Polisario and Spanish universities: indoctrination for public consumption

Brahim Ghali, leader of the Polisario Front - AP/FATEH GUIDOUM

Ignacio Ortiz

21 de marzo de 2025 (11:30 h.)

Introduction and some examples

In recent years, Spanish public universities have increased the organisation of academic events that address controversial issues from perspectives clearly aligned with a specific ideological position, such as the question of Western Sahara.

A recent example is the ‘4th Permanent Seminar on Human Rights in Western Sahara’, currently being organised by the University of Cádiz. This type of activity is nothing new; in fact, they have been organised relatively frequently for years in different Spanish public universities, but they raise serious ethical, political and economic questions that deserve critical analysis.

These activities are even more common, if that is possible, in the universities located in the traditional fiefdoms of the Polisario Front in Spain. For example, in the Basque Country, they take place almost monthly. In the Canary Islands they are also quite common. For example, in November 2022 the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (ULPGC) held a conference to promote Saharawi culture, a title that disguised the true political content of the event. Also at the University of La Laguna, in two events in 2023 and 2024, with a documentary screening included. This Tenerife university has even allowed itself the luxury of signing a collaboration agreement last February with the Canarian Association of Friendship with the Saharawi People (ACAPS) to promote cooperation, teaching and research projects related to the Polisario cause.

But it is not only in the fiefdoms of the Polisario Front that these events take place, they are held in all the public universities in Spain. If we take my alma mater, the University of Murcia, as an example, we find a huge number of events over the last decade. One example that was excessive was the two events that took place in 2013 just six months apart (March and October), with a tent set up in the middle of the campus, where all kinds of information was provided, and with the presence of local and regional authorities entertaining the Polisario leaders present there. These events have continued to be held until today, with the recent ‘Saharawi Film Days 2025’ last February.

To close the chapter of examples, and at the height of absurdity and brazenness, the University of Zaragoza hosted the ‘Training Days for Polisario Front delegates in Spain’ last November 2024. To put it jokingly, it would be something like a ‘crash course in how to be a Polisario leader in Spain. Sponsored by UNIZAR’. And it was held in none other than its most emblematic location, the Paraninfo building, the institutional headquarters of the various governing bodies of the University of Zaragoza.

In short, whatever the case, wherever it was and whatever the format, the pattern is the same: selection of like-minded speakers, public funding for militant causes and students turned into a captive audience for prefabricated narratives.

2. Biased use of public resources

Public universities are mainly financed with public funds, coming from taxes paid by citizens with a wide diversity of opinions and political positions. However, activities such as these events or seminars imply a use of these resources to promote a narrative that does not necessarily reflect that plurality. Beyond the greater or lesser amount that is allocated to them. In this case, the event takes an explicit stance on a complex international conflict, ignoring the multiple existing perspectives. All this in a context where Spanish universities face chronic problems of underfunding, as recent reports show.

In fact, at the last Conference of Rectors of Spanish Universities (CRUE), held at the University of Murcia last November, its president, Eva Alcón, pointed out that to overcome the funding gap that separates the Spanish University System from Europe, an additional 4 billion euros would be needed. Therefore, allocating resources to an overload of ideologically biased events seems like an unnecessary and poorly prioritised luxury.

3. Public spaces as political platforms

Universities are spaces dedicated to education and impartial research. However, by organising events that promote a specific narrative, as is the case with this latest seminar at the University of Cádiz, they become political forums disguised as academic activities.

These events exemplify a dangerous trend in Spanish academia: the use of public funds to turn educational institutions into platforms for one-way propaganda. Under the guise of specialised training, the series of events taking place in Cádiz offers an intellectual menu serving only one side of the conflict: that of the Polisario Front and its allies.

The programme reveals a carefully designed narrative engineering. Speakers include the Polisario's usual media satellites in Spain, as well as leaders such as Mohamed Salem Daha, Saharawi delegate for Andalusia, and Galia Djimi, a well-known activist linked to the Polisario. The sessions include screenings of selected documentaries and workshops where the sole topic of analysis will be ‘Moroccan repression’, with no space for voices questioning the Polisario's management of the Tindouf camps or its authoritarian record.

4. The elephant in the classroom: the Polisario's record

It is paradoxical that institutions that preach human rights systematically fail to analyse the dark side of those they present as heroic victims. The Polisario Front, founded in 1973, has a record that would make any serious educator blush:

The so-called ‘black decade’ of the Polisario Front, referring to the period between 1976 and 1986, during which this organisation carried out numerous attacks and terrorist acts against civilians, causing hundreds of victims, mainly Spanish, but also from other countries. These attacks were centred on two main groups: workers at the Fosbucraa phosphate mines in the Sahara and Spanish fishermen who fished in the waters of the Canary-Saharan fishing bank.
In the Tindouf camps, managed as personal fiefdoms, restrictions on freedom of movement, expression and any kind of dissent are documented, as well as various forms and types of repression, including arbitrary detention, torture and indefinite confinement in the inhumane Rashid prison. A Human Rights Watch report entitled ‘Human Rights in Western Sahara and the Tindouf Refugee Camps’ documents this well, and reveals how political dissidents are imprisoned and suffer social marginalisation.
Its pseudo-hereditary power structure since 1976 with the ‘dynasty’ of Mohamed Abdelaziz and Brahim Ghali at the helm, and with barely a handful of leaders rotating in positions of power for half a century, lacks basic democratic mechanisms. Elections for president of the self-proclaimed Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR) are held without serious international observers and with single candidacies, except on the last occasion, when Bachir Mustafa Sayed stood as a rival for the sake of appearances.

These facts, widely documented by neutral organisations, are conspicuous by their absence from the academic programmes of any Spanish university. Instead, students are offered a watered-down version of these events, in which the Polisario appears as an impeccable liberation movement, omitting its transformation into a bureaucratic apparatus that keeps tens of thousands of refugees in a permanent state of limbo in order to preserve its raison d'être: the economic management of the camps and the benefits that this brings to its leaders.

5. The engineering of sympathy: techniques of covert indoctrination

Analysing the practical module of the seminar in Cadiz, we discovered examples of worrying techniques:

Emotional use of testimonies: the session on ‘Women and Human Rights’ presents Saharawi activists, but omits that the Polisario maintains a family code that restricts basic women's rights, contradicting its progressive rhetoric and its claim to be an egalitarian society. In this sense, we have the dozens of cases of abductions of women who had previously participated in the Holidays in Peace programme.
Binary moralisation: by dividing the conflict between ‘Moroccan oppressors’ and ‘Saharawi victims’, it is silenced that Algeria —a key sponsor of the Polisario— has been violating the basic rights of refugees for decades. Not to mention that in Spain it is often omitted that it is a bloodthirsty gerontocratic military dictatorship.
Construction of common enemies: the workshop on ‘media’ accuses Morocco of censorship, but does not mention that only allied media, such as SADR TV or Sahara Press Service, operate in the territories controlled by the Polisario Front. And when a foreign media organisation does travel to the territory, it does so either because it is close to the Polisario's ideas and therefore able to carry out propaganda work, or because it is controlled and guided so that it only sees what the Polisario is interested in.

This approach turns university classrooms into activism laboratories where, under the umbrella of human rights, a Manichean and decontextualised vision of a dispute that has multiple edges is inoculated, but which are conveniently inhibited under the narrative of the single thought that the Polisario and its allies knew how to install well decades ago. The result is generations of graduates who repeat slogans instead of analysing conflicts, just the opposite of what the university should be doing.

6. The real cost of academic militancy

But the damage goes beyond the economic. These events go much further:

They delegitimise academia: when a course on international law only features jurists such as Juan Soroeta (Polisario's lawyer before the EU Court of Justice), it loses scientific credibility. By now we all know who is who in this dispute.
They polarise the campus: there have been several occasions when attempts have been made to hold events of a similar nature from a more neutral perspective. But as soon as it became public knowledge, they were arbitrarily labelled as pro-Moroccan and the university itself backed down due to external pressure, or tried to be boycotted by certain teaching or student representation positions.
They infantilise students: by offering simplistic analyses of multicausal conflicts, students are denied the tools to understand complex geopolitical realities.

7. Alternatives for a pluralistic university

The solution is not to avoid controversial issues, but to address them rigorously:

Include former representatives of the Polisario who disagreed with the leadership, or simply former residents of Tindouf who criticise the Polisario's management. An example could be a member of the Movement Saharawi for Peace, among many others.
Contrast sources: if, for example, the aforementioned HRW report on alleged Moroccan violations is analysed, its document on Polisario abuses in the camps should also be discussed. This is never done. From outside the camps, on this side of the Strait, the perception of the Polisario is pure fiction. In this country, for the vast majority, it is as if those who govern this population that suffers the inclemency and rigours of the desert were untainted in their management, also pretending to be victims. A condition that only corresponds to that population.
Prioritise the scientific method: instead of activist workshops, empirical research should be promoted using different research methodologies.

As long as universities continue to be megaphones for one-way activism, they will betray their essence as spaces for critical thinking. The seminar in Cadiz is not an isolated case, but a symptom of a systemic disease: the ideological colonisation of institutions that should be beacons of pluralism.