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Washington DC – It would seem that French media outlets of all persuasions have found a new favorite subject: the dispute over Western Sahara. Not a day goes by without one of the Parisian media looking into the subject. Whether it is France24, RFI, Le Monde or even Marianne, the common denominator of the treatment of the Sahara dispute by these French press organs is a flagrant and at times shocking bias against Morocco.
Instead of offering a factual and objective reading of the legal and historical origins of the dispute, these French media hasten to present it in absolute, unnuanced terms. Much of their coverage of the territorial dispute teems with a blatant lack of objectivity and a tendency to overstate in order to play on the emotional fiber of the uninformed reader.
Thus, in their obsession to promote “the Sahrawi people’s right to self-determination,” they have no qualms about resorting to unevidenced allegations and historical untruths or half-truths in order, asGeorge Orwell famously put it, to “make lies sound truthful… and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”
Rather than informing their readers about the real stakes of the conflict, these media seem to be in a perspective of intellectual activism which excels in Manichaeism. In doing so, where the shameless lies fail, they resort to shortcuts and omissions to push the reader to rally to the Polisario Front’s supposedly righteous and noble cause.
Claiming, for example, that Morocco took control of the Sahara by force is at best fallacious and contradicts a proven historical fact: the very peaceful Green March through which Morocco forced Spain to put an end to its occupation of the Sahara. Equally fallacious is the fact of rehashing that the Polisario is the only legitimate representative of the Sahrawis.
Indeed, such arguments overlook the fact that Sahrawis in the Tindouf camps in Algeria come not only from the disputed territory, but also from Niger, Mali, Mauritania, and Algeria. And to get some grasp of the hypocrisy at play here, one only has to read an old article from the newspaper Le Monde, whose correspondent in Madrid in 1979 explicitly said that, despite its support for the separatist agenda of the Polisario, the Spanish government knew full well that half of the Sahrawis in the Tindouf camps were not from the Sahara.
In his book on the history and genesis of the Sahara conflict, the Franco-Italian journalist and anthropologist, Attilio Gaudio, spoke compellingly of “ Western intellectuals and politicians’ profound ignorance of the history and social realities of the Maghreb.” According to Gaudio, it is this very ignorance of the historical and sociopolitical stakes of this dispute that often leads Western intellectuals to indulge in a caricatural account of its history. And this is exactly what we have been seeing for several weeks regarding the treatment of the conflict by the French media.
A stillborn referendum
Self-servingly oblivious to ongoing developments in the UN-led political process, some French commentators continue to analyze the dispute from an outdated perspective. One of the latest, perfect illustrations of this trend is a recent op-ed by Gilles Devers in the newspaper Le Monde.
Reading Devers’s article, one gets the impression that the history of the Sahara dispute began in 1975 and ended in 1991 with the creation of MINURSO, a mission responsible for enforcing the ceasefire and organizing a referendum of self-determination. Nothing that happened before and after these dates seems to be relevant for Devers, whose Morocco-bashing analysis falls into the make-believe reality and alternative truths that have long characterized the argumentation of pro-Polisario activists and intellectuals.
Among other things, Dervers’s article ignores the genesis of the Polisario, in particular the fact that this separatist front, most of whose founders studied at the University of Rabat, originally wanted its opposition to Spanish occupation to be an outgrowth extension of Moroccan nationalism.
The front first sought to be sponsored by Morocco. But Rabat, who was keen to avoid an armed confrontation with Madrid, especially after France had helped Spain rout the Moroccan National Liberation Army during the Ifni War of 1957-58, was instead seeking a peaceful recovery of its Southern Provinces. It is therefore Rabat’s refusal to sponsor its armed decolonization that pushed the separatist front to turn to Boumediene’s Algeria and Gaddafi’s Libya. And the rest is history.
The other fundamental historical fact that Devers knowingly refuses to mention is that Morocco, just a year after its independence from France in 1956, was already busy with the process of claiming the disputed Sahara territory. And so it was Morocco which, in 1964, pushed the UN to include the Sahara in its list of non-self-governing territories.
Out of sheer political expediency, Devers claims that the UN has a moral responsibility to apply the self-determination referendum to end this dispute over the Sahara. In his Manichean view of the conflict, Morocco is the villain of the Western Sahara story, the occupying power which allegedly annexed a defenseless territory and, since then, has supposedly obstructed all the UN’s efforts to organize a referendum.
However, according to Erik Jensen, former head of MINURSO, the hasty manner in which the UN concluded the ceasefire agreement in 1991, as well as the two camps’ inherent disagreements on who should be eligible to vote in any eventual referendum, are the main reasons why the referendum never took place. For Jensen, indeed, the referendum remains unfeasible because it was “stillborn.”
Former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan confirmed this reading in a February 2000 report. Faced with the sobering realization that the UN did not have the means to enforce the outcome of a potential referendum, Annan notably suggested to the United Nations to consider other means of breaking the diplomatic deadlock over Western Sahara. He asked James Baker, who was then his special representative in the Sahara dossier, “to explore the ways and means of reaching a rapid, lasting and consensual resolution.”
Baker submitted two resolution proposals between 2001 and 2003. Morocco accepted the first, but the Polisario and Algeria rejected it. And while Algeria and the Polisario accepted the second proposal, Morocco in turn rejected it. Following Baker’s resignation in 2004, the UN Security Council asked the parties to the dispute to submit a new set of proposals to reach a political solution.
Consensus on the political solution
In 2007, Morocco presented its Autonomy Plan to the council. Since then, this UN council has repeatedly hailed the Moroccan plan as “serious and credible.” Even more crucially, all of the resolutions the council has passed over the past decade, including Resolutions 2440, 2468, 2494, 2548, and 2654 have firmly entrenched the Moroccan plan as the best path to a politically feasible and mutually acceptable solution.
Despite all these developments, the supporters of the Polisario and Algeria still consider any attempt to reach a political solution, which disqualifies the self-determination referendum, as a violation of the right of the “Sahrawi people” to self-determination.
Again, such a partisan reading ignores a key fact contained in the ruling of the International Court of Justice (ICJ). In this 1975 verdict that the defenders of the Polisario continue to keenly invoke, the Court clearly indicated that it left the General Assembly of the UN a certain “discretion as to the forms and procedures by which the right to self-determination can be exercised.”
Besides the fact that the ICJ’s opinion was advisory and not legally binding, the word “discretion” gives the UN room for maneuver and interpretation to seek other means of achieving a lasting solution to the Sahara dispute.
And that is exactly what the UN has been doing for the past 16 years. Faced with the impossibility of reaching a solution by referendum, the Security Council simply resorted to urging the parties to the conflict to negotiate “a mutually acceptable political solution based on compromise.”
The legal status of the territory has changed
More importantly, the historically inaccurate but emotionally appealing narrative of Polisario supporters omits the fact that the legal status of this conflict has changed due to consistency of practice, a fundamental principle of customary international law.
The language adopted by Security Council resolutions since 2007, as well as the council’s constant reminder to the parties to make efforts towards reaching a mutually acceptable and politically negotiated solution, have endorsed the Moroccan plan as the best way out of the impasse in Western Sahara.
So, despite all those in France who still seek to revive the self-determination referendum thesis, the UN Security Council has since 2007 ruled in favor of the more realistic and diplomatically implementable option of a negotiated political solution.
And because the language used in the Council’s resolutions over the past 16 years has endorsed the Moroccan plan as the best way out of the diplomatic impasse over the Sahara, continuing to invoke the ICJ’s inconclusive ruling is not only desperate and obsolete.
It is also dangerous and irresponsible, not least because doing so defies the hard-thought resolutions of the UNSC while encouraging the Polisario Front to dream of waging a war it cannot win, and which will only prolong the ordeal of already distressed Sahrawis.
Samir Bennis is the co-founder of Morocco World News. You can follow him on Twitter @SamirBennis.
