Abdelaziz benefited from strong Algerian backing, and became the PF’s undisputed leader in August 1976, just six months after it had declared an “independent state” of Western Sahara.

Within three years, the PF’s attacks on Mauritanian forces in the south of the Western Sahara region forced Mauritania to abandon the territory. However, this proved a short-lived advantage as Moroccan troops soon poured into the vacated area. In actions often led by Abdelaziz, the PF carried out a number of spectacular raids on isolated Moroccan positions using fast-moving jeeps with mounted machine-guns. But these were really only irritations to the Moroccan army, and its construction of a 2,500km sand wall rendered a military victory for the PF impossible.

Abdelaziz remained the unchallenged leader of the PF throughout the extended, and so far unsuccessful, political phase of the Sahrawi struggle. While there were critics of his failure to advance the goal of independence, there was no serious opposition within the movement.

As part of its diplomatic repositioning, Abdelaziz abandoned the PF’s earlier Marxism and condemned al-Qaida terrorist attacks in America and Europe, insisting the Sahrawi struggle was a “clean” one.

He is survived by his wife, Khadija Hamdi, a minister in the SADR “government”.