Join on WhatsApp
Join on Telegram
Rabat – Gilles Dever, Polisario’s lawyer at the European Union, recently published in Le Monde a curious op-ed on the Western Sahara dispute. So rife is the article with half-truths and approximations that it should appeal to the moral conscience of anyone who remotely cares about history truth and intellectual objectivity, or integrity.
Glaring omission of historical facts
Mr. Devers, to put it simply, views Morocco as an occupying force, even a rogue state that violates international law with impunity. And in this, he deliberately ignores or conflates historical facts in an effort to mislead the uninformed public.
In his analysis, fundamentally aimed at bashing Morocco, Devers dismisses the fact that Morocco was the only country to claim the territory between 1956 and 1965. Or that Mauritania only began to claim the territory years later in order to push Morocco to recognize it as an independent state.
Also, the op-ed makes no mention of the fact that it was at Morocco’s initiative, in December 1966, that the UN General Assembly adopted Resolution 2229, which called on Spain to allow the Sahrawis to decide their future. Until then, the UN assembly used to call on Spain to negotiate with Morocco the fate of Ifni and the “Spanish Sahara.”
Because Spain showed no willingness to do so, Morocco subsequently increased pressure on the Spanish government, urging it to enable Sahrawis to vote in a referendum. Even so, Morocco made it plain that its appeal for a referendum did not mean it had relinquished its claims to sovereignty over the region.
Also conveniently brushed aside in Mr. Devers’s simplistic and Manichean telling of the Western Sahara story is that it was King Hassan II who proposed a referendum — which was to take place in 1982 — during the 18th session of the Organization of African Unity in Kenya in June 1981. Algeria and the Polisario both declined.
In addition, the Polisario rejected Morocco’s suggestion to base the referendum on the 1974 census. Faced with the failure of the UN to organize a self-determination referendum, Secretary-General Kofi Annan in February 2000 instructed James Baker, his then-personal envoy for Western Sahara, to explore other venues to reach a consensual political solution.
Polisario’s dubious legitimacy
Interestingly, though, in a November 2001 meeting with Baker in Texas, Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika proposed the partitioning of the territory, which Morocco rejected. If Algeria and the Polisario are so keen on self-determination, why did they flout this principle twice: in 1981 and in 2001?
The Polisario is not the Sahrawis’ legitimate representative. It was established outside the territory and has since remained in exile. Thus, it cannot claim to represent all Sahrawis, especially those living in Morocco’s southern provinces.
At best, the separatist front represents the voiceless and distressed Sahrawis in the Tindouf camps, the majority of whom come from Niger, Mali, Mauritania, and Algeria. The Polisario Front gained its legitimacy through deception and with the help of Algeria and the mainstream media, whose coverage tends to gloss over the conflict’s complexities and nuances to falsely present Polisario as freedom fighters.
Before Algeria financed and trained Polisario to hijack Morocco’s efforts to diplomatically recover Western Sahara from Spain, the Jemaa or assembly, which was elected by the tribal chiefs and represented all Sahrawis, was the only legitimate representative of the Sahrawis.
On October 12, 1975, the Jemaa and the Polisario held a meeting in Ain Bentili, at the end of which the Polisario declared that it would examine Jemaa’s proposal. In late October, Jemaa held a meeting in Guelta Zemmour.
According to American journalist David Lynn Price, there are three versions of that second meeting’s conclusions.
One version has it that 74 of the 103 members of the Jemaa voted in favor of integration within Morocco and Mauritania. In the second, Algeria-backed version, 67 Sahrawis pledged allegiance to the Polisario as the Sahrawis’ legitimate representative.
According to the third version, Bachir Oueld Brahim, a member of the Jemaa, was kidnapped by the Polisario in Guelta Zemmour while on his way to Morocco. Brahim is said to have been beaten and taken to Algeria. Besides him, 86 members of the Jemaa were arrested and taken to Algeria.
Brahim expressed his support for Algeria while in Tindouf. He did, however, manage to return to Morocco in January 1976. And he vowed loyalty to King Hassan II upon returning to Morocco. Khatri Jemmani, the leader of the Jemaa, swore allegiance to Morocco immediately after the meeting in Guelta Zemmour.
Following in Brahim’s footsteps after the Green March, many Sahrawis returned to Morocco and expressed their disillusionment with the way Algeria took over the Polisario and used it to its advantage.
According to former Polisario members, such as Mustafa Salma Oueld Sidi Mouloud and Bachir Edkhil, the Jemaa never relinquished its legitimacy to the Polisario because the two had diametrically opposed visions of how to resolve the Western Sahara question. The Polisario, with support from Algeria and Libya, opted for an armed conflict, while the Jemaa sought a peaceful resolution of the Sahara dispute.
Prevalence of Security council resolutions over the ICJ’s ruling
As if all these above-mentioned fallacies were not enough, Devers’s slated and misinformed analysis also perpetuates the misconception that the 1975 ICJ ruling decreed Morocco’s lack of sovereignty over the Sahara.
In doing so, not only is the Polisario lawyer overlooking the dissenting views of several of the judges who participated in the ICJ’s decision, but he is also purposefully omitting the fact that the court’s ruling actually acknowledged the existence of allegiance between the Sahrawi tribes and Morocco.
One of the judges was Fouad Ammoun, who said that there were legal ties of a political nature between the Sahara territory and Morocco and that, “in any event, allegiance to the Sultan was equivalent to allegiance to the state.”
The second was Judge Forester, who strongly opposed the ICJ’s decision. Judge Forester was particularly dismayed by the court’s Euro-centric approach to the Sahara dispute, with its ruling appearing to suggest that Morocco’s state structure should resemble that of European countries. He argued that the ICJ should have made an effort to avoid seeing African problems through a European lens.
Judge Boni joined Forester and Ammoun in questioning the validity of the ICJ’s ruling. Even as he voted in favor of the two matters that were brought before the international court, Boni remained convinced that the court did not take sufficient account of the “local context” of the Sahara dispute.
The court, he said, ignored the religious ties between Moroccan sultans and Sahrawis, in which the sultans served as commanders of the faithful. He also noted, crucially, that the local population in the disputed region considered Moroccan sultans to be their leaders in religious and temporal affairs.
More pertinently, contrary to Devers’s allegations, the resolutions of the UN Security Council have overtaken the ICJ’s advisory verdict as the main and only invocable reference in the UN’s ongoing efforts to resolve the Sahara dispute.
Indeed, resolutions adopted by the Security Council have long been the final arbiters in any talks of breaking the political and diplomatic deadlock that has been hovering over the Sahara dispute. Since 2007, every Security Council resolution has emphasized the need for any conflict settlement to be based on the search for a realism-driven and compromise-based political solution.
The option of independence is therefore unrealistic, not least because Morocco will never accept the establishment of an independent state on part of its territory. As Rabat sees it, allowing the creation of an Algeria-dependent satellite state in Morocco’s southern provinces would not only undermine Moroccan interests and territorial integrity; it would also be a major upset of the strategic balance in the region.
But one does not have to look at the Sahara dispute from fundamentally Moroccan lenses to realize the depth or scale of the danger of the establishment of yet another fragile, failed state in a largely fragile, insecure Sahelo-Saharan corridor.
Anyone with a realistic, basic grasp of regional politics should know that establishing a country with a population of less than 80,000 –based on the 1974 Spanish census defended by Algeria and the Polisario– on an area larger than 300,000 km2 amounts to condoning further destabilization and chaos in the insecurity-ridden region. That is, to support separatism in the Sahara is to promote the creation of a safe haven for terrorist groups and transnational criminal organizations.
Samir Bennis is the co-founder of Morocco World News. You can follow him on Twitter @SamirBennis.
