America Entreprise Institute
Michael Rubin@mrubin1971
In recent decades the Middle East has been a region replete with conflicts. In the last four years alone civil war has erupted in Syria, Libya, and Yemen, contributing to the highest world refugee totals since World War II.
Beyond the Arab-Israeli conflict, however, one of oldest and most intractable conflicts has been over possession of the Western Sahara, home to barely 500,000 people—equivalent to Fresno, California—spread over a 100,000 square mile patch of desert, an area the size of Colorado.
It boasts only one town over 100,000 people. Indeed, if the Western Sahara were to be an independent country, it would compete with Mongolia as the least densely populated country on earth.
Origins of a Conflict
Nevertheless, this barren corner of Africa has been the center of conflict between Morocco and Algeria for four decades and the subject of contention between Morocco and various European powers for decades before that. In 1884 Spain, a late-comer to the colonial scramble for Africa, seized the coastal region that would become known as the Western Sahara (but which it initially divided into the southern Río de Oro and northern Saguia el-Hamra). Local tribes did not take colonial conquest easily and resisted Spanish administration for 50 years. While Spain largely pacified the area by 1934, quiet and acquiescence do not always correlate.
Morocco, meanwhile, never ceded its claims. Five of eight dynasties which have ruled Morocco since the ninth century AD—the Midrarids (823-977), the Almoravid (1062-1147), the Marinids (1217-1465), the Wattasids (1428-1549), and the Alaouites (1631-present)—controlled the Western Sahara, or at least its oasis towns; most actually trace their tribal roots to the territory. One additional dynasty—the Sadid Sharifs (1510-1659)—ignored the coast of the Western Sahara, but pushed Moroccan rule deep into what is now northern Mali.[1] In short, Moroccan nationalists find no shortage of evidence to support their claims.
In 1912 the Kingdom of Morocco briefly lost its independence when, against the backdrop of the Agadir crisis, the French established a protectorate over the kingdom (the Spanish had also established a protectorate in the Sahara and along the northern coast minus Tangiers). However, in the aftermath of World War II Moroccans began agitating for their independence, which they won in 1956. The Spanish forfeited their protectorate along the northern coast, but continued to hold the Western Sahara.
The following year Morocco formally laid claim to the territory, making its return Rabat’s chief foreign policy goal. In 1963 Morocco successfully pushed the United Nations to formally designate the Western Sahara as a non-self-governing territory, and in 1965 the Moroccans spearheaded a UN General Assembly resolution demanding Spain forfeit its colony. Momentum seemed on the Kingdom’s side. The imperial era was ending. Between Morocco’s independence and 1975, when the Spanish ultimately decided to evacuate the Western Sahara, three dozen African countries gained independence, including Equatorial Guinea, a former Spanish colony. Morocco hoped it could correct bloodlessly what it saw as a historical wrong.
Meanwhile, the Soviet Union and its North African rival Algeria, a historic rival to Morocco, were also making plans. In 1973 they supported a handful of local Sahrawi residents in the Western Sahara who formed the Frente Popular de Liberación de Saguía el Hamra y Río de Oro (“Popular Front for the Liberation of Saguia el-Hamra and Río de Oro,” Polisario Front). The Polisario Front claimed to both represent the Sahrawi residents of the Western Sahara and be the rightful government of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic.
The Moroccan government meanwhile sought to lay the diplomatic groundwork for its annexation of the Western Sahara, regardless of Polisario demands. In 1974 it sought an International Court of Justice ruling on two questions: first, Was Western Sahara (Rio de Oro and Sakiet El Hamra) at the time of colonization by Spain a territory belonging to no one (terra nullius)? And, second, What were the legal ties between this territory and the Kingdom of Morocco and the Mauritanian entity?[2] If the Moroccan leadership thought it had a clear-cut case, the International Court ruling disabused it of that notion, issuing a split decision, on one hand confirming that Morocco had deep historical ties to the Western Sahara, but on the other hand declaring that the Western Sahara was not terra nullius.
While proponents of Western Sahara independence suggest that the Court ruling de-legitimized Moroccan control, the implications are not so cut-and-dry. Firstly, the ruling was advisory only. Secondly, the judges split on the second question largely along Cold War lines: judges from Marxist and pro-Soviet nonaligned countries voted against Morocco while judges from Western countries voted for the Kingdom’s claims. Lastly, the devil was in the details on the terra nulliusissue. Finding that the Western Sahara was terra nullius at the time of the Spanish invasion did not mean that the Court agreed that the Western Sahara was a distinct entity. Rather, the judges’ interpretation centered only upon the question about whether tribes and chiefs were theoretically capable of autonomy.[3]
Regardless, King Hassan II (r. 1961-1999) was not going to take no for an answer. On 6 November 1975, just weeks after the Court’s decision, he dispatched 350,000 Moroccans to march unarmed into the Western Sahara. Spanish forces watched the “Green March” migrants march past the border, waving Moroccan flags and carrying copies of the Qur’an. The action ended all pretense of Spanish control. Just eight days later Madrid made it official, agreeing to divide the Western Sahara between Morocco and Mauritania.[4] While the Moroccan Army moved into the northern two-thirds of the territory, the Mauritanian Army had difficulty consolidating control, finally ceding its claims in August 1979.
The Polisario Challenge
Algeria and, indeed, the broader Soviet and radical Arab blocs immediately moved to counter Morocco’s possession of the Western Sahara. For this, the Polisario became their chief mechanism. The Polisario had already established itself, if not as a serious national movement, than as an irritant and terrorist group. It launched symbolic guerilla actions against Spanish garrisons, but its chief target was fellow Sahrawis who opposed the Polisario’s Marxist philosophy and its political goals, or challenged the group’s claim to speak for all Sahrawis. After all, not all of them sought independence or claimed a national identity. Because of intermarriage over centuries and the Saharan tribal roots of various Moroccan dynasties, many local Sahrawis considered themselves just part of Morocco’s ethnic and tribal diversity, an attitude which infuriated the Polisario leadership.
After the Spanish withdrawal, however, the Polisario’s campaign took a new direction. On 27 February 1976 it declared the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic and launched a full-scale guerilla war to “liberate” the territory.
As Cold War conflicts went, the Western Sahara War was a relatively low-intensity conflict, but 7000 Moroccan soldiers and 4000 Polisario fighters, not to mention several thousand Sahrawi civilians, still died as a result of it. Fighting displaced tens of thousands. In August 1980, however, the Moroccans did the unexpected: they began a seven-year project to construct a 1500-mile-long, multilayered, sand and stone berm and trench system, reinforced with minefields and forward bases roughly along the Western Sahara’s frontiers with Algeria and Mauritania. From a military perspective, the “Moroccan wall” was a resounding success. On 7 October 1989 the Polisario launched its final offensive against Guelta Zemmur, a Moroccan-held town in the east-central portion of the Western Sahara, but the attack went nowhere. The wall prevented the Polisario from resupplying its forces in the Western Sahara, and all the Moroccan Army needed to do then was to mop up. The Soviet collapse, and its reverberations in Cuba, a staunch Polisario backer, drained Polisario resources further. Seeing the writing on the wall, the Polisario accepted a ceasefire. On 29 April 1991 the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 690, which created a United Nations Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara (MINURSO), with the mission to arranging a referendum among the Sahrawi to determine the fate of the territory.
Morocco consolidated control over the Western Sahara with a brutal hand, but its behavior was nothing compared to the ruthlessness employed by the Polisario, who treated Sahrawi refugees as hostages in camps in the western Algerian province of Tindouf. It separated children from their parents and sent them to Cuba for re-education. Sahrawis who questioned Polisario dominance in the Tindouf camps faced imprisonment or execution. After the ceasefire the Polisario illegally kept more than 2400 Moroccan prisoners-of-war, including 400 which it kept for 14 years after initially denying their existence.
Breaking the Stalemate
Despite the ceasefire, the MINURSO referendum never occurred, as preparation broke down over qualification to vote. While the Polisario Front claimed more than 100,000 Sahwari refugees populated the Tindouf camps, diplomats with experience in the camps and former refugees estimate the true figure at less than half that. In 2007 the European Union’s Anti-Fraud Office detailed Algerian diversion of humanitarian aid destined for Sahrawi refugees and confirmed that Algeria and the Polisario greatly exaggerated the camps’ population. Beyond that, the origin of the individual refugee matters. If the question is the disposition of the Western Sahara, then only those with roots in the region should vote. However, many of the Tindouf residents—perhaps half—have roots in Algeria, Mauritania, or Mali and so Morocco argues they should have no standing in the referendum. Algeria, for its part, has refused to allow an independent census. The imaginary Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic exists on paper only, although thanks to Algerian largesse, which sees the Polisario as a useful wedge against rival Morocco, the Polisario’s diplomatic missions are bankrolled. There is no reason why stalemate must continue into perpetuity.
Moroccan stewardship of the Western Sahara changed in both tone and reality under Mohammed VI, who succeeded his father in 1999. Rather than rule the Western Sahara with an iron fist, he began to flood it with new investment.[6] Living standards in Western Sahara are higher than in the rest of Morocco. Rather than simply exploit the region’s mineral wealth or its fisheries, the government now focuses on sustainable development, the tourism sector, other businesses, and education.[7] More importantly, Rabat has agreed to grant the Western Sahara autonomy under Moroccan sovereignty.[8] The notion expressed by critics that Morocco seeks simply to exploit the Western Sahara’s resources are a red herring.[9 ]While the territory has phosphates, they are a pittance compared to the 50 billion metric tons—85 percent of the world’s total—found elsewhere in Morocco.[10]
US policy has also shifted over the past decade. Morocco and the Western Sahara are the only oases of security and stability across Northern Africa and the Sahel, a fact highlighted when Tunisia, arguably the most successful country to undergo an Arab Spring transition, suffered a series of devastating terrorist attacks.[11] Counterterrorist analysts say that Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, already flush with loose weaponry from Libya, now recruits in Polisario camps.[12] In the pre-9/11 era policymakers tolerated ungoverned spaces more than they do now. Given the recognition that, after a quarter century, the MINURSO referendum will likely not occur, American and French policy has shifted largely in favor of Moroccan suzerainty over the territory. In 2014, for example, President Obama directed in the Fiscal Year 2014 appropriations law that the United States assistance to Morocco “should also be available for assistance for the territory of Western Sahara,”[13] and the Omnibus Spending Bill for 2016 specifically allows Morocco to use US aid anywhere in the country, including the Western Sahara.[14]
This has not been a one-way shift. While the Algerian government and the Polisario Front continue an uncompromising line, Rabat no longer simply seeks to annex the territory. In 2006 the Moroccan Royal Advisory Council for Saharan Affairs (CORCAS) proposed an autonomy plan for the territory, somewhat modeled on the Spanish autonomy model toward its regions and the Canary Islands. In 2007 Nicholas Burns, then-Undersecretary of State for Policy, called the Moroccan plan “a serious and credible proposal,” and a bipartisan group of 229 congressmen—including nearly every member of the leadership—expressed support for the Moroccan proposal.[15] On 6 November 2014, the 39th anniversary of the Green March, Mohammed VI announced “advanced regionalization,” effectively complete autonomy under Moroccan sovereignty.[16] On the 16th anniversary of Mohammed VI’s accession he announced further plans for empowering regions rather than centralizing control.[17]
The September 2015 local elections furthered implementation of the autonomy plan in Western Sahara by allowing Moroccans across the Kingdom to vote directly for local and regional representatives. While the Western Sahara (or Morocco, for that matter) is by no means affluent, the juxtaposition between Sahrawis living in the Western Sahara under Moroccan suzerainty and those whiling away time in Tindouf, Algeria, could not be greater. While Algeria has long leveraged its energy resources into support for the so-called Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic, in recent years a number of countries have reversed their recognition of the Polisario’s self-declared states. They accepted both the reality of Sahrawi development over recent decades and the fact that the autocratic Marxist model still embraced by the Polisario has very little relevance in the 21st century. It appears that after more than 40 years the Western Sahara conflict may finally resolve, albeit with a whimper rather than a bang.
Endnotes
1. Clifford Edmund Bosworth, The New Islamic Dynasties. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), pp. 25-54.
2. International Court of Justice, “Advisory Opinion of 16 October 1975,” www.icj-cij.org/docket/files/61/6197.pdf
3. Clemens Feinäugle, “Western Sahara (Advisory Opinion),” Max Planck Encyclopedia of Public International Law, March 2007, http://opil.ouplaw.com/view/10.1093/law:epil/9780199231690/law-9780199231690-e233?prd=EPIL
4. “Declaration of Principles on Western Sahara by Spain, Morocco, and Mauritania,” United Nations, November 14, 1975, http://peacemaker.un.org/sites/peacemaker.un.org/files/MA-MR-ES_751114_DeclarationPrinciplesOnWesternSahara_0.pdf
5. “Bruxelles accuse Alger de détournements d’aide humanitaire,” (“Brussels Accuses Algiers of Misappropriating Humanitarian Aid,”) Le Monde Afrique, January 23, 2015, http://www.lemonde.fr/afrique/article/2015/01/23/bruxelles-accuse-alger-de-detournements-d-aide-humanitaire_4562455_3212.html
6. “Nouveau modèle de développement pour les provinces du Sud,” Le Conseil Economique, Social et Environnemental, Kingdom of Morocco, October 2013. http://www.cese.ma/Documents/PDF/Web-Synthese-Rapport-NMDPSR-VF.pdf
7. Pierre Tubiana, “Dakhla, la petite Essaouira aux portes du desert,” Le Figaro (Paris), April 8, 2015, http://www.lefigaro.fr/voyages/2015/04/08/30003-20150408ARTFIG00243-dakhla-la-petite-essaouira-aux-portes-du-desert.php; Claire Spencer, “Human Rights in Western Sahara: If Morocco is Serious, It Deserves Western Support,” Chatham House (London), November 21, 2013, https://www.chathamhouse.org/media/comment/view/195677#
8. “Conseil MRE: La feuille de route royale,” L’Economiste(Casablanca), November 8, 2007, http://www.leconomiste.com/article/conseil-mre-la-feuille-de-route-royale
9. Kristen Chick, “In Remote Western Sahara, Prized Phosphate Drives Controversial Investments,” Christian Science Monitor, January 24, 2013, http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Africa/2013/0124/In-remote-Western-Sahara-prized-phosphate-drives-controversial-investments
10. “Phosphate: Morocco’s White Gold,” Bloomberg Business, November 4, 2010, http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/magazine/content/10_46/b4203080895976.htm
11. “Ifriqiyah Media Calls Lone Wolves to Male ‘Summer of Hell’ in Tunisia, Kill Foreigners, Security Forces, and Spies,” SITE Intelligence Group, May 8, 2015, https://news.siteintelgroup.com/Jihadist-News/ifriqiyah-media-calls-lone-wolves-to-make-summer-of-hell-in-tunisia-kill-foreigners-security-forces-and-spies.html
12. Alison Lake, “Unlikely Bedfellows: Are Some Saharan Marxists Joining Al Qaeda Operations in North Africa?” Foreign Policy.com, January 3, 2011, http://foreignpolicy.com/2011/01/03/unlikely-bedfellows-are-some-saharan-marxists-joining-al-qaeda-operations-in-north-africa/
13. “FY2014 Appropriations Bill,” signed into law as P.L. 113-76, January 17, 2014.
14. Consolidated Appropriations Act 2016 (Signed by President Obama, December 18, 2015), p. 537.
15. For text and signatories of letter, see: “Majority of Congress Calls for Resolving W. Sahara Conflict to Remove ‘Single Greatest Obstacle’ to Combating Terrorist Threats in N. Africa,” April 16, 2009, www.moroccanamericanpolicy.org/CongressionalLetter.pdf; Joseph K. Grieboski, “Western Sahara Caucus threatens North African security,” The Hill, August 20, 2013, http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/foreign-policy/317685-western-sahara-caucus-threatens-north-african-security-
16. “Les réactions au discours royal à l’occasion du 39e anniversaire de la Marche Verte,” Le Matin (Casablanca), November 7, 2014, http://www.lematin.ma/journal/2014/les-reactions-au-discours-royal-a-l-occasion-du-39e-anniversaire-de-la-marche-verte_hassan-boukantar—une-reaffirmation–des-constantes-du-maroc-sur-la-question–de-l-integrite-territoriale-/211856.html
17. “Discours royal à l’occasion du 16iéme anniversaire de la Fête du Trône,” Le Conseil Royal Consultatif des Affairs Sahariennes (Rabat), July 31, 2015, http://www.corcas.com/Default.aspx?tabid=738
