al-Wali Mustafa Sayyid

Al-Wali Mustafa Sayyid ( Arabic الوالي مصطفى سيد, DMG al-Wālī Muṣṭafā Sayyid ; * 1948 or 1950 probably in Bir Lehlu , Western Sahara ; † June 9, 1976 near Benichab , Inchiri Province , Mauritania ) was a folk hero of the Sahrawis , co-founder of the independence movement of the Frente Polisario and the Democratic Arab Republic of the Sahara (DARS). There are different transcriptions into the Latin script for his name: In Spanish his name is written El Uali Mustafa Sayed , in French El-Ouali . He was called Lulei by his friends .

Youth and education

El-Ouali was born into a nomadic family in the eastern desert of the Spanish Sahara colony . The national Armée de Liberation (Liberation Army) for the independence of Morocco , founded in 1956, was also joined by Sahrawis in 1958 with the aim of achieving liberation from Spanish colonial rule and a state of their country as it had prevailed before Spain took control in 1934. The Sahrawi liberation movement was militarily crushed in 1958 by united French and Spanish forces. El-Ouali's family fled to Tan-Tan that year , where they were impoverished and without their herd, with only a few goats left, were dependent on the free distribution of flour and oil, which the Moroccan government made available to destitute Sahrawi in the southern provinces . The father was unable to work, the mother was a seamstress and the eldest of the five sons earned some money building roads.

Nevertheless, the young El-Ouali managed to graduate from elementary school and to obtain a scholarship that allowed him to attend a grammar school in Marrakech . It was there that he became interested in Arabic literature, but was expelled from school in 1965 for lack of discipline. After a short time he received a second scholarship for a secondary school in Taroudannt . He graduated with honors in 1970 in Rabat from one of the most prestigious high schools in the country. In the same year he began to study law at the university there .

Liberation struggle

Some of the few Sahrawi fellow students in Rabat later played a role like him in the anti-colonial liberation struggle. With them El-Ouali formed a loosely connected political group. By 1973, the student group became what they saw as the nucleus of a new movement. At the same time, the students gave up their support for Moroccan opposition parties, from which they expected little concrete support for their goals. At a secret meeting in Tan-Tan in October 1971, they discussed the establishment of a liberation organization. Despite a public declaration of sympathy for the Sahrawis by the Moroccan King Hassan II in April 1972, 45 Sahrawi students were arrested by the police during a demonstration for independence in Tan-Tan and some of them were detained for several days. From such incidents, the group around El-Ouali concluded that it would be too dangerous to officially found a liberation movement in Morocco.

After various meetings, including in El Aaiún , Western Sahara, and Zouérate in the north of Mauritania, a meeting took place somewhere on the Mauritanian border on May 10, 1973, at which the Frente Popular para la Liberación de Saguia el Hamra y Río de Oro (“ Popular Front for the Liberation of Saguia el Hamra and Río de Oro ”), or Frente Polisario for short, was founded and El-Ouali was elected its General Secretary.

From the beginning, the group's activities focused on guerrilla warfare against the Spanish colonial power. As early as 1975, the military supremacy of the Spanish troops could only be maintained in the coastal towns due to guerrilla activity. After the Madrid Agreement of 1975, in which Spain agreed to partition the Western Sahara between Morocco and Mauritania , the armed forces of these two neighboring countries advanced into the northern third of Saguia el Hamra and the southern Río de Oro area of the Spanish Sahara, creating the exodus one significant part of the population was raised to Algeria , who still lives decades later in refugee camps near Tindouf . The refugees on both sides of the border between Algeria and Western Sahara soon created their own administrative structures, so that within the first year of exile the Democratic Arab Republic of the Sahara (DARS), whose first president was El-Ouali, could be proclaimed.

El-Ouali fell in the guerrilla war just a few months later, when freedom fighters from the Polisario Front launched an attack on the Mauritanian capital Nouakchott in 1976 . On June 7, 1976, his troops reached Om Tounsi, about 70 kilometers north of the city, in the evening. The next morning a small unit with land rovers set out from here, bombed the northern outskirts of Nouakchott for half an hour, and immediately returned to the camp. On the evening of the same day they advanced again to the state capital and shot at the area of ​​the presidential palace and the surrounding embassies precisely within a quarter of an hour. On the morning of June 9th, all of the troops started their way back north. In the Benichab oasis they wanted to destroy the well that supplies water to the copper mining area of Akjoujt , which is about 110 kilometers to the northeast, but were found near by a troop of Lieutenant Ney Ould Bah, who belonged to the units of the Mauritanian military leader Ahmed Ould Boucef , involved in a half-hour battle. El-Ouali was shot in the head.

Mauritania renounced its territorial claims in the Western Sahara in the same year. Although Moroccan troops then moved into the positions of the territory that had been vacated by Mauritania, many Sahrawis revere El-Ouali after his untimely death not only as a martyr ( shahīd ), but also as a national hero. Mohamed Abdelaziz was his successor as General Secretary of the Polisario Front .

literature

• Tony Hodges: Western Sahara. The Roots of a Desert War. Lawrence Hill & Company, Westport, Connecticut 1983

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Hodges, p. 164
2. ↑ Hodges, pp. 157-161
3. ↑ Hodges, p. 244