Sultana Khaya is covered in bruises. The deep purple welts run up her legs and across her arms — the result of one of many beatings she says she’s received from the police.
Her crime is calling for independence for Western Sahara, a Colorado-size territory in southwest Morocco, where many of the indigenous people have been fighting for self-determination for nearly four decades.
In 2011, the Arab Spring revolutions swept away many of the rulers in North Africa. But the royal regime of Morocco is firmly in place because of reforms that have made an uprising less likely and independence for the disputed desert people of Western Sahara even less so.
“We are protesting here for independence and the return of the refugees around the world in order to construct a country,” says the prominent Western Saharan human rights activist Mohammed Daddach.
Advocates for independence say the Arab Spring began not in Tunisia as is commonly reported but at the Gdeim Izik protest camp in Western Sahara in 2010 when thousands of pro-independence activists gathered to voice objections to discrimination, human rights abuses and poverty. Mass protests hit the rest of the country in February 2011.
The difference here is that the demonstrations failed to gain momentum.
Morocco is unlike the deposed rulers of those countries, whose regimes were foisted upon the people in recent history. The royal family of Morocco first came to power nearly 500 years ago and its past has much to do with Morocco’s present.
“The Moroccan monarchy has been around for hundreds of years and that goes a long way,” says Alexis Arieff, analyst in African affairs at the Library of Congress. “Many Moroccans fear that without the monarchy, Morocco would fall apart and be divided tribally and ethnically.”
Moroccans trace their lineages back to Arab invaders, Berber tribesman and indigenous Africans, all brought under the Alaouite Dynasty in the 17th century. Its Barbary pirates were feared the world over, and it was the first to recognize the United States as a nation independent from England.
The monarchy resisted colonization by the French and Spanish and in the 1950s won independence for the country. The current king, Mohammed VI, is thus part of a dynasty that has ruled Morocco since the 1600s and that traces its origins to the Islamic prophet Mohammed, meaning the king is not just head of state but an important religious leader.
Arab kingdoms such as Morocco, Jordan and Saudi Arabia have proved much more durable than republics, and Morocco’s combination of reform and credibility seems to have succeeded.
“The monarchy goes both ways: They can claim religious legitimacy and they can claim modernization legitimacy,” Arieff says.
Some experts credit the king’s deft handling of the first signs of dissent for his resilience. When protesters took the streets in February 2011, he drafted a new constitution and called elections. When the moderately Islamist Justice and Development Party won the elections, the king appointed its leader, Abdelilah Benkirane, prime minister.
Moroccan officials say changes in response to the citizenry date back even further.
“We have started our reform process more than 10 years ago. Today we are consolidating,” explains Youssef Amrani, minister-delegate for foreign affairs. “We were listening to our people. We have political parties, we have trade unions, we have civil society. We have the leadership and the legitimacy — nobody was putting into question the role of the king.”
Geography also plays a part in the survival of the current system. Morocco is 12 miles from Spain and thousands of miles from the unrest of the Middle East. Dividing it from the revolutionary fervor of Libya and Egypt is Algeria, a closed and secretive nation that went through a grim and violent civil war in the 1990s and whose government appears to have crushed the revolutionary impulses in its society.
However, despite reforms, the Moroccan king still retains charge of the military and religious authorities, and dissent continues to be punished.
Seventy of the activists who protested against the regime during the 2011 demonstrations remain in prison and a popular rapper, “El Haqed,” recently spent a year in jail for penning a song about police corruption.
But there is comparatively little pressure on the regime to change, and even in volatile Western Sahara people are calling for independence not revolution.
Daddach says the people here don’t wish to sweep away the rulers as has happened in Tunisia, Libya and Egypt to their east.
“What we work for is peaceful demonstrations with no violence, no stone-throwing and with no words that would touch the dignity of the Moroccan sacred elements — God, the homeland and the king,” he says.
Some simply want better working conditions. One of the greatest grievances of the Western Saharan people, known as the Saharawi, is that their land’s resources such as ample fishing reserves and valuable phosphorus mines are exploited by the Moroccan state with little benefit for the native residents.
But there is little high-level international interest in pressing the Western Sahara issue.
“Morocco is a very close ally of France and the United States; Paris and Washington don’t want to jeopardize their excellent security and economic cooperation with Rabat, which could be the cost of forcing peace in Western Sahara,” says Jacob Mundy, assistant professor at Colgate University and author of Western Sahara: War, Nationalism and Conflict Irresolution.
“It’s not going to be resolved until there is a crisis. Something major has to happen to shake things up.”
Sultana Khaya still refuses to give up hope.
“This will not slow me down,” she says. “I’m still determined to go on and to continue the struggle.”
