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Western Sahara: Anatomy of a Stalemate? Second Edition. By Erik Jensen. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2012. Pp. 181; maps, bibliography, index. $42.50 cloth, $16.95 paper.
In late August 2012, Kerry Kennedy, the daughter of the former United States Senator and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, visited both the Moroccan-occupied Western Sahara as well as the refugee camps in the Tindouf region of Algeria operated by the proindependence Polisario Front. What she found in her survey of the territory in her capacity as head of the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights was chilling but unsurprising: a police presence on nearly every street corner in the territorial capital of ElAyoun; a near-blanket prohibition on questioning the legitimacy of the occupation, much less advocating an independent Western Saharan state; long periods of pretrial detention for dissidents and protesters, sometimes followed by an appearance before a military tribunal instead of a civil court; and nearly routine mistreatment and harassment. In an incident publicized on the internet as well as in an article in the New York Times (October 9, 2012), Ms. Kennedy, her seventeen-year-old daughter Marian, and RFK Center staff personally witnessed the beating of a Saharawi woman in El-Ayoun by Moroccan security forces, who then unsuccessfully tried to stop the incident from being photographed. The RFK Center delegation was always shadowed by police, and was apparently the target of what Ms. Kennedy described as a "smear campaign."
The conditions in Western Sahara encountered by the members of the RFK Center bear directly upon the proposals advanced by Morocco and some...