Mohamed Abdelaziz (17 August 1947 – 31 May 2016) was a Sahrawi nationalist leader who served as the 3rd Secretary General of the Polisario Front, from 1976, and the President of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic from 1982 until his death in 2016.
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Biography
Abdelaziz was born in Marrakesh or in Smara into a Sahrawi family of an eastern Reguibat subtribe, migrating between Western Sahara, Mauritania, western Algeria and southern Morocco.
He was the son of Khalili Ben Mohamed Al-Bachir Rguibi, who was a member of the Moroccan Liberation Army and the Royal Moroccan Army. Abdelaziz's father lived in Morocco with a part of his family and was a member of the Royal Advisory Council for Saharan Affairs. His father held two transport licences in Morocco for buses serving Rabat–Casablanca–Essaouira. The first license was given to him by Hassan II in 1983 and the second by Mohammed VI in 2002. His brother is Mohamed Lahbib Rguibi, lawyer of many Sahrawi human rights activists such as Aminatou Haidar or Naama Asfari, and former "disappeared" in Moroccan prisons between 1976 and 1991.
As a student in the Mohammed V University of Rabat, he gravitated towards Sahrawi nationalism, and became one of the founding members of the Polisario Front, a Sahrawi independence movement in Western Sahara with strong Arab socialist ideas which launched a few attacks against Spanish colonialism in the Spanish Sahara in 1973. Shortly after Spain relinquished control of the area to Mauritania and Morocco in the 1975 Madrid Accords, Polisario declared the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR), leading to the Western Sahara War (1975–1991). From 1976 until his death, Abdelaziz was Secretary-General of the Polisario Front, replacing Mahfoud Ali Beiba, who had taken the post as interim Secretary-General after El-Ouali Mustapha Sayed was killed in action in Mauritania.