Edoovillage #1411 - Algeria, Tindouf: Technology Center in the Refugee Camps

The first technology center in the refugee camps. http://saharauiinfo.byethost5.com
Set deep in the desert outside Tindouf, Algeria, the Sahrawi refugee camps are a remote yet lively political hub. The camps are home to 173,000 refugees of a forgotten conflict: an older generation who remember the war against Morocco from 1975 to 1991, and a younger generation born in the camps since the latter year’s ceasefire agreement. All are active in the struggle for a return to the disputed territory of Western Sahara, a 100,000-square-mile coastal stretch of desert now mostly controlled by Morocco. The camps resemble other Saharan settlements, with trucks threading through low sand-clad structures and herds of camels, goats and sheep grazing the desert bush. But their politics are unique: the Polisario Front, a military and political movement formed in the early 1970s to fight for independence for Western Sahara, controls them

Living conditions in the seven Tindouf camps have improved a great deal since 1976, when Sahrawi refugees first fled here from fighting between the Polisario and the Moroccan army. With the men in combat, nomad women, with no experience in administration, had to set up rudimentary structures for social welfare. Over the next 40 years, the camps grew and the Polisario invested heavily in education and health. In the past several years, more schools – including kindergartens, a film school and an arts academy – and clinics have popped up, and six of the seven camps have been connected to electricity grids. With electrification, access to the Internet – and its galaxy of virtual worlds – has become widely available.

But while some doors have opened, others are closing. The international assistance upon which the camps rely is shrinking: an aid worker said annual donations had dropped from $10 million to $7 million over the past several years. Jobs in the camps are scarce. A senior Polisario defence official said an unusually high number of youths, perhaps 500, left the camps in mid-2017 in search of work. In general, though, opportunities for legal migration to Europe – normally to Spain, the former colonial power in Western Sahara – are fewer. Between aid reduction and ambient despair, the Polisario risks losing control of the generation born and raised in the camps. “Without work and without money.

Meanwhile, the Internet allows youths to express themselves outside of traditional channels. “There’s a sense of transition from a mass movement to something less centralised”, a 30-year-old video blogger and activist said. Social media is tying refugees more tightly to Sahrawis living in the parts of Western Sahara controlled by Morocco, with activists circulating mobile phone videos of Moroccan repression