Hubert Höllmüller
An Austrian social work project in Western Sahara 
Received 16 June 2020, accepted 10 December 2020
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Report
Western Sahara is a territory in northwest Africa, bordered by Morocco, Al-
geria, Mauritania, and the Atlantic Ocean. In 1963, the United Nations asked 
Spain as the colonial power of Western Sahara, to decolonize the territory. But 
Spain did not answer this call, instead it handed the colony to the neighboring 
countries Morocco and Mauretania. In reaction, the Sahrawi people proclaimed 
the Democratic Arab Republic of Western Sahara or DARS. After the invasion 
of Morocco in the north and of Mauretania in the south, part of the people fled 
to Algeria and erected several refugee camps that exist to this day.
According to Dreven, Poprask in Ramšak (2019), a military conflict ensued. 
Mauretania retreated in 1985 and Morocco took over this area and succeeded 
in permanently occupying about 80% of the Western Sahara, and the DARS 
was left with around 20%. Morocco brought in several hundred thousand of 
its citizens. To cut off the 20% rest of Western Sahara, a 2700 km long wall 
known as “the Berm,” surrounded by millions of land mines was built. In 
1991, the United Nations brokered a ceasefire agreement and established a 
peacekeeping mission, the MINURSO, which has been monitoring the ceasefire 
and the buffer zone along the Berm for 29 years, but without any mandate 
to monitor the human rights situation in the occupied area. A referendum 
should have been carried out, but it hasn’t happened. The UN finished the 
register of voters, but Morocco refuses to accept it.
Western Sahara is to this day the largest territory on the UN’s list of Non-
-Self-Governing Territories by both land area and population. The Western 
Saharan conflict is fundamentally a question of decolonization: an anomaly in 
an otherwise successful process of the decolonization of Africa. The territory 
is therefore often referred to as “the last African colony”.
The Sahrawi refugee camps were first established in this harsh and in-
hospitable desert plain during 1975 and 1976 by Sahrawi refugees fleeing 
from advancing Moroccan forces. The land was offered freely by the Algerian 
government, but it is subject to scorching temperatures, frequent sandstorms, 
and lack of vegetation. It is often referred to as “the Devil’s Garden.” The last 
official counting of the UN (in 2019) showed up a figure of 173.000 people 
living permanently in the camps.
As one of the last unresolved decolonization issues on Earth, Western Saha-
ra should be one of the international community’s most urgent priorities. 
A situation of refuge and exile, imagined to be temporary, has in this case 
become a permanent status quo. This frozen conflict has an increasing 
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potential of again turning violent, as frustration and hopelessness take root 
in Sahrawi refugee communities, especially among the youth. In a world 
of growing instabilities, preventing such an escalation in favor of peaceful 
means of conflict resolution should be in everyone’s best interest. (Dreven, 
Poprask in Ramšak, 2019, p. 82 ff)
      Charcoal drawing of the refugee camp by E. Sorgo.
The conflict could be solved easily by the European Union. All the big ex-co-
lonial countries in Europe could put an end to the last African colony. But the 
official France and Spain have good ties with Morocco, so instead of putting 
political and economic pressure they are intervening against any diplomatic 
efforts to bring the conflict to public’s awareness. One of the last examples is 
the Austrian Parliament, where representatives of all parties in March 2018 
proposed a motion for a resolution on human rights monitoring of MINURSO 
(the UN mission for the Western Sahara) in the occupied territory and for the 
referendum referring to all UN resolutions, but after diplomatic interventions 
the parliament didn’t proclaim anything. 
The conflict of Western Sahara contains some ingredients to be a good 
practice example for refugee work in Northern Africa: 173,600 self-organized 
refugees live in their camps near Tindouf in Algeria. They have established 
an educational system and a basic health system. Most of them don’t want to 
go to Europe. Their religion is a moderate independent Islam and their state 
in exile strives for democratic values. But the Sahrawi people have the big 
misfortune of having 80% of their territory, now under Moroccan rule, full of 
natural resources and with rich fishing grounds. In their resistance to Morocco, 
they were successful enough to be offered a ceasefire in 1991 and a referen-
dum on legal status of Western Sahara. Friedhard Teuffel (2018), a journalist, 
explains why this Western Sahara conflict is ignored in European discourses:
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Based on UN resolutions, there should have been a referendum on the 
status of Western Sahara, which could bring back the territory to the Sa-
hrawi. But it hasn’t happened so far. And from where should the pressure 
come to organize it? There is little the Sahrawi can do. Their situation is 
severe, but not catastrophic. Most of them depend on food donations of 
the world food program. Diseases and diabetes are increasing. In the re-
fugee camps, tents were transformed into mud huts. […] Morocco on the 
other hand has made its profit out of the natural resources of the Western 
Sahara and settled it with Moroccans. The referendum is inhibited by the 
question who would be allowed to vote. […] Morocco can do what it wants 
with the Western Sahara, as nobody wants to start a head-to-head contest 
with Morocco because of some 160,000 nomads. Recently Morocco has 
got a new fishery agreement with the EU, including the coasts of Western 
Sahara, even though the European Court of Justice decided that any fishery 
agreement has to exclude Western Sahara. The EU Commission does not 
seem to be bothered. A crucial factor is, that Morocco is a passing country 
for refugees on their way to Europe. This strengthens its position, despite 
reports that this north African state deports refugees into the desert. So 
the Sahrawi remain in their refugee settlements, which exist for too long 
to be provisional, but should not be permanent.
In 2012, the Western Sahara Government founded the University of Tifariti, as 
the first university located in refugee camps, and the rector Jatari Hamudi was 
invited by the Carinthian University of Applied Sciences (CUAS) to sign a coo-
peration agreement. With this contract, CUAS applied for an Erasmus program 
and the Austrian National Agency accepted the argument that as the refugee 
camps are located in Algeria and Algeria is one of the countries eligible in the 
program, an academic exchange can be carried out. In 2017/2018 students 
and professors from the camps and from Carinthia visited each other. After this 
first step, the Carinthian regional government funded a project, where young 
       Photo 1: International meeting with Hubert Höllmüller (in the middle).
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Sahrawi academics should develop research designs related to the camps 
and social issues there. Following the proposals of Sahrawi colleagues, the 
University of Tifariti made a call for applicants for four one-year scholarships 
for young female academics in the field of social sciences.
The first hearing was organized in Boujdour in June 2018, where two stu-
dents were chosen, and the second hearing in January 2019, where the other 
two students were selected. In January the first seminar started on scientific 
research principles in the camps and the second took place in June 2019 also 
in the camps about the first research ideas.
Two of the young academics were invited to Carinthia and to the partner 
universities in Ljubljana and Cologne, and in February 2020 the last workshop 
took place in the camps. During the year, there were ongoing contacts via 
skype, email and WhatsApp.
The names of researchers: Khadija Mumu, Nuna Mohamed, Raaba Ahmed 
Ali, Salamo Omar, Rhageb Ahmed Baba, Majidi Mohamed Bouzid (coordina-
tor), Fatimetu Sidi Mohamed (Education Professor at the University of Tifariti)
Major research topics which were discussed by Sahrawi researchers were 
the following: 
• political attitudes of Sahrawi youth in the refugee camps,
• danger of whitening cosmetics for young Sahrawi women,
• relation of children to their fathers during parental divorce,
• mute and deaf children in the camps,
• ideas of war invalids in the Polisario center for war invalids,
• women and men in wheelchairs in the camps doing sports,
• wishes and worries of kindergarten teachers, educated in Austria, working 
and living in the refugee camps,
• day nursery for children between 0 and 2,
• what makes young Sahrawis disconnect with the refugee society and po-
litical authorities.
Researcher Salamo Omar came to the first workshop with an elaborated 
questionnaire for Sahrawi youth regarding their democratic values. He desi-
gned questions to assess: do they respect freedom of opinion and thinking; 
do they respect others regardless of intellectual extremism and affiliation; 
do they respect others regardless of their religious/nonreligious orientation; 
do they respect others regardless of their sexual orientation; do they accept 
the opinions opposing their opinion and discuss them; do they believe in the 
diversity of political and cultural ideas; what do they think of violence; and 
does democracy conflict with the values and customs of their society.
Researcher Raaba Ahmed Ali worked on this research topic very inde-
pendently. She wanted to make young Sahrawi women question the ideals 
of pale skin as an expression of beauty and to alert women about the risks of 
using non-medical bleaching creams. After carrying out 100 interviews, she 
found out that there is no regulation by the authorities to avoid the selling 
of harmful cosmetics. Most young Sahrawi women confirm that pale skin 
is regarded as beautiful, but only a smaller part agrees with this statement.
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       Photo 2: Interviewing.
Raaba Ahmed Ali also worked on a second research question about family 
disintegration. The Sahrawi society is facing the phenomenon of family disin-
tegration due to unstable situation and the state of wars. Her research goals 
were to know the effects and dimensions of family disintegration, to under-
stand what the causes of family disintegration are – social, cultural, political 
or religious, and is family disintegration linked to the enormous changes that 
have affected social life in Sahrawi society?
Austrian students Lisa Bebek and Franziska Syme who spent their Eras-
mus semester at the University of Tifariti, carried out an action research in 
the Sahrawi refugee camp focusing on the kindergarten educators trained in 
Austria. The main findings from their report: there is a big need of meetings 
and exchange among the kindergarten educators, which has not been met. 
The educators complain about the new standard from the Algerian Ministry 
of Education that kindergarten should be run like a pre-school where children 
are not allowed to play but instead should learn how to write and read and 
calculate in a very strict structure. The educators who were partly trained in 
Austria, were taught there that playing is the central element of any kinder-
garten program. They learnt the importance of a good day-structure and that 
there has to be a balance between activity and recovery.
Lisa Bebek wrote in her personal protocol the following: 
We realized very soon that the women had the need to talk and to tell us 
about their worries. So we decided to start every workshop with small 
group discussions where they had to write down their biggest worries 
about their everyday work with the children. Thus we were informed 
that the curriculum, which was elaborated by Austrian professionals, was 
abolished and that since three years the curriculum of the Algerian kinder-
garten-system, which is much more a curriculum for primary school, has 
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to be executed. The women really were desperate and felt left alone. They 
also were concerned that the now missing physical activities could harm 
the children and that the strict learning could inhibit the development of 
social competences.
As representatives of an Austrian university, we learnt much more during this 
project than the young researchers from the refugee camps. From a sociological 
point of view, the life in the refugee camps shows a kind of unnormal normality 
as there are housings, roads, taxis, schools, shops and also bureaucracy and 
social networks crossing tribal structures. Improvements on their social and 
political structures in the reality of the refugee camps should be addressed.
It has been shown that the critical inner perspective on the Sahrawi refu-
gee society exists and that the young generation of the scientific community 
there knows exactly where the main problems lie and how they can – and 
have to – be made visible by research. Three of the researchers are actually 
in Europe to follow their individual plans and dreams – a big loss for the Sa-
hrawi scientific community. Hopefully, opportunities might pop up for them 
to go back to the camps to work on the central research question: what are 
the reasons for the young generation to distance itself from the structures of 
the Sahrawi society and how to prevent it so that the Sahrawi refugee society 
will not disintegrate?
Luckily, in July 2020, we got the information that another Erasmus+ 
program with the University of Tifariti has been accepted by the Austrian 
National Agency.
Sources
Dreven, S., Poprask, C., & Ramšak, R. (2019). The everyday reality of Saharawi people in the 
exile. In H. Höllmüller et al., Erasmus goes Westsahara. (pp. 82–126). Klagenfurt/Celovec: 
Drava.
Teuffel, F. (2018). Die vergessenen Flüchtlinge der Saharaui. Der Tagespiegel, 12 September 
2018. Retrieved on 14 December 2020 from https://www.tagesspiegel.de/politik/migrati-
on-in-afrika-die-vergessenen-fluechtlinge-der-saharaui/23015262.html