Western Sahara, the last African colony and other Western Sahara General Tips

Favorite Thing: Western Sahara or the former Spanish Sahara was a Spanish colony until 1975. After the withdrawal of Spain, the territory was occupied by Morocco in 1975 during the so called "Green March". Morocco annexed the northern part of Western Sahara in 1976, and also the southern part of the territory in 1979, after the withdrawal of Mauritania.

This resulted in the uprisal of the Polisario Front to fight for the national liberation. The Polisario Front was formed allready in 1973 to fight Spanish colonialism. The Moroccan army erected a wall in the desert to prevent the attacks from the Polisario front. In 1991 the UN succeeded in reaching a cease-fire.

A large part of the Saharawi population emigrated to Algeria and live since more than 25 years in camps near Tindouf. Since the "Green March", Morocco has encouraged Moroccan people to settle in the Western Sahara, but also some Saharawi people integrated in (northern) Morocco.

Since 1975, the UN tried to find a solution for the conflict. An UN-organized referendum on final status has been repeatedly postponed. Morocco has boycotted this referendum. The proposal that currently has gained support (mainly by France and the USA) is that the Sahara should remain under Moroccan control, but with a certain degree of autonomy. The Polisario Front objects to this solution.


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Favorite Thing: Crossing Western Sahara, you will have a lot of checkpoints of the police. All times you enter a town and at all cross crossroads. Luckily there are not that many.

The police need your name, date and place of birth, profession, nationality, adress, marital state, pasportnumber, place of delivery, names of your father and mother, place of entry, mark, type number of the car.

The best you can do, is making copies (about 10 or 15) of a list of these facts, so you can hand the copie over to the policemen at the checkpoints. This will save lots of time. Mostly after giving the copy the policemen looked into the car and asked only our professions.


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