in The Arab World Geographer 15(2), Summer 2012: 95-126
Since assuming control of the former Spanish Sahara in 1976, Morocco has encouraged between 200 000 and 300 000 of its citizens to settle there. As a result of this settlement campaign, combined with the mass exodus of nearly half of the indigenous Sahrawi population in the immediate aftermath of Rabat’s 1975 invasion, Moroccan settlers now constitute the majority population in occupied Western Sahara. Moroccan-occupied Western Sahara continually posts some of the highest voter turnouts in Moroccan elections; however, Rabat rejected a 2003 UN peace proposal that would have allowed both Moroccan settlers and native Western Saharans to vote for independence or formal union with Morocco in a final status referendum. The Western Saharan independence movement’s acceptance of this proposal and, more importantly, Morocco’s rejection of it, despite the clear demographic hegemony of Moroccan settlers in the territory, has led observers to speculate as to the rationale that drove Morocco to reject the UN plan. This article argues that a possible factor—largely unknown elsewhere, but likely very well understood by Moroccan authorities—is the ethnic composition of the settler population, which may be predominantly Sahrawi. To establish this as a tenable hypothesis, the author first backgrounds the Western Sahara conflict and the basic parameters of its ethno-political geography, then sketches the broad patterns of Moroccan settlement in occupied Western Sahara and pays closer attention to the ethnic aspects of Rabat’s settlement drive. Finally, the article examines the role of Moroccan settlers in the Western Sahara peace process during the 1990s and after, leading up to Morocco’s rejection of the 2003 UN plan.