Word: polisarios
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...fondness for the bold flourish. He took over part of the Spanish Sahara in 1975 by exhorting 350,000 Moroccans to march unarmed into the disputed territory while Spanish soldiers looked on in disbelief. He gained the upper hand in his eight-year desert war with the Marxist Polisario guerrillas by enclosing almost half of the 103,000-sq.-mi. Western Sahara with a 750-mile-long wall of sand and rock. Just last month he caught Western leaders off balance yet again by signing a treaty of friendship with Libya's notorious Muammar Gaddafi. Says a West European...
...liaison, of course, has less to do with amity than with convenience. Hassan seeks Libyan oil dollars to cure his country's economic ills and wants to ensure that Gaddafi does not resume his support of the Polisario guerrillas that have plagued Morocco since 1976. Gaddafi hopes to end Libya's political isolation, especially from its nearest neighbors; he was nettled by his exclusion from a friendship treaty signed by Algeria, Tunisia and Mauritania...
...Sudan, the story is much the same: 518 fighters arrived in August, and only 370 remain today. The Palestinians who live in tents at Mashtal el Bassatin, a Nile village 120 miles north of Khartoum, occasionally call themselves Polisario, after the desert guerrillas of northwestern Africa. Says one: "We did not choose to come here." Discipline at Mashtal el Bassatin has broken down only once: on the day the fighters heard over the radio of the Beirut massacre. Outraged, some of the men set their tents on fire. About 100 of them had relatives in the two Beirut camps...
...Gaddafi it was to be a major event: according to a decision made at the 1981 summit in Nairobi, the Tripoli gathering would confirm his installation as O.A.U. chairman for one year. But Gaddafi alienated a number of moderate African states by helping to engineer the recognition of the Polisario guerrilla movement, which opposes Morocco's 1976 annexation of the Western Sahara, as the O.A.U.'s 51st member. As a result, only 21 heads of state showed up, and Gaddafi did not get the quorum of 34 necessary to hold a summit. Last week he tried and failed...
...what appeared to be a conciliatory gesture, Gaddafi announced before the scheduled meeting that Polisario representatives had "voluntarily and temporar ily" withdrawn both from the rescheduled summit and from a preliminary gathering in Tripoli of African foreign ministers. In response, 44 national delegations turned up for the initial gathering. Then the posturing began. In a welcoming speech, Gaddafi exposed his territorial ambitions in northern Africa by proposing to abandon one of the O.A.U.'s most sacred principles: the inviolability of the national borders inherited from Africa's former colonial powers...