- guardian.co.uk, Thursday 3 February 2000 02.01 GMT
The people who live here are victims of one of the world's most neglected conflicts. Another 150,000 of them linger in refugee camps across the border, near the Algerian town of Tindouf. All are waiting to see if one day they will be allowed a voice in their future.
"We don't know when it will happen," said Kher Ahmed, a former rebel fighter who now heads an aid organisation for families separated by the war. "All we've had is propaganda, propaganda, propaganda for years and years and years. Now with the new king, maybe things will change - but I'm not holding my breath."
It is now 25 years since King Hassan II of Morocco ordered 350,000 of his loyal subjects into this desolate north-west African territory, an area slightly bigger than Britain, to pressure the occupying Spanish forces to withdraw.
When they eventually did, the independence fighters of the rebel Polisario Front, armed and backed by Algeria, lost no time in declaring a Saharan Arab Democratic Republic in exile, and embarked on a sporadic war of attrition.
After one failed reconciliation attempt in 1981, a United Nations deal finally ended the fighting in 1990. It foresaw a ceasefire, an exchange of prisoners, a partial withdrawal of Moroccan troops and a referendum allowing the people of Western Sahara to choose between independence and integration with Morocco.
Ten years on, the region's estimated 300,000 inhabitants are still waiting for the poll, amid an extraordinary dispute about who is qualified to vote.
At first, the electorate was to consist of voters identified in a census by the Spanish in 1974. Then the UN decided to broaden the criteria by admitting members of all 88 clans of the 10 nomadic Saharan tribes listed in the Spanish survey.
Polisario objected furiously, considering it an attempt by Morocco to pad out the electorate with descendants of tribesmen who may have migrated elsewhere but who were likely to be loyal to Rabat.
Morocco argues that in a nomadic, largely illiterate society, the evidence of ties to the region and eligibility to vote can only realistically be based on oral testimony, rather than formal documents a quarter of a century old.
"We had examples in the same family of fathers being accepted and sons or brothers or aunts being rejected," said the Moroccan prime minister, Abdulrahman Youssoufi. "It was an absurd situation: under the original criteria the present leaders of Polisario themselves would not be eligible to vote."
For six years the two sides have been haggling over the cases of some 200,000 potential voters, under the glazed eyes of the 350-odd members of the UN mission for the referendum in western Sahara (Minurso).
It is an exhausting process, and it is why so many unhappy families are still in those shacks outside Laayoune. They are photographed, fingerprinted, then interviewed by UN officers in the presence of officials from both sides.
Oral testimony of their Saharan origins can only be provided by sheikhs recog nised back in 1974. Since many of those have died or are too weak to travel, the whole process is delayed further.
In the meantime Rabat has invested massively, building schools, hospitals and sports centres in what looks like a blatant attempt to buy loyalty.
To win over voters, the new young king, Mohammed VI, has founded a royal commission to look into the Saharan people's grievances, and he seems as popular here as he is elsewhere in Morocco.
But equally importantly, he has made overtures to the Algerian president, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, and hinted at the possibility of limited autonomy for the region if it remains under Moroccan sovereignty.
This, the returned Moroccan leftwing leader Abraham Serfaty argues, is the first glimmer of hope in decades. "A referendum is not the answer," he said.
"Victor and vanquished cannot be a solution in such an explosive region. The two sides need to sit down and hammer out an arrangement."
