Some food for thought, and little else
As Sahrawi hunger grows and their cause shrinks, a library tries to lend more than books.
Maxine Betteridge-Moes
The Sahrawi people living in the Tindouf camps of southwest Algeria are facing their worst nutrition crisis since 2010. The timing couldn’t be worse: humanitarian support is shrinking and global politicians are increasingly abandoning the Sahrawi independence cause, which the refugees see as key to ending their 50-year exile.
One in 10 of the Sahrawi children living in the camps are acutely malnourished, seven in 10 women are anaemic and nearly nine in every 10 people are food insecure, according to a survey by University College London.
Mothers cannot breastfeed because they are so anaemic,” says Najla Mohamed-Lamin, an activist living in the camps. The mother of two spends most of her income on vegetables and fruit but at a recent health check doctors were shocked by how anaemic she was.
Since 1975, nearly 200,000 Sahrawis have lived in the camps, dependent on aid as they wait for a resolution of the Western Sahara conflict. It began when Spain ended its colonisation of the territory and it was annexed by Morocco, sparking a 16-year war with the Polisario Front independence movement. A United Nations-brokered ceasefire in 1991 promised a referendum on self-determination that has never happened.
Now, ultra-processed foods dominate stalls in the camp markets, fuelling both undernutrition in children and obesity and diabetes in adults. A local library cofounded by Mohamed-Lamin is trying to respond by expanding beyond books.
The Almasar Library Centre in Smara camp started a seed bank, giving families seedlings and training them to create home gardens. “We need some agency over what we eat, even though we are in a refugee camp,” says Mohamed-Lamin. “If we don’t have any alternatives to humanitarian aid, it will be catastrophic.”
Malnutrition among women means they have trouble breastfeeding, which leads to wasting in infants – a 2017 study found that up to 22% of Sahrawi refugee infants are breastfed for less than six months. To encourage breastfeeding, the Almasar library gives young mothers breast pumps but, vital as such community initiatives are, they are no substitute for a political solution.
The UN referendum proposal appears to have fallen by the wayside. Instead, several countries have publicly backed Morocco’s “autonomy plan” – a proposal to give the Sahrawis self-governance under Moroccan sovereignty instead of full independence. It includes the United States, whose president backed the plan in 2020 in return for Morocco normalising relations with Israel. Spain, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and Kenya have also supported Morocco.
But Sahrawi leaders insist that the UN referendum is still the best solution. “We find it very unfortunate that respected countries who speak about rules-based international order rally [behind] the aggressor and find no shame in doing that,” Mohamed Yeslem Beisat, the Sahrawi minister for foreign and African affairs, told The Continent.
The African Union continues to recognise Western Sahara as an independent member state. But in 2018, the year after Morocco returned to the union after a 33-year absence, the AU decided to stop actively trying to resolve the disagreement between Morocco and the Polisario Front, deferring to the stalled UN process instead. n