Mohamed Abdelaziz

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President of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic
Mohamed Abdelaziz محمد عبد العزيز

Incumbent
Assumed office 30 August 1976
Prime Minister	Mohamed Lamine Ould Ahmed Mahfoud Ali Beiba Mohamed Lamine Ould Ahmed Mahfoud Ali Beiba Bouchraya Hammoudi Bayoun Mahfoud Ali Beiba Bouchraya Hammoudi Bayoun Abdelkader Taleb Oumar
Preceded by	Mahfoud Ali Beiba

Born	17 August 1947 (1947-08-17) (age 60) Marrakesh, Morocco
Political party	POLISARIO

Mohamed Abdelaziz (محمد عبد العزيز) (born August 17, 1947) has served as the Secretary General of the Polisario Front and President of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic since 1976.

He speaks French, Arabic, and Spanish.

[edit] Background

Abdelaziz, born in Marrakesh,^[1] comes from a Sahrawi bedouin family, members of an eastern Reguibat subtribe, migrating between Spanish Sahara, Mauritania, Algeria and southern Morocco. His father lives in Morocco with a part of his family and is a member of the Royal Advisory Council for Saharan Affairs.

As a student in Moroccan universities in the 1970s, he gravitated towards Sahrawi nationalism, and became one of the founding members of the Polisario Front, a Sahrawi independence movement in Western Sahara which launched an armed struggle against Spanish colonialism in 1973.

Since 1976 he is Secretary-General of the organization, replacing Mahfoud Ali Beiba, who had taken the post as interim Secretary-General after El-Ouali Mustapha Sayed was killed in action in Mauritania. Since that time he is also the presidency of the Saharawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR), whose first constitution he was involved in drafting. He lives in exile in the Sahrawi refugee camps in the Tindouf Province of western Algeria.

According to former members of Polisario, Abdelaziz was "chosen" by Algeria at the top of the organization although he did not belong to the very closed circle of the organization's founders and "he always considered himself to be their man."^[2]

[edit] Political profile

He is considered a secular nationalist^{[citation needed]} and has steered the Polisario and the Sahrawi republic towards political compromise, notably in backing the United Nations' Baker Plan in 2003. Under his leadership, Polisario also abandoned its early Arab socialist orientation, in favor of a Western Sahara organized along liberal democratic lines, including expressly committing it to multi-party democracy and a market economy. He has consistently sought backing from Western states, notably the United States of America and the European Union, but so far with little success.

There is some criticism against him from within the Polisario for preventing reforms inside the movement, and for insisting on a diplomatic course that has so far gained few concessions from Morocco, rather than re-launching the armed struggle favored by many within the movement. The most prominent of these opposition groups is the Polisario Front - Khat al-Shahid, which states that it wants to restore the legacy of his predecessor, El Ouali. Others consider that, despite his militant rhetoric Abdelaziz cannot order a resumption of fighting without the approval of Algiers.

Abdelaziz has condemned terrorism^{[citation needed]}, insisting the Polisario's guerrilla war is to be a "clean struggle" (that is, not targeting private citizens' safety or property). He sent formal condolences to the afflicted governments after the terrorist attacks in New York City, Madrid, London and notably also to the Moroccan kingdom after the al-Qaida strikes in Casablanca^{[citation needed]}.

In an interview with the London-based Arabic newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat in 2005, Abdelaziz's father Khalili Mohamed Bachir Oueld Rguibi, a veteran of the Moroccan Army of Liberation, expressed his wishes to see his son Mohamed coming back to "his country Morocco." "I want to see my son coming back to Morocco to see me, we have been separated for a long time. I want him to come back to Morocco, his country, and that of his grandparents, I am sure the education I gave him will not go in vain, he is Moroccan, and I want to meet him before I leave this life." He added that "Algeria does not have the right to intervene in this dispute," and that he is "proud to be Moroccan". He added that his opinion concerning this dispute of the Western Sahara is the same opinion of the king Mohammed VI.^[3]