Polisario Front: the flame is still barely burning

When the same discourse keeps rolling on in the middle of nowhere, with an argumentation that, apart from being shoddy and false, is obsolete, the result will always be the same: to deceive with false hopes and to keep the flame burning in the midst of the most resounding failure. And as a target, the crowds dressed up with flags, many flags, raised and dressed by people lost in the past, without present or future. They only swarm thirstily, converted into a docile mass of people, accustomed to repeating the same empty, empty slogans, which they know will never be fulfilled, and lead nowhere.  

There in the Hamada, Algerian territory, everything remains the same. Even if thousands of congresses are held, such as the current marathon congress of the Polisario, the same procedures will remain in force. The objective and priority is to keep the head of an organisation stiffened by time and injustice in its usual place. This leadership of old people will continue as long as they live (and if they die, their children will surely inherit their project). There will be no change. They will remain the same even to the detriment of a malnourished and neglected population, and despite their barbaric crimes against the Saharawis themselves, the rapes of women, abductions, tortures etc.... No one can call them to account for the barbarism that has taken place there, for the theft of humanitarian aid, not even for the abuses and the time spent in vain.

In the republic of the forty tents, the same gestures are repeated, the same anachronistic words, with arms raised in the air, "fatherland or death", a crowd roars with shouts torn out by force, turned into aphonic voices, which hardly anyone hears. They are always the same faces, trying hard to conceal their hard-fought friendliness in the face of adversity, and, in order to please, above all, the "supportive" Spaniards, who are enjoying tasting their exotic eagerness, in the middle of the tents with mechui of roast lamb and tea with good grass and rickety children, next to them, dead of hunger and disgust.

Only this time, the Algerians have shown their true colours in keeping up this never-ending farce, which they themselves do not want to end. Now, in the eyes of all, Algerians, the security services, dependent on the Tindouf Sector, are in charge of maintaining the security of this so-called congress, which has been going on for almost a week, and the clearest thing of all, they are there to bet on their Trojan horse, as a testimony of their intentions, they give a "burnus" (cloak) of the colour of a Santiago horse to their favourite "candidate". With this gesture, all is said and done. Algerians vote for Brahim Ghali.

This choice is not new. Ghali has been appointed, through "fingercracy", by Abdel Aziz himself, the late president, who remained, for the Algerians, some 42 years, at the top of that organisation - state - camp (not even the long dictatorship of Generalissimo Franco managed to continue for more than forty years). A few days before his death, he even declared in a video (available on YouTube) the "nomination" of Ghali as his heir. He presents him as the possible messiah of the cause, the righteous, the good, although he does not stand out for anything positive in particular.

Everyone in these camps knows him well enough.  His election to the presidency is not by chance or on his own merits. It is compensation for his loyalty to the Algerian military's directives, for his eternal closeness to power in Algiers. He is so subservient to them that all relations with Spain are in tatters.  

At a press conference, the controversial Bachir Mustafa, who always plays the "opposition" throughout the Polisario congresses, asked the Algerians, with a clarity bordering on insolence, not to intervene in their internal affairs, and asked them for military and diplomatic support. With this intervention, all is said and done.

In other words, the Polisario has long since become an organisation in Algerian hands, and no one there can change its course or elect its president without Algerian backing.

In this sense, at last and openly, someone in the life leadership officially recognises and corroborates that the organisation is not independent of the Algerian "diktat". And whatever is organised there is nothing more than a show put on for the benefit of the gallery and the dreamers who believe they can change things.

The Algerian services have the real handle on the frying pan.  Without them, the Polisario would not last a day. The Polisario's own leadership knows this best and is always looking the other way for a reason.

The congress will end one day, they will ask to go to war, but no leader will send his sons and close relatives to face Moroccan drones and sophisticated weapons. For that, the poor are left to serve as cannon fodder, as always, and the lucky sons are called upon to enjoy themselves in Western capitals. 

Thus the torch of a small war that only burns the most innocent, its own, and enriches the most opulent of a small organisation, lost in the boots of the past of what is known as the Cold War, forgotten several decades ago, has been held aloft.