Polisario leadership elections

In the Polisario's XII General Popular Congress in Tifariti, voting has now begun for the National Secretariat.

The NS is the Polisario's highest body between congresses, its "government" so to speak, and rather more important than the Sahrawi Republic's actual exile government -- although they're not always all that easy to tell apart. Polisario and SADR structures are still very much entangled, and many members will hold key posts in both organs.

The race for the post of Secretary-General -- i. e. head of the NS, and by constitutional fiat also SADR president -- is not terribly exciting, since the eternal (?) Mr. Mohammed Abdelaziz will be running unopposed. In a way, that is more credible than at the XI GPC in 2003, when three pretend-competitors were put up for show, and he crushed them all with a mubarakesque 92%, but still it leaves very little to the imagination. Then again, perhaps the Sahrawis just want nothing less than their Algerian and Moroccan neighbors: blatantly unfair head-of-state elections (or none at all) is apparently an attribute of statehood in these quarters.

[picture: now who could he be voting for?]

For the remaining 28 NS posts, however, there are a full 146 candidates. The smart money is on none of the longtime leaders losing his post: think of names like Mohammed Lamine El Bouhali, Emhamed Khaddad, Abdelkader Taleb Oumar, Mahfoud Ali Beiba, and a few others. Most of them hold the real reins of power, in the government-within-the-government, the seven-man Presidium of the NS. This body has survived under different names since the 1970s with remarkably little change in personnel, despite some deaths and defections, and one instance of massive structural reform in the early 1990s, when the worst one-partyisms were dismantled and the internal human rights situation set straighter. Instead, these men of power just keep rotating posts between them, with Abdelaziz at the apex of the pyramid, and a distinctively second-rank layer of ordinary NS members below.

[picture: a meeting of the outgoing national secretariat]

But beside these stalwarts, there remains quite a few posts up for grabs, to the extent that internal democracy works at this level. We'll see what happens. Also, at the last congress it was established a quota for the occupied territories -- or the liberated southern provinces, in Moroccan parlance -- from where an additional twelve secret candidates arrive. How exactly they are appointed remains a mystery, since open elections would be nothing but an invitation to the Black Prison in El Aaiún. While some people indicate they are elected amongst themselves through the underground networks of Polisario at that side of the Wall, I think direct appointments may also be a valid guess.