The Ideal Refugees: Gender, Islam, and the Sahrawi Politics of Survival

2 —The Sahrawi Refugee Camps

79 — 2 — The Sahrawi Refugee Camps International and Solidarity Networks unlike refugee camps that are run and controlled by international organizations such as the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), the Sahrawi refugee camps have been “managed” since their creation by the Polisario Front, which proclaimed the birth of the camp-based SADR in February 1976. Malkki argues that refugee camps provide the potential for “managers” to control medical and sanitary matters , observe and limit socioeconomic dynamics, “regularize” refugees’ status, and “normalize” their lives (Malkki 1995a, 112). At the same time, as a device of power that contains and encloses groups, refugee camps enable both the production of their own “fixed and objectified” objects and domains of knowledge (“the refugees”) and simultaneously provide a space for continual subversion and transformation (ibid., 237). Camps act as “controlling institutions”1 and “technologies of power” (Malkki 1995b, 498) and therefore potentially both enable and inhibit action and discourses, allowing for social and political invention and change. In the case under consideration, the Sahrawi refugee camps have habitually been presented by the Polisario/SADR and many Western observers alike as a location for an experiment in “social democracy” and participatory aid management. Most important for this study, the Sahrawi refugee camps 1. Hitchcox quoted in Callamard 1999, 203. 80 | the ideal refugees can be identified as a space for the re/production of particular representations of gender.2 Although this book primarily explores the “ideal” representation of “secular gender equality” in/from the camps, this is only one element of a broader strategy of international public relations designed by the Polisario /SADR to secure international support. In the first part of this chapter, I briefly examine the ways in which the Polisario/SADR has successfully projected the camps as a “democratic” and “egalitarian” space to nonSahrawi visitors and external observers. I then provide an overview of the history and structure of the camps, with particular reference to their organization and demography and to educational and employment systems in place there. In the second part of this chapter, I highlight the extent to which the camps are ultimately politically and physically dependent upon a range of international and transnational networks. Indeed, Appadurai has stressed that “every major refugee camp . . . is a translocality” (2003, 339), hinting at the multiple ways in which refugees may be implicated in international or transnational networks, including the presence of international NGOs and the role of remittances and transnational livelihood strategies (Hyndman and Walton-Roberts 2000; Jacobsen 2002; Crisp 2003). The Sahrawi refugee context is characterized by these and other transnational dynamics, in particular a specific dependence on a range of non-Sahrawi state and nonstate actors that offer the Polisario/SADR different forms of humanitarian and political support. I argue that this dependency has led to the development of particular strategies designed to ensure the continuation of support that keeps the camps, their inhabitants, and the Sahrawi “cause” alive. While a multiplicity of such networks exists,3 I will focus primarily on the solidarity network formed by members of Western civil society and especially those of the former colonial power, Spain. 2. Malkki’s focus is on the re/creation of “mythico-histories” (1995a, 237). 3. See Fiddian-Qasmiyeh 2011a and 2011g for analyses of solidarity networks based around Evangelical-humanitarians. The Sahrawi Refugee Camps | 81 The Sahrawi Refugee Camps The vast majority of the earliest reports written on the camps in the 1980s stressed the Polisario/SADR’s extraordinary “participatory ideology ” and “democratic” organization of the camps (e.g., Harrell-Bond 1981a, 1–4; Black 1984, 1–2; Mowles 1986, 8–9). These further highlighted that the camps are “models of efficient local government” (Brazier 1997, 14), whose members are elected in “state” elections during National Conferences , which are held every five years. However, while Zunes notes a “high degree of economic and social democracy” since the camps’ creation, he points to the fact that “actual political democracy for most of [the 1980s] was limited” (1999, 44). Indeed, he acknowledges with reference to an earlier article that he published in 1988 entitled “Participatory Democracy in the Sahara: A Study of Polisario Self-Governance,” “that in hindsight, parts of my analysis dealing with the actual level of political democracy at that time appear to have been premature in light of subsequent events” (1999, 50; also Shelley 2004, 176). Outlining the characteristics of the...