AMONG the themes of next month’s Celtic Connections festival is one entitled "music born from extreme adversity". Few of the artists typify this more than Aziza Brahim does. She is one of the casualties of one of the world’s largely overlooked conflicts.

She was born 40 years ago in a refugee camp, el Hamada, in the Tindouf region of Algeria. Her mother was one of many thousands of people who fled Western Sahara when Morocco, annexing the former Spanish colony in 1975, sent in some 300,000 settlers.

Today a huge, 1,600-mile long wall divides the Western Sahara areas controlled by Morocco and those by the indigenous Saharawi people, led by the Polisario Front. The wall has been described as the largest active military barrier in the world, almost half the size of China’s Great Wall and 16 times larger than the Berlin Wall. According to a recent article in The Economist, there are still 100,000 refugees encamped in the world’s harshest desert (temperatures can exceed 50 degrees, half of the year) and perhaps four times that number under a “repressive Moroccan thumb”.

In 1991 a UN Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara (MINURSO) was established by a Security Council resolution, but to date no referendum, allowing the Saharawi people to determine their own political future, has taken place.

Brahim, who now lives in Barcelona, has never forgotten the plight of her country-people. She has made her name with a succession of albums that have sought to reawaken the West’s interest in the conflict that has sundered her homeland – a country, incidentally, she has never seen.

Her second-but-last album, Soutak, topped the World Music Charts in 2014. Her latest, the rather excellent Abbar el Hamada ("across the Hamada"), has won admiring reviews, one critic noting its embrace of the electric desert blues popularised by such groups as Tinariwen. In the words of Celtic Connections, she “gives majestic voice to her people’s profound hurts and their hopes of peace, infusing her native oral traditions with West African, Cuban and Mediterranean influences”.

She is actually making not one but two appearances here on January 21: the first a conversation with Karine Polwart (theme: A Woman’s World) and the second her concert at Drygate Brewery.

Brahim has played in many countries across Europe (there was also a live appearance on Jools Holland’s show in 2014) but this will be only her second concert in Scotland. She played the Knockengorroch World Festival, in Castle Douglas, last year. “It was a wonderful experience for us,” she tells me. “It was cold and rainy but there was indeed a warm atmosphere.”

Life in the refugee camps was obviously hard but Brahim has previously spoken of a childhood spent playing with stones and sand, and walking barefoot. There was a festive atmosphere; on Fridays, the family got together to sing spiritual songs.

“After the Green March (the name they gave to the Moroccan military occupation to Western Sahara territories) most Saharawis, my family among them, left their home and went to the desert,” she says.

“They first raised some camps closer to the border with Western Sahara, such as Um Draiga, but they were devastated by Moroccan napalm bombing. So, they had no choice but to move again and build new camps. In the first years, life in the Saharawi refugee camp was very difficult because of the uncertainty, the war.

“It actually is not easy to live there, not only because of the scarcity of food or medications or because of the harshness of the outdoors, but because of the people’s emotional stability. When I was a child I thought the camps were my real country but when I grew I realised it was a refugee camp and it created a big contradiction for me.”

Music, she adds, was something of a strong self-defence mechanism for her. “When we were children my sisters and I pretended to be musicians and we prepared songs that were evaluated by a family jury. My grandmother, Ljadra Mint Mabruk, is a great poet, a leading figure of Saharawi culture. She was an important part of that court, and she encouraged me to sing and gave me many of her poems to set to music.”

Cuba had long-standing connections with Western Sahara. Many Cuban doctors worked in the refugee camps, and Fidel Castro’s government offered sponsorship to many young children there, to educate them in Cuba. Brahim was one of the many who were offered this, and so she flew some 6,500 kilometres to the other side of the Atlantic.

Says Brahim: “I was in Cuba from 11 to 18 years old. All of my adolescence happened there. When I finished my secondary education I applied to study music at university, but our counsellors recommended me to study medicine or law – any degree that was useful for our country, from a political point of view.

“I could have studied any of those degrees, but I wanted to make music, because it was the most important thing for me. Besides, I looked forward to meeting my family, too, and I returned home.” There is, however, a distinct Cuban influence to her music, as she herself acknowledges – “I love Cuban music”.

Brahim found herself back in the refugee camp in Algeria, and began to seek a career in music, which she considers to be "a powerful form of resistance”, playing with a number of local groups. But there was no way she could develop a career in the camps, so in 2000 she decided to relocate to Barcelona, where she still lives. “Some personal reasons brought me to Barcelona,” she says, “but it was a lucky move as far as my work's concerned, since it is a wonderful cosmopolitan city full of culture and musical events.”

She established a group, Gulili Mankoo, a Saharawi/Spanish collective, and they released an EP, Mi Canto, in 2008 and an album, Mabruk (2012), via Re-aktion, a French label that specialises in music from the Sahara. Soutak (which translates as "your voice") was released on the Glitterbeat label in 2014. The new album, Abbar el Hamada, was recorded in Barcelona in the summer of 2015. The great Malian guitarist, Samba Toure, plays on one track, Mani. The album is number one in the annual WMCE (World Music Charts Europe) 2016 charts.

As you might expect, there’s a very high level of musicianship evident on Brahim’s albums and in her stage shows. She herself sings and plays hand-drums. The various video clips on YouTube give you a flavour of what to expect when she plays Glasgow in just over a month’s time.

“The musicians in my band are amazing people and excellent musicians,” she enthuses. There are six of them, although the Glasgow date will see just a four-piece. “Besides me, the Scottish audience will meet: Guillem Aguilar, an astonishing bass player, Josep "Pep" Mendoza, a fantastic guitar player and jazzman, and Aleix Tobias, an amazing drummer who has studied African percussion. They are great connoisseurs of folk music, too.

“When there are performances with the whole band we are accompanied, also, by Ignasi Cussó, a Catalonian guitar master and Sengane Ngom an incredible Senegalese percussionist and striking dancer.”

Through her music Aziza Brahim has become a potent voice of the Saharawi people, and their ongoing campaign for recognition and justice.

The situation in the Moroccan-controlled parts of Western Sahara is very difficult. The Human Rights Watch (HRW) organisation says the authorities in the Moroccan-controlled part have tightened restrictions on human-rights groups, both domestic and international. Laws that provide criminal penalties for “harming” the monarchy, Islam, or “territorial integrity”, restrict freedom of expression and association.

“The situation in Moroccan-controlled Western Sahara is very difficult for the Saharawis who live there,” she observes. “Our culture is persecuted, repressed and silenced. Every day there are arbitrary arrests, disappearances, tortures.”

She cites an occurrence in 2010, when, according to Amnesty International, there were clashes as Moroccan security forces tried to dismantle a protest camp in Gdeim Izik, outside Laayoune, the largest city in the disputed territory. Hundreds of people were arrested and 25 of them were later convicted by a military court. All but four remain in jail.

She also refers to the Moroccan authorities pressing the UN to expel International Watchers or to reduce MINURSO forces. The HRW reports, she adds, “are accurate”.

Will the people who are living in the refugee camps ever be able to return home?

“Of course, from a fairness point of view, from a political point of view, the Saharawi people who are living in the refugee camps must return home, because UN resolutions obliges Morocco, since 1991, to accept a referendum. This also includes the return home of the exiled people to vote about their self-determination.

“It could be difficult for those generations who, like me, were born in the camps or were part of the diaspora, to know our country for the first time. We have, in spite of our long-standing conflict, reclaimed our rights in a peaceful way. On the other hand, at present it is necessary also that the West’s, and the world's, attention focuses on the plight of countries suffering complex military conflicts, such as Syria. I think it is another crime against humanity to overlook those countries’ refugee emergencies.”

Aziza Brahim is in conversation with Karine Polwart as part of Celtic Connections on January 21 at 4.30pm in the City of Music Studio, Royal Concert Hall, Glasgow. She plays the Drygate Brewery at 7.30 that evening

www.azizabrahim.com/new; www.celticconnections.com