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Western Sahara

The Refugee Nation

University of Wales Press

From Cuba to Villa Cisneros: The Construction of a Spanish Neocolonial Space in the Sahara

The end of the Spanish Empire ...

1898 was 'more than a year in Spanish history'. The 'Disaster of 98' was the turning point that symbolically marked the loss of the position that Spain had held for the last four centuries as a major global power. The progressive decadence of the Spanish Empire had started almost a century before with the Latin American wars of independence and the loss of the mainland possessions during the first decades of the nineteeth century. However, the Spanish political, social and military elites resisted the idea of the end of the empire, considering it 'as only a temporary setback. There was a widespread belief ... that the cultural and ideological ties binding Spain and Spanish America were so strong that their erstwhile American subjects would eventually return to the fold.' In fact, Spain made several unsuccessful attempts to recover, or at least to keep a privileged patronage, over parts of mainland Spanish America between 1840 and 1860, culminating in the temporary annexation of Santo Domingo in 1861. On the other hand, the three key remaining possessions – Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines – were gradually incorporated 'into the economy and the politics of the Empire with much more intensity', in what Josep Fradera has identified as an attempt to shift from an old-style imperial system to a new, and more efficient in economic terms, neocolonial system.

However, despite the 'temporary setbacks' of the beginning of the century, in 1870s the list of Spanish possessions across the world was commensurable with that of the emerging colonial powers and still considerable:

Cuba and Puerto Rico in the Caribbean; the Philippine Islands and a sprinkling of other ... islands in the Pacific, the Marianas, the Pelew islands, and Carolines. [The] old historic possessions of Ceuta and Melilla on the northern coast of Morocco and the Canary Islands off the coast of north-west Africa. [T]he protectorate of Ifni in Southern Morocco, the two small islands of Fernando Poo and Annobon in the Gulf of Guinea off the west coast of Africa and the small coastal enclave of Rio Muni opposite them, through which trade with equatorial Africa passed.

The rise of the independence movements in Cuba and the Philippines in the following decades was not considered as a serious threat by the Spanish political elites until very late on. In fact, even at the beginning of the Cuban War in 1895, there were very few Spanish intellectuals and politicians who anticipated the final outcome of the conflict. However, in 1896, one year after the beginning of the revolt, despite the promises of the Spanish government to finish quickly with the insurrection and the strategy of 'total war' under the command of General Valeriano Weyler, the situation was far from sorted out and had become much more complicated than before. 'The prolongation and extension of the colonial conflict were unequivocal symptoms of the failure of the political strategies employed to its possible resolution.' Despite the theoretical superiority of the Spanish army and some significant and symbolic setbacks for the insurrectionists, such as the death of rebel black General Antonio Maceo, the war became a slow but unmanageable drainage of Spanish soldiers and economic resources. More than 200,000 troops were sent to the Caribbean island, most of them poorly trained and equipped reservists, which generated agitated debates in the press, demonstrations of soldiers' relatives who opposed the distant war and a general climate plagued with doubts as the months passed without a clear prospect of victory. The popular support for the wars in Cuba and the Philippines decreased dramatically as the number of Spanish casualties increased. In Cuba alone, more than 60,000 soldiers died, according to most accounts. Of them, fewer than 5,000 were killed in battle, or as the military would put it at the time 'with honour'. The rest, probably more than 55,000, died as a result of diseases, principally cases of yellow fever, which increased the exotic images (in this case in negative terms) of the overseas possessions as a sort of undomesticated, uncivilized and unmanageable territory and, in many respects, acted as a moral justification for the 'dirty war' developed by the Spanish military against a non-conventional enemy in a non-conventional environment.

In April 1898, the declaration of war on Spain by the United States, under the pretext of supporting the Cuban and Philippine insurrectionists, was the definitive turning point in the conflict. By December, Spain had been defeated by the American army and forced to sign the humiliating Treaty of Paris, by which Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines were ceded to the United States. Soon afterwards, Spain was also forced to sell the Pacific island of Guam to the United States and the rest of the Micronesian possessions – the Northern Mariana, Caroline and Pelew Islands – to Germany. In a time when the power and wealth of nations seemed to be measured in terms of their capacity to construct domains of influence in other continents, the loss of the Caribbean and Pacific territories was met with dismay, frustration and anger by the Spanish cultural and socio-political elites.

The Disaster exposed as a terrible delusion the belief that Spain was at least a middle-ranking world power, a belief that was a central component of the national culture. The lost of the remnants of the Empire provoked a severe post-imperial crisis among sections of Spanish society ... Spain's political system, its national character, and Spanish nationhood itself now began to be widely questioned.

But, despite the catastrophe and the mixture of pessimism, nostalgia and resentment that it provoked, neither the Spanish government nor the Restorationist political system collapsed directly as a result. In fact, as José Varela Ortega argues, the effect of the Disaster could be interpreted precisely as the opposite in some respects. Due to the way in which the war with the United States was managed and lost in such an overwhelming and unquestionable manner, the general perception tended not towards linking the Disaster to the failure of a particular government but to 'understand[ing] [it] as a national problem' with deeper roots, as a 'national issue' more than a problem related to the incompetence of 'some politicians' in particular. The problem, as the intellectuals of the influential Generation of 1898 insisted, was Spain itself. Therefore, what was necessary to rethink and rearticulate was Spain, her national character, her history and her destiny, in the changing context of a fin de siècle marked by 'a global process of colonial redistribution in a new era of expansionism'. And, as in any time of crisis, characterized by dislocation, and by the collapse of the discourses and social imaginaries that had been hegemonic until then, the horizon was one of uncertainty, ambivalence and radical openness; a space when 'the horror of indetermination has manifested itself'. Spain and its position in the world needed to be re-inscribed in a new narrative in order to make sense of the present, to connect coherently with the past and to create a 'new space of representation' for the future. In this context, several contending alternatives emerged attempting to occupy the void opened with the confrontation with the Real, in Lacanian terms. If, on the one hand, some sectors of the Spanish elites adopted an escapist strategy, rejecting the imperial past and trying to find the Spanish essence inside the wide Castilian fields, on the other hand, the Disaster in the Caribbean and the Pacific reactivated the desire to explore new colonial horizons.

... And the new African adventure

In this new context, Africa emerged as a new space of possibilities for some sectors of the wounded Spanish elites and especially for the colonial military struggling to find a new strategic position.

If something was clear [after the Disaster] it was that only in Africa ... was it possible to consolidate possessions and positions. Neither in the Asian southwest nor in postcolonial America was it possible to compete with the interests of the European Powers or the United States ... Africa was the place, the space where the mirage of a new kind of colonization could take place after the new defeat of 1898.

As Sebastian Balfour points out, the 'new venture [in Africa] was a direct result of the insecurity felt by the Spanish political elites after the Spanish–American War'. Since the 1870s one of the main areas of competition of the European powers had been the 'Dark Continent', and Spain, despite being a decadent power, was in some respects well positioned to take part in the scramble for Africa. In addition to the cities of Ceuta and Melilla and the Canary Islands, under Spanish rule since the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, current Equatorial Guinea (Fernando Poo/Bioko Island and Rio Muni) had been ceded from Portugal to Spain in 1778 and had been a protectorate since 1885. In 1860, Spain had also been granted control of the Sidi-Ifni enclave (an old Spanish coastal possession between 1476 and 1524 called at that time Santa Cruz de la Mar Pequeña) on the southern Moroccan frontier, which had been obtained after the African War the previous year.

The African War of 1859 had been triggered by the attack on a defensive fort under construction on the outskirts of Ceuta by members of the Anyera tribe. In response, 'the Spanish army ... marched out ... to seize Tetuan and bomb Tangier [in the Rif region, in northern Morocco], forcing the sultan [of Morocco] to accept humiliating terms for peace in the following year'. The African War, which was very popular at the time, was seen as a demonstration of the military might that Spain still maintained after the loss of mainland Latin America. Also called 'the Romantic War', this victorious operation renewed, on the other hand, the interest of the Spanish elites in the unknown but close continent, and was used to symbolize the position of Spain as an international player that had to be taken into account. As writer Benito Pérez Galdós noted with irony in one of his acclaimed Episodios Nacionales: 'the Spanish went to war because they needed to show off ... in Europe and to provide public sentiment at home with some healthy and restoring food' aimed at creating 'some patriotic dogmatism for the souls in need of discipline and to be made more docile to political action'.

In addition, in the aftermath of the 1898 Disaster, Spanish interests in Morocco were favoured by the contending and at the same time coincident interests of France and Britain in the area. On the one hand, Britain was worried about a French-controlled northern Morocco which could challenge British strategic position in the Strait of Gibraltar and, therefore, considered the Spanish presence in the area as a good alternative; on the other, France saw Spain as a suitable ally with whom to share the North African cake without really putting in any danger its hegemony in the area, given Spanish structural weakness. Therefore, in the entente cordiale of 1904 between France and Britain, it was agreed that Spain would have a sphere of influence in northern Morocco, later formalized in the Algeciras Conference in 1906 and the Treaty of Fez in 1912, when the Rif, a mountainous region stretching over 300 kilometres along the Mediterranean, officially became the Spanish Protectorate of Morocco.

The Western Sahara had been recognized as a Spanish possession years before, in the Berlin Conference of 1884–5, although its limits were not clearly established until 1912 and the effective control of the whole territory did not take place until the 1930s. As we shall see, the control of the Western Sahara was limited during the first decades to a few coastal enclaves, stretching from Cape Juby (current Tarfaya) to Cape Blanco. In the post-Disaster era, the Spanish colonial efforts in north Africa were directed initially to the much better-known (although in general terms still unknown), close and strategically important territory of the Spanish protectorate in northern Morocco. But between 1909, the year of the first campaign, and 1927, the year when the protectorate was definitely 'pacified', the new Spanish colonial adventure faced stiff resistance from the Rifian cabilas (tribes), commanded by leaders such as El Rogui and Mohammed Amezian during the first years and by the charismatic Abd el-Krim during the 1920s war. In fact, Abd el-Krim managed to control most of the Spanish protectorate (and also part of the French areas) for several months in 1925 instituting an uncomfortable Rif Republic free from effective Spanish and French control and infringing humiliating and highly symbolic defeats to the nascent Spanish African army. For example, in the Mount Arruit and Annual disasters, several thousand retreating Spanish soldiers were massacred by the Rifian guerrillas. The new colonial adventure soon proved to be a very demanding enterprise and sank the army into a brutal conflict that would end up redefining the contours of the wounded post-1898 Spanish military and creating the new class of Spanish Africanists, among whom a young and successful general called Francisco Franco began to stand out. The Rifian campaigns created the bases of a new colonial army, driven by 'a spirit of compulsive revenge' against Abd el-Krim troops, and 'unleashed a wave of racism in the media'.

As the [Spanish] troops recaptured ... positions they were deeply distressed by scenes of massacre and devastation left by the retreating enemy. Amid the putrefaction of the rotting bodies, it was clear that many Spaniards had been killed after surrender and many had undergone savage torture.

The practice of beheading prisoners became common among the advancing Spanish African army, little difference was made between civilians and insurgents and bombings with chemical weapons, such as mustard gas, devastated large areas of the Rif countryside. The colonial adventure in Morocco developed into brutal confrontation and vicious repression, justified by the new Africanist army because of the 'uncivilized' nature of an enemy with whom the moral standards of warfare among 'civilized enemies' did not fully apply. The decadent armed forces of the nineteenth century, after almost two decades of war, were progressively transformed into an 'excellent operative force, led by an elite of special troops, conducted by competent officials and armed with the most modern means of combat'. However, the Africanist officers, although highly professional and well trained, were in general terms 'profoundly conservative, if not reactionary', and inherited from past military failures a feeling of 'bitterness, frustration and distance from the rest of society', as well as a deep lack of trust in civilian authorities and democratic institutions. The Africanist mystique, linked to the idea of restoring Spanish grandeur through sacrifice (a sacrifice that only the military were prepare to accept, as opposed to the decadent and essentially inactive bureaucrats and politicians), was a central element in the articulation of nationalist discourses that led to the 1936 rebellion against the Second Spanish Republic. As General Franco acknowledged later, '[w]ithout Africa, I can hardly explain myself to myself, nor can I explain myself appropriately to my comrades in arms'.

Tracing the boundaries of the new Spanish territories

The Africanist enterprise, in any case, cannot be understood exclusively as a military venture. In fact, the military Africanism introduced in the previous section emerged in the specific historical context of confrontation with the Rifian tribes, at a time when the Spanish military, after the 1898 Disaster and the rise of anti-militarism in some sectors of Spanish society, felt an overwhelming desire to recover its lost pride, under the attentive and critical gaze of both internal public opinion and the rest of the European powers. But the contours of Spanish neocolonial Africanist discourses, from which military Africanism later developed, were initially more linked to the creation of geographical societies, the influence of the romantic ideologies and writings in vogue during the second half of the nineteenth century that combined a fascination about the unknown and 'uncivilized' with a paternalistic 'civilizing' mission, and the pragmatic vision of opening new 'protected' markets in unexploited territories.

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Excerpted from Western Sahara by Pablo San Martín. Copyright © 2010 Pablo San Martín. Excerpted by permission of University of Wales Press.
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