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Vice News : Morocco Boots UN Diplomats Over Western Sahara Spat

Morocco Boots UN Diplomats Over Western Sahara Spat
Kayla Ruble
March 18, 2016
https://news.vice.com/article/morocco-boots-un-diplomats-over-western-sahara-spat

Morocco’s government and the Polisario Front liberation movement have been locked in a territorial dispute over Western Sahara for decades. Progress toward a solution has stagnated in recent years as the international community attempts to balance between the two sides, but controversial comments from the United Nations’ top official have sparked an unusually tense diplomatic spat.

The controversy kicked off last week when UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon visited refugee camps in Algeria where more than 100,000 indigenous Sahrawi people reside, many of whom fled Western Sahara decades ago. These camps are the base for the Polisario and the wider independence movement for Western Sahara, which has long pushed for Morocco to give up control of the territory that lies along Africa’s northwestern Atlantic coast and abuts Mauritania and Algeria.

Ban, however, did not meet with Moroccan authorities during the visit, as is typically expected by diplomats in order to appease both sides. Following the visit, Ban said the UN would work toward achieving a solution in the conflict. The UN chief referred to the Moroccan presence in Western Sahara, which Morocco took control of after Western Sahara gained independence from Spain in 1975, as an “occupation.”

This set off a series of condemnations by Morocco, with the government taking a strong stance as a result of the comments. Morocco said Ban’s statement’s indicated that he had abandoned his neutral position in the dispute and sided with the Polisario. While the UN confirmed that Ban did use the word occupation, they said the meaning was misinterpreted and that it was said in the context of the UN chief’s reaction to the situation in the camps.

A demonstration in the Moroccan capital Rabat on Sunday saw thousands gather in the streets to protest the secretary general. As the situation escalated this week, the country initially said it would cut down on staff at the UN mission in Western Sahara (formally called the UN Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara, or MINURSO), while also threatening recall its troops participating in peacekeeping operations around the world.

“Following the unacceptable declarations and inadmissible actions from the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon during his recent visit to the region, the royal government of Morocco has decided on immediate measures,” the statement from the government said.

As the situation deteriorated, Ban cancelled a planned trip to Morocco. Eventually officials in Rabat backed down on Thursday, saying they would no longer move to withdraw its troops from global UN missions. But on Thursday, Morocco gave a three-day warning to 84 international UN civilian staff members to get out of Western Sahara, including three from the African Union. According to a UN secretariat spokesman, these actions “would seriously impede the functioning of MINURSO and negatively impact on its ability to deliver its mandate.”

After 16 years of fighting between Morocco and the Polisario Front, which has continuously sought to gain independence, the situation peaked in 1991 when the two sides finally signed a UN-brokered ceasefire and the peacekeeping mission known as MINURSO was established.

The most optimistic point in the conflict came in the early 2000s when former US Secretary of State James Baker, the UN’s personal envoy to Western Sahara at the time, attempted to push through a peace plan that included the option for self-determination by the Sahrawi people. Morocco ultimately rejected this plan in 2004, largely due to the option for independence. Just months later Baker resigned.

Since then the situation has been stuck in a stalemate. Popular uprisings took hold in 2011 as the Arab Spring protest movements spread through North Africa and the Middle East, but failed to incite any major changes. Moroccan authorities are routinely accused of human rights abuses against the Sahrawi in Western Sahara, including arbitrary arrest, torture, and restrictions on freedom of speech. Tensions heightened during the past two years after Morocco refused to accept the appointment of a new UN personal envoy to Western Sahara.

For the secretary-general, these tensions appear to have helped fuel continued frustration towards Morocco and the visit may have been an attempt to show Western Sahara that the international body has not forgotten about the issue, according to Jacob Mundy, a political science professor and North Africa expert at Colgate University. As Mundy noted, the visit was unusual in the fact that Ban only met with one side.

“It’s kind of unprecedented, just on its face, only going to meet with one side of the conflict,” he said. “The secretariat has never visibly shown this much frustration before and if it was… it never would have made its frustration public.”

As Mundy noted, even when the Baker plan was rejected, the secretary general did not express this kind of outward displeasure or frustration. While it’s difficult to say what the threats from Morocco mean, Mundy said he expects efforts to be made to try to repair the relationship before the annual referendum vote at the end of April to reaffirm the UN mission’s mandate.

Anna Theofilopoulou, a political analyst and former UN staffer who assisted Baker during the peace plan proposal process, questioned the decision to not sit down with Moroccan authorities during the visit. Theofilopoulou wondered why the UN chief felt the need to travel to Western Sahara given the relative impasse in recent years.

“In my whole career in the United Nations I just never witnessed such an ill-advised movement, quite bluntly,” she said. “I don’t know what [they] advised him and what were they thinking… did anybody look to the background of this conflict?”

While addressing the issue of the refugees living in Algeria is important, Theofilopoulou said that by making the visit the the secretary general was essentially walking into a pit of vipers — referring to Moroccan officials. As she explained, the situation in general is a tense one for the country, but furthermore Morocco is known for having the ability to overreact to these kind of diplomatic developments or when something doesn’t go their way.

Earlier this year, Morocco pushed back against the European Union after a court for the governing body blocked a farm trade deal with Morocco, ruling that goods from the occupied territories of Western Sahara should not be included in the agriculture trade agreement. Morocco subsequently cut communications with the EU, which later pushed the court to reverse its decision. Just this week, Morocco decided to warm up to Europe again after a visit from the bloc’s foreign policy chief helped to smooth things over.

“Morocco does respond to pressure if they realize there’s no way out,” she said. “It’s gone from bad to worse and I don’t know what on earth they’re thinking in the UN. How do they think this is going to end?”

Theofilopoulou speculated that Morocco will not work effectively with the UN until Ban’s term is up this year. Both she and Mundy also said that the kingdom is likely waiting for the results in the US presidential election this fall to make any significant moves. The US is one of Morocco’s key allies — along with France — with ties to former secretary of state and presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and the Clinton Foundation.

Regardless, with the peacekeeping mission in the spotlight, Mundy said it will be important to watch whether the UN seriously considers rethinking MINURSO’s role in the Western Sahara dispute and the peace process as a whole.”Since Baker resigned in 2004. It’s really been negotiations for the sake of negotiations [with] very little momentum [and] backwards progress from the kind of advancements made in late 1990s and early 2000s,” he explained. “One of the few tools the international community has left is the silent treatment really.”

Topics: africa, northern africa, western sahara, ban ki-moon, united nations, war & conflict, sahrawi, polisario front, algeria, morocco, occupation, peacekeeping mission, minurso

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Waiting for Disruption: The Western Sahara Stalemate

The Western Sahara conflict is fast approaching its 40th anniversary with no end in sight. A web of geopolitical interests keeps the conflict in a permanent state of limbo. At the heart of this web is the U.N. Security Council, which has managed the conflict since the late 1980s. The council has been historically reticent to take dramatic action to resolve the dispute and remains so today. Though there has been “peace” in Western Sahara since 1991 when a cease-fire came into effect, all efforts to reconcile Morocco’s claim of sovereignty against the local population’s right to self-determination have failed. The status quo thus seems indefinitely sustainable. Unless the conflict takes a sudden turn for the worse, it is unlikely that the international community will make the tough choices necessary to achieve a lasting solution. Therein lies the paradox of the Western Sahara peace process: The peace process now exists to contain the conflict, but only a crisis will save Western Sahara.

For these reasons, observers often speculate as to which forces could shake things up in Western Sahara. In recent years, three developments have emerged that initially appeared to have the potential to unbalance the deadlock: the Arab Spring, the 2012 Mali crisis and renewed oil and gas interest in the area. However, it is unlikely that a popular mass revolt will drive Morocco out of Western Sahara, or bring down the Moroccan monarchy. Meanwhile, it is abundantly clear that North Atlantic powers see Morocco as a bulwark of stability in a region plagued by civil strife along the Mediterranean coast and by terrorist groups in the Sahara. Finally, international energy companies that have returned to Western Sahara seek to work with Morocco to exploit the contested territory’s possible riches. Whether or not oil companies will bring peace or war to Western Sahara will likely hinge on the response of the territory’s nationalist movement, which remains to be seen.

A Brief History of the Stalemate

Morocco invaded Western Sahara in 1975 as the Spanish colonial authorities were about to conduct a referendum on the territory’s independence. Rather than face war with its neighbor across the Strait of Gibraltar, Madrid opted to transfer its colonial authority to Morocco and Mauritania. The United Nations viewed this transfer as largely illegitimate and continued to call for the territory’s self-determination. A local nationalist movement, led by the Polisario Front, had been fighting the Spanish for several years and, upon Morocco’s invasion, began to receive significant support from Rabat’s regional rival, Algeria. In the chaos of the invasion, nearly half of the native Sahrawi population fled to Algeria, where they live today as refugees under Polisario’s control; today they number over 100,000. The Morocco-Polisario war—Mauritania left the territory it controlled in Western Sahara in 1979—dragged on until 1991, when a cease-fire was declared to allow a U.N. mission to organize a referendum.

The U.N. arrived in Western Sahara with the intent to solve the conflict in less than 12 months by organizing a vote on independence. Twenty-three years later, the mission is still there. Disputes over how to register voters for the referendum dragged on until Moroccan King Hassan II died in 1999 and was succeeded by his son, Mohammed VI. King Mohammed soon reversed his father’s position and rejected the idea of an independence referendum. Morocco signaled its willingness to grant the territory autonomy but has steadfastly rejected any plan that has an independence option. In 2007, Morocco presented a formal autonomy proposal, but it has been treated as a non-starter for Polisario so long as an independence vote is off the table.

Since 1997, three U.N. envoys have attempted to mediate the dispute, including former U.S. Secretary of State James Baker. The current U.N. envoy, former U.S. Ambassador Christopher Ross, has held the position since 2008. For all intents and purposes, Morocco has stopped negotiating and even tried to have Ross dismissed in 2013. Morocco’s current position demands that Polisario accept its autonomy proposal as the basis of negotiations. Polisario is willing to discuss any proposal so long as it includes a referendum on independence, which is technically Western Sahara’s right under international law as Africa’s last non-self-governing territory.

The Western Sahara impasse owes as much to the mutually incompatible positions of the parties as to the U.N. Security Council’s unwillingness to place demands on either of them. Western Sahara’s relatively low standing on the international agenda owes as much to the territory’s intrinsic features as to its extrinsic ones. Intrinsically, the conflict suffers from obscurity because of the territory’s geography. Even with the large number of Moroccan settlers that have moved there in the past three decades, it is still one of the least densely populated countries. The native Sahrawi population is estimated to be less than half a million strong. Unlike other African countries along the great desert, Western Sahara has neither a mild Mediterranean coast nor a tropical south to augment the endless desert that defines its landscapes. What Western Sahara does have are some of the world’s richest fishing grounds off its long Atlantic coastline and some significant phosphate deposits.

But when the great powers of the Security Council look at Western Sahara, they do not simply see fish, phosphates, a protracted humanitarian crisis or Africa’s last colony. Paris and Washington, most of all, see one of their strongest allies, Morocco, and one of the world’s most important energy producers, Algeria. Both of these states are not only pivotal to stability in the Maghreb, they are increasingly viewed as important players on the African and Middle Eastern stages as well. Yet the Western Sahara conflict is not simply a Moroccan-Algerian affair. Central to the dispute are fundamental norms of decolonization and the prohibition of territorial expansion by force, issues that are central to the post-World War II order enshrined in the United Nations. After four decades of fighting for independence, it is also abundantly clear that Western Saharan nationalism will not accept a Moroccan fait accompli. Indeed, it is now widely understood that an international failure to accommodate Western Saharans’ right to self-determination will leave them no choice but to pursue armed struggle once again, as they did in the 1970s and 1980s.

The fundamental tension at the heart of the Western Sahara peace process is based on two fears: If the international community pushes too hard for a settlement, the situation could deteriorate; but if efforts to shift the status quo are abandoned, the situation could also deteriorate. Despite shifting international circumstances, from the fall of the Berlin Wall to 9/11 to the Arab Spring, there has been no exogenous disruption powerful enough to change the status quo in Western Sahara.

The Missed Opportunities of the Arab Spring

There was much hope that the Arab Spring might bring some positive change to Western Sahara. Whether through reforms in Morocco or in Polisario’s exiled leadership, or through mass demonstrations in the territory, the possibilities for change seemed endless in early 2011. Such hopes proved to be misguided. In several ways, the Arab Spring has made the Western Sahara peace process worse.

Reforms instituted by the Moroccan regime only enhanced its domestic and international credibility, thus resulting in a bold and uncompromising posture in recent negotiations. Though Arab Spring protests in Morocco, led by the February 20 Movement, failed to coalesce into a force that could threaten the regime, the monarchy nonetheless responded with a series of reforms that curbed the de jure powers of the throne. In reality, these reforms were part of a long trend in Moroccan politics whereby the monarchy has used electoral processes and power-sharing to delegitimize its foes and so enhance its de facto power within the country. First were Morocco’s democratic socialists, who were allowed to govern in the late 1990s; then came the Islamists in the early 2000s. In both cases, the government failed to deliver on long-promised reforms, promises that were easy to make when these parties were in the opposition. The monarchy, on the other hand, having symbolically retreated from politics, now wields power through informal and financial mechanisms. While political parties are blamed for the country’s failings, the monarchy—among the top 10 wealthiest royal families in the world—now uses its globalized holdings and influence over domestic economics to rule by other means.

Internationally, the monarchy’s top-down reforms also touched on the question of the “Saharan Provinces,” as Western Sahara is called in Morocco. These steps included recognizing the Sahrawi identity and loosening restrictions on travel between the occupied territory and the refugee camps. For Moroccan journalist Samia Errazzouki, a co-editor at the Jadaliyya website, the Moroccan regime deftly used the Arab Spring to improve its image vis-a-vis Western Sahara. “For many abroad,” she claims, “it appeared as if Morocco was making concessions and ceding to the demands of the people. This was no different than how Morocco responded to criticisms from abroad over its repression of pro-democracy protests associated with the February 20th Movement.” The instability witnessed in Egypt, Syria, Libya and Mali further convinced Washington and Paris to view the Moroccan monarchy as a pillar of stability in the Arab world.

Western Saharan nationalists are bitter not only because the Arab Spring has been a boon for Morocco, but because their protests have been largely ignored internationally. Indeed, weeks before protests erupted in Tunisia and Egypt, Western Sahara witnessed the largest pro-independence demonstrations ever organized in the Moroccan-occupied territory. In a massive showing of solidarity with the Western Saharan refugees in Algeria, Sahrawi activists established a protest camp on the outskirts of the territory’s main city, Al-Ayun, in a place called Gdaym Izik. Soon the camp boasted tens of thousands of Sahrawis, until Moroccan security forces violently demolished it in early November 2010. Following the camps’ dispersal, the territory saw the most intense and sustained civil unrest since Moroccan forces arrived in 1975, resulting in several casualties among the Sahrawis and Moroccan police, as well as clashes between Moroccan settlers and nationalist activists.

At the United Nations, these protests raised concerns about the fact that the U.N. mission in Western Sahara has no mandate to monitor human rights. Though all other missions now have such provisions, France, Morocco’s main ally, has steadfastly blocked all efforts to amend the U.N. mission.

Concerns about human rights inside the Moroccan-controlled territory had been growing since widespread Sahrawi protests greeted the new king in 1999. A massive uprising in 2005 drew even more attention due to the role the Internet played in the diffusion of images, videos and testimonies of the Sahrawi protestors. For years, the human rights group Freedom House has considered the Moroccan-occupied Western Sahara one of the worst situations in the world, and in 2008, Human Rights Watch released a damning report detailing the excesses of the Moroccan occupation, including widespread torture. The following year, Aminatou Haidar, a Sahrawi rights activist, won the prestigious Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award, causing further embarrassment for Rabat.

With the Gdaym Izik protests in 2010, things appeared to be coming to a head. Then the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, as well as the civil wars in Libya and Syria, changed everything. Morocco not only used the Arab Spring to advance its image as a moderate ally of Paris and Washington, the Arab Spring also drew attention away from Morocco’s repression in Western Sahara, which included the imprisonment of dozens of young activists who had created the Gdaym Izik camp. Most have received sentences of 25 years to life imprisonment.

According to Errazzouki, “November 2010 marked a turning point for the Moroccan regime’s treatment and response to dissent within the territory.” She added, “This is evident through the widespread torture, arbitrary arrests, harassment and even death of Sahrawis who dare to demand their right to self-determination.”

Hijacked by Radicals

One effect of the Arab Spring has undoubtedly had a negative impact on the Western Sahara conflict: the short-lived secessionist Tuareg republic in northern Mali that was hijacked by al-Qaida-linked groups. Key members of the Security Council, particularly the United States, are now more reluctant than ever to take risks to resolve the Western Sahara conflict, particularly if a solution leads to a weak and unstable new state.

Fed by the arms unleashed on the Sahara by the Libyan civil war of 2011, Tuareg rebels—many having been forced to flee the collapse of the Gadhafi regime—relaunched their decades-old bid to create an independent state for their people in the north of Mali. Humiliated by the rebels, elements of the Malian military staged an impromptu coup in March 2012. Amid the chaos, various armed Islamist organizations, including al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghrib (AQIM), hijacked the Tuareg rebellion and declared an Islamic state in northern Mali. A year later, French forces quickly routed the Islamists and restored a modicum of central government control to Mali’s vast northern stretches. However, a daring attack on a gas facility in eastern Algeria proved that the Islamists’ reach and audacity had grown well beyond their humble origins in the early 2000s.

For many, these developments in the Sahara were the outcome of a long-neglected front in the global war on terrorism. Concerns over the Sahara-Sahel region’s security grew as remnants of Algeria’s Islamist insurgency of the 1990s began to seek shelter and sustenance in the Sahara by linking up with smuggling networks and taking Europeans as hostages. The latter activity allowed AQIM to amass a small fortune from ransom payments to spend on arms and recruits. Though traditionally a region dominated by French influence, the United States launched a special, albeit modest, counterterrorism initiative there in 2003 to improve border security and address some of the root issues driving radicalization.

It was not long before concerns about trans-Saharan terrorism began to affect the Western Sahara conflict. A coordinated suicide attack in Casablanca in 2003 did much to convince the George W. Bush administration that a solution to the Western Sahara conflict should not be imposed on Morocco. Indeed, Morocco began insinuating that there were connections between al-Qaida activists in the Sahara and the refugee camps run by the Polisario in southwestern Algeria.

Recent reports in The Daily Beast, Time Magazine and Vice have offered contradictory and incomplete accounts of the supposed terrorist threat posed by the Western Saharan refugees and Polisario. On the face of it, these concerns seem ill-founded. Polisario is a secular Arab nationalist umbrella organization not unlike the Palestine Liberation Organization, and Algeria, which has been at war with jihadists since the early 1990s, is Polisario’s main diplomatic and financial backer. That said, aid workers in the camps were kidnapped in 2011 and delivered to one of the region’s armed Islamist organizations.

So is it possible, as recent reports often insinuate, that clandestine militant Islamist groups are recruiting or even operating within the Western Saharan refugee camps? Could we see Polisario’s revolution hijacked by Islamic fundamentalists in the same way the recent Tuareg rebellion in Mali or the rebellion in Syria have been hijacked by radical groups?

Anthropologists and aid workers with extensive experience in the camps remain skeptical about such claims.

Dr. Konstantina Isidoros has been visiting the camps regularly over the past six years, including two years of sustained ethnographic research. In her view, recent claims that the Sahrawi refugee camps have become overrun with criminal and terrorist networks are “absolute rubbish.” As she argues, “the close-knit kinship nature of Sahrawi society makes it very hard for an external entity to penetrate.” She adds, “The idea of ‘terrorism’ is pointless to the Polisario and the Sahrawi—they are focused on international legal frameworks.”

Nadia Zoubir, a political affairs consultant who recently visited the camps for the African Union, noticed significant improvements in local security measures following the 2011 kidnapping. She likewise doubted the presence of any militant organizations in the camps besides Polisario given the nature of the society. “I think that it would be very difficult to take place in a community that practices a more liberal and tolerant form of Islam than witnessed in other Muslim communities.”

“Polisario works hand in hand with the Algerian government in supporting anti-terrorist activities,” she noted.

Alice Wilson, who holds a doctorate in social anthropology, likewise finds recent media reports about terrorism in the camps incongruous with her years of experience there. The major political debate in the camps, she observed, was between those who favored the diplomatic approach to national liberation and those who favored a return to the military approach.

According to Wilson, “In general, I would say that Sahrawi refugees were not hopeful for the short term, but were hopeful about a long term, even a whole generation away or longer, in which Western Sahara would not be under Moroccan control.” But, she adds, “When people expressed such views, they weren’t specific about how to get from the current situation to something different. . . . Some refugees wish for a return to war as a means of shaking the stalemate. Others are opposed to this, on varying grounds.”

How Oil Could Upend Everything

The conditions under which Polisario might return to armed struggle are currently unclear. The liberation front almost went to war with Morocco in 2001. That year, Moroccan forces fired warning shots as they crossed the armistice line to clear mines for the Paris-Dakar Rally. While Algeria pulled Polisario back from the brink, these events demonstrated a widespread Sahrawi willingness and capacity to field a significant fighting force. Although Polisario’s forces are incapable of driving Morocco from Western Sahara, they could once again make Rabat’s occupation very expensive and send a strong signal to the U.N. Security Council.

The year 2001 also saw the entrance of a new factor into the Western Sahara conflict: the oil question. Moroccan efforts to attract French and U.S. energy companies to Western Sahara also succeeded in attracting U.N. legal attention. In an important 2002 opinion, Hans Corel, then the United Nations’ top international law expert, described Moroccan efforts to exploit Western Saharan natural resources as illegal. Given the extraordinarily strange international legal status of Western Sahara, foreign energy companies soon walked away from the territory, citing underwhelming prospects.

Just over a decade later, the oil companies are back with a vengeance, though Morocco has worked hard to keep things quiet this time. Using a precedent set in its fisheries accord with the European Union, Morocco has convinced foreign energy companies that the legal risks are minimal so long as resource exploitation in Western Sahara includes “social responsibility” programs that benefit the local population. Sahrawis have recently begun taking to the streets to protest the activities of Kosmos Energy, the U.S.-based firm leading the charge. According to the Maghrib Confidential newsletter, Morocco could become an energy-producing country by the end of the year.

“Clearly drilling in Moroccan-licensed acreage off the Western Sahara fits into the Moroccan political agenda,” explains John Marks, chairman of Cross-border Information, a consultancy that specializes in the region’s energy issues.

As for the companies’ motives in coming back to Western Sahara, Marks see a much more simple explanation. “The [international oil companies] who will make a heavy investment in offshore drilling,” he says, “are not doing it to burnish the Moroccans’—or Polisario’s—political credentials.”

“For the companies, it’s all about making a big offshore find in some attractive acreage with good terms on offer,” he adds. “Kosmos and Total have tried to implicate their governments in lobbying, but this is no power play; it’s about money.”

So could oil become the disruption to break the Western Sahara impasse? Morocco, for certain, will only become more intransigent. Oil’s effect will largely depend on how Sahrawi nationalists and, in turn, the U.N. Security Council respond. Polisario has said very little about the oil issue though it has recently become more aggressive in the international legal arena. In the East Timor conflict, a dispute between Indonesia and Australia over oil rights is often cited as an important step in that territory’s road to independence.

Conclusion

Right now, oil is the factor to watch when it comes to the Western Sahara dispute. The political and military stalemate that has been in effect since the late 1980s is otherwise unlikely to be disturbed. With much more serious crises unfolding in Southwest Asia and Eastern Europe, Western Sahara will continue to remain at the bottom of the international agenda. The impasse has not only shown an extraordinary ability to sap all diplomatic initiatives, it has survived profound geopolitical shocks, from the Cold War’s end to the Arab Spring. But what impact would a significant oil find have on the impasse?

It would certainly galvanize the Moroccan position. The question is how Polisario would respond. Mass protest by the Sahrawis is impossible given the Moroccan security presence in the territory. International legal initiatives are the nationalist movement’s strongest suit, and perhaps the only card left in their hand. No one doubts that international law is on Western Sahara’s side. But this has been the case since the start of the conflict in 1975. Unless the U.N. is willing to enforce the law in Western Sahara, the Sahrawis will continue to see no alternative but to take the law into their own hands.

Jacob Mundy is an Assistant Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at Colgate University where he also contributes to the Africa and Middle East studies programs. His books include “Western Sahara: War, Nationalism, and Conflict Irresolution,” “The Post-Conflict Environment: Investigation and Critique,” and the forthcoming “Imaginative Geographies of Algerian Violence.”

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The Western Sahara Peace Process: Tragedy or Farce?

At the end of every April, a small drama plays out in the UN Security Council. This is when the UN Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara (MINURSO, its French acronym) comes up for its annual renewal. Western Sahara — Africa’s last colony according to the United Nations — is largely ignored by the Security Council the other eleven months of the year. The Secretary-General has a Person Envoy working on the case, former US Ambassador Christopher Ross, one of the great Arabophone diplomats of his age.  The mandate given to Ambassador Ross, to achieve a mutually acceptable political solution that will afford Western Sahara its long denied right to self-determination, is a farce and everyone knows it.

Morocco, the country that has illegally occupied Western Sahara since 1976, has made it abundantly clear that self-determination (that is, a referendum on independence) is out of the question. Backing Morocco’s unilateral assertion of sovereignty over Western Sahara is a member of the Permanent Five, France. What the United States is to Israeli interests on the Council, France is to Morocco’s. Even when Morocco does not hold a seat on the Council (as it will for the next two years), Paris and Rabat are thick as thieves when it comes to protecting Morocco’s control over Western Sahara.

By now it is well known that there is no will from the other permanent members of the Council to challenge France and Morocco on this issue. So every April Western Sahara’s “group of friends” (France, Russia, United States, United Kingdom, and Spain, the de jure administering power) comfortably assume their well established roles in the well scripted dramaturgy called the Western Sahara peace process.

For the native people of Western Sahara, who call themselves Sahrawis, the peace process has become a tragedy. Dispossessed of their homeland by Spain in 1885 and then Morocco nearly a hundred years later, the Western Saharan nationalist movement has found strong support in neighboring Algeria (Morocco’s regional adversary) and the African Union. That support, however, has its limits. Unlike East Timor, Western Sahara’s Asian twin in the annals of botched UN decolonizations, the Sahrawis remains under foreign domination or in exile. This year half the native population “celebrated” their thirty-seventh year in refugee camps in the roughest corner of the southwestern Algerian Sahara.

Sahrawi nationalists have become used to the cheap promises of the international community. Spain first promised a referendum on independence in 1974, prompting Morocco to invade the territory in 1975 right as Franco lay on his deathbed. As Moroccan and Western Saharan nationalist forces led by the Polisario Front waged war for Africa’s most sparsely inhabited desert territory, the Organization of African Unity (OAU), now known as the African Union, attempted to convince Morocco that a referendum was the only way out. After years of stalling by Rabat, the OAU decided to recognize Western Sahara as sovereign nation under the Saharan Arab Democratic Republic. The issue then moved to the UN Security Council where it lingers to this day.

First established in 1991, MINURSO was implemented to achieve one simple task: to organize a vote on independence (or integration with Morocco) for some 300,000 native Western Saharans. At the time, the King of Morocco, Hassan II, was nominally committed to a referendum on independence, so long as his “Sahrawis” were also allowed to vote. After eight years of painstaking technical negotiations and the tedious individual vetting of over 180,000 potential voters, MINURSO finally seemed ready to hold a referendum in the summer of 1999 — right when Hassan II died and the UN referendum in East Timor turned into a bloody fiasco. Morocco’s willingness to contemplate a referendum on independence died with Hassan II, as did the Security Council’s willingness to press the Moroccan regime towards a contentious and ambiguous end game without clear final status arrangements. This is when the language of a mutually acceptable political solution began to creep into the peace process.

At that time, James Baker, the former US Secretary of State, was in the driver’s seat of the negotiations. With the referendum on hold, Baker first attempted to work with Morocco to see what level of autonomy Rabat might be willing to grant Western Sahara. In principle, Morocco’s new leader, King Mohammed VI, was committed to devolving central authority to a quasi-independent Western Sahara, so long as ultimate sovereignty rested with him. In practice, the Moroccan negotiation team proved unwilling to consider even the most banal power-sharing arrangements.

Baker put forward a framework for discussion but his diplomatic blurring of the meaning of self-determination prompted a strong rejection from Polisario and Algeria. The Western Saharan independence movement has always insisted that any final status arrangement? be it integration, autonomy, or independence? had to be approved by the people of Western Sahara in a referendum. Algeria, thanks to its position in the global hydrocarbon market, wields enough influence to make sure that Polisario is listened to.  The Security Council surprisingly agreed with Polisario, urging Baker to find a mutually acceptable political solution that will provide for self-determination.

It is this language, which persists in UN Security Council resolutions on Western Sahara to date, that essentially gives both parties the ability to fire the person holding the position of the Secretary-General’s envoy. If Morocco feels that self-determination is being forced upon them, as they did when Baker put forward his final proposal in 2003, then they can stonewall in the name of a mutually agreed solution. If Polisario feels that self-determination is being undermined, then they can unilaterally declare no confidence in the Envoy and hope for a better hand next time. This is exactly what happened to Baker’s successor, Dutch diplomat Peter Van Walsum.

Not only is the Personal Envoy to Western Sahara expected to work miracles with an empty toolbox, the Secretariat has historically tolerated the parties’ unilateral rejection of the Envoy and members of the Security Council have failed to arm the Envoy with the means to get anything done.

This is the knife’s edge Ambassador Ross has walked since becoming the Personal Envoy in 2008. While Ross has managed to hold countless rounds of negotiations, there is apparently little to show for it. Polisario begrudgingly attends because they trust Ross, while Morocco’s “negotiating team” literally reads from a script prepared by the Palace from which they do not dare deviate from (thanks to the Interior Ministry minders watching over the Moroccan negotiators). For the past three years, both sides have mostly restated the positions they marked out in 2007: Morocco is willing to grant Western Sahara special regional status (an autonomy proposal that lacks all the legal hallmarks of genuine autonomy), while Polisario is willing to discuss post-referendum guarantees for a referendum that Morocco, and so too the Security Council, is unwilling to allow.

Today most of the debate surrounding the now routine renewal of the long moribund Western Sahara mission is not focused on MINURSO’s actual mandate (to hold a referendum). For several years, the major debate has been whether or not MINURSO should be allowed to monitor and report on human rights violations in the Moroccan occupied territory and the Polisario refugee camps in southwest Algeria. All other UN missions have this mandate, but morality and reason has its limits vis-à-vis French neocolonial interests. While the United States and United Kingdom (both ostensibly neutral in the dispute) favor the addition of human rights monitoring protocols to MINURSO’s mandate, their leverage over France is limited to one drastic threat: veto the renewal of MINURSO. As the presence of MINURSO — as is — is the key to maintaining a status quo Rabat and the Élysée see as beneficial, if sub-optimal; there appears to be some leverage to be gained from the veto (apart from any horse trading the Council members might do on other pet issues).

Last year the United States indeed is reported to have threatened to veto MINURSO to force Paris to acquiescence to human rights language in the April 2011 resolution. Washington got its way but with little to show for it. The 2012 draft report of the Secretary-General on Western Sahara (i.e., the initial draft written by MINURSO personnel in the territory) had little to say about human rights violations because Moroccan authorities systematically blocked the Mission from interacting with Sahrawis (as they have since blue helmets arrived in 1992).  In New York, Ban Ki-moon’s office and the peacekeeping department massaged these inconvenient truths out of the final public report that was released in April 2012 (as the Secretariat has done since 1992).

The warrant for including human rights language in the 2011 resolution came out of the first but largely forgotten uprising of the Arab Spring. In October and November 2010, thousands of Sahrawis attempted to re-occupy Western Sahara by setting up a protest camp outside of the territory’s largest city. A brutal Moroccan crackdown followed, resulting in several Sahrawian and Moroccan deaths. If mass violence is required for the Security Council to take a baby step towards expressing concern about human rights in Western Sahara, imagine what it will take for the Security Council to take MINURSO’s original mandate seriously.

Jacob Mundy is an Assistant Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at Colgate University. He is coauthor with Stephen Zunes of Western Sahara: War, Nationalism, and Conflict Irresolution (Syracuse University Press), which went into its second printing in 2011. His current research in Libya, Sudan, and Algeria focuses on the relationship between the international response to mass atrocities and the global locations/allocations of energy resources.

http://www.e-ir.info/2012/05/10/the-western-sahara-peace-process-tragedy-or-farce/

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Why the UN won’t solve Western Sahara (until it becomes a crisis)

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Stubborn Stalemate in Western Sahara

On June 11, 2004, the United Nations announced that former Secretary of State James Baker had resigned his position as the secretary-general’s personal envoy to the Western Sahara. Despite his personal prestige and the explicit backing of the US government, Baker failed to bring the Moroccan government around to his vision for resolving its almost 30-year old dispute with the Algerian-supported POLISARIO Front, a Western Saharan independence movement active since 1973. If Morocco does not agree to Baker’s most recent settlement proposal soon, the Security Council has threatened to turn the impasse over to the General Assembly come October, thereby admitting that its 16-year, $600 million effort to resolve the conflict has come to naught.

After his appointment by Secretary-General Kofi Annan in 1997, Baker convened numerous high-level meetings and presented two different proposals to give the Western Sahara four to five years of autonomy within the Kingdom of Morocco. The proposals also contained provisions whereby a “final status” referendum, at the end of the autonomy period, would determine whether the desert territory is to be independent or permanently integrated into Morocco. Protected by its allies France and the US from UN sanction or other penalty, Morocco has thus far refused to accept the plebiscite. Annan’s new envoy to the Western Sahara, Alvaro de Soto, inherits a stubborn stalemate that he is unlikely to break.

A REFERENDUM DEFERRED

Morocco has occupied Western Sahara since “reclaiming” the territory from Spain in November 1975. King Hassan II moved aggressively to prevent Spain — then the colonial occupier — from holding a self-determination referendum recommended by the International Court of Justice and mandated by the UN. Yet the POLISARIO, which had been fighting Spain, soon turned their guns on Moroccan troops and found strong backing from Algerian President Houari Boumedienne, who sought to check Hassan’s expansionism. A war for the Western Sahara raged until the UN got serious about resolving the dispute in the late 1980s. Based on a plan drawn up by the Organization of African Unity (now the African Union), the UN proposed to hold a referendum on self-determination for the people of the Western Sahara. Morocco and the POLISARIO, however, held different views on who is really a Western Saharan. The Sahrawi independence movement rejected the eligibility of thousands of Moroccan settlers introduced into the territory since 1975. From 1991 to 2000, the UN Mission for a Referendum in the Western Sahara (MINURSO) attempted to verify the legitimacy of over 200,000 prospective voters, the vast majority of them presented by Morocco. The identification process ground to a halt in 1995.

In 1997, according to Marrack Goulding, former head of UN peacekeeping, Annan approached Baker to see if he could convince Hassan II and the POLISARIO to accept an alternative settlement based on autonomy for Western Sahara. Instead, Baker reconciled the parties so that MINURSO could finish its initial vetting of prospective referendum participants. MINURSO published preliminary lists of all eligible voters in late 1999 and early 2000. Morocco quickly cried foul, pointing to the fact that most of its candidates failed to pass the UN identification process, which had employed Spanish colonial records and tribal leaders from Western Sahara (chosen by both Morocco and the POLISARIO) to verify an applicant’s legitimacy. At that point, Annan pushed the Security Council to drop the referendum, arguing that the winner-take-all nature of the poll, along with the lack of an “enforcement mechanism,” could lead one party simply to reject the outcome of the vote. Unconfirmed rumors have maintained that the US and France were the ones doing the pushing, aiming to protect Morocco’s newly crowned monarch, Mohammed VI, from a scenario similar to East Timor, where Indonesia was eventually forced to honor the results of a plebiscite in favor of independence.

In 2000, Annan called on Baker to resume his position as the secretary-general’s personal envoy to the Western Sahara. The former secretary of state ostensibly set out to find a way to bridge the mutually exclusive goals of Morocco and the POLISARIO. In fact, he presented a whole new endgame for the dispute, one that aimed to settle the fate of the Western Sahara once and for all.

“OPTIMUM POLITICAL SOLUTION”

The secretary-general unveiled Baker’s first Western Sahara “autonomy” proposal in 2001. Morocco’s satisfaction with the “framework agreement” was obvious; King Mohammed subsequently told Le Figaro that he had “solved” the issue. For Algeria and the POLISARIO, Baker’s proposal looked like a total sellout. Not only did the proposal offer the Western Sahara minimal autonomy, but it also gave Rabat a better chance at winning the desert territory than the original UN-OAU settlement plan had. Baker’s proposal also called for a “final status” referendum after four years of autonomy — the difference being that, under Baker’s proposal, Moroccan settlers in the Western Sahara would be able to vote. As the settlers vastly outnumber the indigenous Western Saharans, the autonomy proposal prompted a predictable backlash from supporters of independence.

In order to correct Baker’s aim, the Security Council passed Resolution 1429. The resolution specifically called on Annan and Baker to seek a solution that would uphold the Western Sahara’s right to self-determination. Baker’s second proposal paid obvious yet superficial heed to the Security Council’s wishes. Unveiled in 2003, the Peace Plan for the Self-Determination of the Western Sahara offered the Western Sahara a significant degree of self-governance and reduced the overall number of potential Moroccan settlers who could vote in the final status referendum. The secretary-general wholeheartedly endorsed the proposal, calling it an “optimum political solution” whereby both sides would get some, but not all, of what they wanted. Annan also claimed that the plan guaranteed that the “bonafide” inhabitants of the Western Sahara would be able to express their right to self-determination, as called for in Resolution 1429. It was strange enough that Morocco and the POLISARIO had been offered another paradoxical winner-take-all “compromise.” But Annan also seemed intent on blurring the lines between Moroccan settlers and indigenous Western Saharans, the majority of whom are ethnic Sahrawis who speak Hassaniyya, a distinct Arabic dialect.

FLEXIBILITY VS. INTRANSIGENCE

With the second proposal, however, Baker managed to get Algeria and the POLISARIO on board. Emmhamed Khaddad, the POLISARIO’s coordinator with the UN Mission in the Western Sahara, told me in September 2003 that the second Baker proposal offered the POLISARIO a chance to prove to the world that the liberation front could govern fairly, democratically and transparently. Khaddad dismissed as an unproven assumption the notion that the final status referendum would be tilted in Morocco’s favor. Indeed, many observers did question whether Moroccan settlers would stick with Rabat in the referendum, knowing that their subsidized existence would end the day Morocco’s claim to the Western Sahara gained international legitimacy. Would they, as some have suggested, choose independence in Western Sahara, where fish, phosphates, tourists and maybe even oil are plentiful?

Morocco, for its part, quickly rejected Baker’s second proposal, feeling that it would lack control over the Western Sahara during the autonomy period, and also fearing the unpredictable outcome of the final status referendum. A palpable sense of betrayal by Baker and the Bush administration, which pushed the Security Council to endorse the plan, led Rabat to adopt some of its most intransigent rhetoric in years. The Moroccan government still repeats that it will not let the international community question the status of its “Saharan provinces.” Yet it is obvious, as even the secretary-general has noted, that the international community will recognize Morocco’s chance to win these “provinces” if and only if Morocco also has a measurable chance of losing the Western Sahara.

FOUNDATIONS OF STALEMATE

Morocco’s obstinacy is rooted in the fact that it has everything to lose — and not much to gain — by playing Baker’s game. Rabat is in effective control of over 70 percent of the Western Sahara, including the coast and the rich phosphate mines at Bou Craa. In recent years, Morocco has expanded its investments in the territory, including a new $42 million fishing port at Dakhla and offshore oil exploration contracts with France’s TotalFinaElf and the US-based Kerr-McGee. The only thing Morocco would have to gain by the Baker plan would be possible international legitimation of its claim to the Western Sahara. Rabat clearly does not want to take the risk.

The US and France will make sure that no undue pressure is brought to bear on King Mohammed VI, who is embroiled in his own internal war on terror. In 2003, when former US Ambassador to the UN John Negroponte (now ambassador to Iraq) tried to shove Baker’s second proposal through the Security Council, France jumped to Morocco’s defense, successfully watering down the language in the resolution “endorsing” the proposal to the blander word “support.” Mohammed’s recent calls for direct negotiations with Algeria on the Western Sahara, bypassing the POLISARIO, have been taken up by Paris, with French President Jacques Chirac waiting in the wings to reconcile his country’s former Maghribi possessions. For its part, the US recently concluded a bilateral free trade agreement with Morocco and declared the North African nation a major non-NATO ally. When Washington deals with Rabat, the Saharan issue is on one track and mutual interests are on another.

Calling Morocco’s bluff on the Baker plan in mid-2003 was perhaps the only diplomatic gambit left for the POLISARIO. Without the high profile of Baker, and given the Security Council’s looming abandonment, the independence movement could be facing tough times ahead. Yet the POLISARIO and the 160,000 Western Saharan refugees under its supervision in Algeria are ready to play a waiting game as well. While the POLISARIO has suffered some political defeats, the Sahrawi refugees near Tindouf in Algeria are as dug in as their Palestinian counterparts. With remittances and overdue pensions from Spain improving living standards in the camps, along with the rise of a small economy and almost guaranteed support from the international aid community, the exiled Sahrawis can hold out for some time to come. As several refugees told me in the summer of 2003, the thought of returning to the Western Sahara with the Moroccan army and settlers still resident, if only for four years, is chilling. Some were shocked to hear that their leadership had considered this idea before it could be ratified at the refugees’ popular congress in October. Many said they would return only if the international community could guarantee their safety, although they were quick to cite the UN’s dismal performance in Rwanda and, before 1999, East Timor.

Baker’s departure, long threatened, leaves the UN efforts to achieve a rapprochement in Western Sahara without a center of gravity. If one of the most powerful players in Washington could not resolve the Western Saharan conflict, who can? The fact that Annan has assigned de Soto to the Western Sahara, while he is still devoting attention to his previous portfolio, Cyprus, indicates that the secretariat’s peacekeeping office might be stretched so thin thinking about Iraq and the Sudan that it cannot devote substantial time to the deadlocked Western Saharan issue. Since the POLISARIO’s Algerian patrons are not likely to bless a return to armed struggle by the front, a resolution might have to wait for a new generation to come of age in Rabat, Algiers and the refugee camps, or for a monumental historical event like the fall of Suharto in Indonesia. So long as would-be mediators of the Western Sahara dispute seek a winner-take-all solution, one that implicitly grants the Moroccan and POLISARIO positions equal legitimacy, is it any wonder that no progress has been made since 1975?

http://www.merip.org/mero/mero062604.html

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“Seized of the Matter”: The UN and the Western Sahara Dispute