I urge you to read this hit piece about the Polisario Front by Michael Rubin:
I
have written here before about the Polisario Front, a
Cold War throw-back and authoritarian cult funded by the Algerian military
regime as a tool against Morocco. The Department of Homeland Security
classifies the Polisario Front as a terrorist group. Polisario leaders seek to cloak themselves
in a shroud of anti-colonial legitimacy saying they are fighting for a Sahrawi
state in the Western Sahara, a former Spanish colonial territory now autonomous
under Moroccan control. That is enough for many leftist journalists and
progressive academics to embrace them, and even President Obama took a photo with the Polisario Front’s autocratic
leader, but the reality is their constituency is tiny and growing smaller every
day.
While
the Polisario imagines themselves leading a state, the sad truth is they reign
over little more than a handful of refugee camps in the Tindouf province of Algeria which house not more than 100,000 Sahrawi, of whom
perhaps only 40,000 are refugees from the Western Sahara. These refugees live
in a political culture as authoritarian and as that of Turkmenistan, Eritrea,
North Korea, or the Mujahedin al-Khalq. Here, for example, is a report that the
Polisario has forced youth into
marriages in order to create
new constituents. The Polisario notoriously separated children from
their parents and shipped
them to Cuba for indoctrination. The Polisario taxes residents to fund the
profligate lifestyles of its leaders. Party membership—and blind loyalty to
Mohamed Abdelaziz, the Polisario’s dictator—is required for employment and to
receive other benefits. The group prevents residents of the Tindouf camps from
returning home. While the United Nations facilitates some family visits between
Moroccan Tindouf refugees and their families, the Polisario refuses to allow
husbands and wives and children to travel together, treating those left behind
as hostages in order to guarantee the return of the camp residents. In short,
to be born into the Polisario-run camps is to be born into an authoritarian
hell.
Just
as the White House remained largely silent when Iranians rose up for freedom in
2009, and remains muted on similar anti-authoritarian protests in Venezuela
today, so too is it now silent on a nascent freedom movement in the
Polisario-run camps. According to al-Arabiya:
The
so-called “Youth Movement for Change” released a video accusing the Polisario
Front’s leadership of corruption and called for improving the conditions of
Sahrawi refugees in Tindouf. The movement also demanded the departure of the
Front’s aging figures, including its 66-year-old leader Mohammad Abdelaziz who
has been in control since 1976. The youth group, which was founded in February
this year, accused Abdelaziz and his associates of “trading in the suffering of
the Sahrawi refugees.” “We have suffered from injustice for more than 40 years.
We demand the departure of this corrupt leadership, which is the oldest, most
corrupt leadership in the world,” Mohammad Lamine, a spokesman for the nascent
group, told Al Arabiya News Channel from the Tindouf refugee camp. “They have
been stealing humanitarian aid provided by international organizations to the
refugee camps and whenever we raise our voices against [this] they accuse us of
being agents of Morocco,” he added.
Susan
Rice, currently Obama’s national security advisor, has twice during the Obama administration promoted policies which would impose a politically-charged
‘human rights monitoring’ regime in the Western Sahara, a move that would
effectively undercut Morocco’s security and empower Polisario Front propaganda
in the Western Sahara. She did so supposedly in the name of the interests of
the Sahrawi population (most of whom, it seems, prefer to reintegrate into
Morocco or into the Western Sahara to which Morocco granted autonomy). But when
she and President Obama have the opportunity truly to support liberty, freedom,
and human rights for Sahrawis, they remain silent. That silence simply makes
the Polisario’s oppression easier. How sad. And how telling.
Having been off doing other things for the last year and a
half, I regret that I have been neglecting this blog since my last post on
September 30, 2012. Anyway, last week Michael Rubin, "a resident scholar at the
American Enterprise Institute; senior lecturer at the Naval Postgraduate School's Center for Civil-Military Relations; and a senior editor of the
Middle East Quarterly" and
much much more, came out
with a Commentary Magazine blog article titled
Arab Spring Comes to Polisario Front? that is so appallingly ignorant, so appallingly dishonest, so
appallingly biased, and so appallingly mean-spirited that he has successfully driven
me out of semi-retirement.
Quite simply
it is the most compromised piece of writing on the Western Sahara and Polisario
that I have read in my many years of scholarship in this area. This guy should
be sued for defamation. And Commentary should be held accountable for hosting –
apparently without any fact checking – this verifiable pile of lies.
Again please read his article at the top of this
posting a couple times, and I’ll start this exercise by going through his first
paragraph sentence by sentence because it truly is a doozy of a paragraph and
Rubin clearly has a severe problem.
Paragraph One
“I have written here before about the Polisario Front, a Cold War throw-back and
authoritarian cult funded by the Algerian military regime as a tool against
Morocco.”
On the stuff that he has written before about the Polisario,
I urge you to follow his link and feast on his earlier articles, which you will
find are just as ignorant, dishonest, biased, and mean-spirited as this one.
Rubin’s dismissing the Polisario Front as “a Cold War
throw-back” is moronic. The USSR never recognized the Polisario and, likewise,
after the end of the Cold War Russia has never recognized the Polisario. Yes,
Cuba-Polisario relations have been cordial and, with no higher education
available in the refugee camps, many Sawrawi children have happily accepted
Cuba’s offers of free education. In other words, Cuba-Polisario relations are
very much like the cordial relations between
Canada and Cuba.
In their rhetoric, on the ground, and in their constitution, the Polisario is
very much committed to pluralistic, free-enterprise democracy when they achieve
independence. And even the Polisario support from Algeria has nothing to do
with the Cold War. It is about de-colonialism and the Western Sahara’s status
as the only African colony that has not been de-colonized.
His characterization of the Polisario as an “authoritarian
cult” hardly deserves any comment. Let me just say that it is a far better
description of the Morocco monarchy. See Freedom House’s description of
Rabat’s illegal and totalitarian occupation of the Western Sahara as the
Worst of the Worst on their Freedom of the World ratings.
And the part about “the Algerian military regime” funding
the Polisario “as a tool against Morocco,” ignores the fact that the
United Nations also funds the Polisario Front as a tool against Morocco’s
illegal invasion and occupation. Algeria happens to be on the right side here.
“The Department of
Homeland Security (DHS) classifies the Polisario Front as a terrorist group.”
Nowhere does the Department of Homeland Security classify
the Polisario Front as a terrorist group. If you take a look at the
Department of Homeland Security website and do a search for
“Polisario,” you will get “Sorry, no results found for 'Polisario'.” Oddly, Rubin’s
link in this sentence takes you, not to the Department of Homeland Security
website, but to a
Global Terrorism Database (GTD) of a group called the
National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism
(START) at the University of Maryland. While the GTD has been partially funded
by the Department of Homeland Security for a number of years,
START makes it
very clear that “The GTD does not purport to represent the official position,
inclusion decisions, or information holdings of the Department of Homeland
Security, the National Institute of Justice, the U.S. State Department or any
other funding agency.”
The GTD profile of the Polisario also very
clearly states that the U.S. Department of State does not classify the
Polisario as a Foreign Terrorist Organization and does not include them on the
Terrorism Exclusion List. And even the Polisario’s
appearance on the GTD list
is hardly convincing given the lack of evidence tying them to terrorism and
their consistent refusal to turn to terrorism – even in the face of massive state
terrorism by Morocco. The bottom line is that the U.S.
Department of State and the Department of
Homeland Security have never classified the Polisario Front as a terrorist
group. Rubin either has no idea what he is talking about here, or he does and just chooses to lie.
“Polisario leaders
seek to cloak themselves in a shroud of anti-colonial legitimacy saying they
are fighting for a Sahrawi state in the Western Sahara, a former Spanish
colonial territory now autonomous under Moroccan control.”
Rubin simply ignores here that it is international law, the International
Court of Justice, the United Nations, and the analyses of innumerable
international lawyers that cloak the Polisario in the “shroud of anti-colonial
legitimacy.” The Polisario leaders have
no need to “seek to cloak themselves” because international law has been
cloaking them for decades. The Polisario
is fighting for a Sahrawi state in the Western Sahara because they have a clear-cut
international law right to de-colonial self-determination and independence.
Rubin proceeds in this sentence to tell us that the Western
Sahara is “now autonomous under Moroccan control.” This is just wrong. Morocco
proposed autonomy under their sovereignty in 2007, but autonomy has never been
implemented in the occupied territories and has never been accepted by the
Polisario. The Western Sahara is NOT autonomous and Morocco’s refusal to hold a
referendum on independence – even with autonomy as an option – tells me that Morocco
knows all too well that the indigenous Sahrawi of the Western Sahara would
never vote for autonomy. As with Rubin’s
totally bad info about the Polisario and terrorism, he also doesn’t have a clue or chooses to lie
about Western Saharan autonomy.
“That is enough for
many leftist journalists and progressive academics to embrace them, and even
President Obama took a photo with the Polisario Front’s autocratic
leader, but the reality is their constituency is tiny and growing smaller every
day.”
Rubin’s idea here that the “embrace” of the Poliario and
their anti-colonial legitimacy by leftists and progressives is the root of all
evil in the Western Sahara is ludicrous. While there are indeed many leftist
and progressive Polisario fans, strong support for the Polisario comes from all across the ideological
spectrum. Pennsylvania Representative
Joseph R. Pitts, longtime Polisario
supporter, is a conservative Republican with a 100% rating from the American
Conservative Union who co-chairs the Western Sahara Caucus in Congress.
Furthermore, the Polisario’s biggest
supporter in the U.S. is the
Defense Forum Foundation,
a solidly conservative 501(c)(3) non-profit
foundation
under the presidency of notable and respected human rights activist,
SuzanneScholte, a Republican who is running for Congress in the 11
thCongressional District of Virginia this year.
If anything, Michael Rubin’s neo-conservative dissing of anti-colonial
legitimacy reeks of neo-colonialism.
“and even President Obama took a photo with the Polisario Front’s autocratic
leader,”
Obama and Bush before him have posed numerous times with
leaders who are far more autocratic than the elected Abdelaziz. Take, for starters, the kings of Morocco and
Saudi Arabia. Everybody knows about the sordid autocratic rule in Saudi, but
the enormity of Moroccan lobbying and propaganda has here in the U.S. shielded
King Mohamed VI from the reality of his sordid and corrupt autocracy. And what
is so bad about Obama posing with President Abdelaziz at Mandela’s memorial in
South Africa? The Sahrawi Arabic Democratic Republic is a member of the African
Union (and remember that Morocco is not a member), South Africa has always been
among the biggest supporters of the Polisario, and Mandela was a great friend
of the Polisario leadership.
“the reality is their
constituency is tiny and growing smaller every day”
If the Polilsario’s constituency is really so small, how is
it that not one country officially recognizes Morocco’s sovereignty over the
territory and the UN’s Fourth Committee still lists the Western Sahara as a
non-self-governing territory with the right of self-determination.
Paragraphs two and three
Rubin’s next two paragraphs are a thoroughly biased attempt
to demonize the Sahrawis and the the Polisario Front, which is the most
exemplary national liberation movement in the world. He backs up his rabidly
anti-Polisario rant with some very suspect sources.
These include
Al Arabiya, a Saudi-owned
internet news source, that is notorious for mirroring Saudi Arabia’s very
slanted and pro-Moroccan foreign policy, and Sahara News and and Morocco World
News, Moroccan propaganda sites. And his most laughable trick is to back up his
lies by referencing his own articles, which are also piles of lies.
There is so much biased, false, unsubstantiated and unproven
stuff in these two paragraphs that I’m just going to touch on the worst of it.
“These refugees live
in a political culture as authoritarian and as that of Turkmenistan, Eritrea,
North Korea, or the Mujahedin al-Khalq.”
Again, I have been following and researching
the Polisario for a long time, and Rubin’s take on the political culture of the
Polisario is just false. He bases his tales of the Polisario’s nastiness on
little more than Moroccan propaganda disseminated by compromised media.
And again, he just happily ignores that
Freedom House categorizes the Moroccan government’s totalitarian occupation of
the Western Sahara among the
Worst of the Worst alongside Central African
Republic, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Somalia,
Sudan, Syria, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan.
And in case you were wondering if Freedom House is a hotbed
of “leftist journalists and progressive academics,” take a look at
Right Web’s profile of Freedom House.
They conclude that “Although in recent years the organization has appeared to
relax its close association with hawkish U.S. policies, its
leadership remains
heavily represented by individuals affiliated with neoconservatism and it has
continued to support projects aimed at bolstering aggressive U.S. foreign
policies.” And, in addition to substantial U.S. government funding. Freedom
House receives much private funders “including many rightwing foundations, such
as the
Smith
Richardson Foundation, the
Bradley
Foundation, Sarah
Scaife,
and the
Olin
Foundation.” And to be transparent, I have consulted for Freedom House in the
past, but never on North Africa.
And finally what makes all of this more ironic is that Right
Web describes
Michael Rubin as follows: “An outspoken and sometimes
controversial proponent of hawkish U.S. foreign policies, Rubin is closely
associated with neoconservatism.” Wow, it turns out Rubin and Freedom House are
on the same side.
Yes, it is Morocco's, not the Polisario's, political culture in the Western Sahara that is the Worst of the Worst.
This was debunked years ago by
UNHCR interviews and numerous independent inverviews.
"The so-called “Youth
Movement for Change” released a video accusing the Polisario Front’s leadership
of corruption and called for improving the conditions of Sahrawi refugees in
Tindouf.”
For starters Al Arabiya is, again, a highly compromised source.
There is no real evidence that this group even exists, and even if it does, my guess is that it is as anti-Morocco and pro-independence as the Polisario.
Let me move on to Rubin’s concluding paragraph.
Final Paragraph
“Susan Rice,
currently Obama’s national security advisor, has twice during the Obama
administration promoted policies which would impose a politically-charged
‘human rights monitoring’ regime in the Western Sahara, a move that would
effectively undercut Morocco’s security and empower Polisario Front propaganda
in the Western Sahara.”
This conclusion is mind-bogglingly crazy. He doesn’t even want to deal with the wealth
of information from lots of NGOs, international lawyers, academics, etc. that
is conclusive that Morocco’s human rights behavior in the occupied territories
is atrocious and that there is lots of stuff that should be monitored. But
despite this reality, Rubin doesn’t want human rights monitoring because it is
“politically-charged” and would “effectively undercut Morocco’s security.” It is far easier to make the case that
Morocco’s security will be undercut, not by any monitoring of human rights
abuses, but by the predictable end of the cease fire between the parties if Morocco
continues denying the long-established right of the Western Saharans to
self-determination and a referendum on their future.
And the part about empowering “Polisario Front propaganda”
is just silly given the abundance of raunchy propaganda coming out of Rabat.
The Polisario point of view is largely consistent with widely accepted
international law.
“most of whom [the polisario], it seems, prefer to reintegrate into
Morocco or into the Western Sahara to which Morocco granted autonomy.”
His idea that most of the Polisario prefers to reintegrate
into Morocco is baseless. The UN finished selecting the electorate for the
referendum on independence in 1999, and if
Morocco really thought that the Sahrawi wanted to come back to the motherland they
could have held the referendum years ago. But they didn’t because they know the
Western Saharans would choose independence.
And I repeat, on the rest of this sentence about Morocco
granting autonomy: Morocco has never granted autonomy. This is just oneof
Rubin’s many fabrications.
The bottom line of all this is that Michael Rubin knows nothing about the Polisario and is a flat
out liar and a thoroughly dishonest analyst: the Polisario Front is not a
terrorist organization and the Department of Homeland Security doesn't consider them one, the Western Sahara is not an autonomous region of
Morocco, liberals are not the only ones who love and support the Sahrawis, Algeria is not the only one who supports and
funds the Polisario, and lots more. To say that this guy is a propagandist is too kind; he is a journalistic
terrorist angling for the destruction of the most commendable national liberation movement on earth.
