Fez – If you are a keen observer of the decades-long Western Sahara dispute or just an occasional reader of developments in Morocco and the Maghreb, you have certainly repeatedly heard or read in the past few weeks that the latest UN resolution on the Sahara dispute, which the Security Council adopted on this past October 31, constitutes a decisive development and a watershed moment. I think this is true to a very large extent, especially in terms of this resolution’s implications for the future of the Western Sahara region in southern Morocco.
Yet, to more accurately make sense of it, my take is that the resolution is neither wholly unprecedented, nor was it particularly surprising. Instead, and I make this point in many sections of my latest book on the Sahara, which was published a year before the much-hailed UN resolution, it represents the inevitable culmination of a historical process with two origins. While is ane distant and the other one is more recent, these two origins shaped the political destiny of the region for the past five decades.
The Green March set the stage for everything that has taken shape since
The distant origin dates back to November 6, 1975, when the late King Hassan II orchestrated the Green March. Spain still administered the territory back then, while Algeria was starting to insert itself deeper into the dispute by supporting and hosting the separatist Polisario Front. And with the Cold War-shaped ideological contests of that era making the idea of “decolonization” particularly galvanizing across the Global South, Algeria knew that it had the ideological or philosophical upper hand it needed to cast doubt on the legitimacy of Morocco’s claim of historical sovereignty over that region.
Perhaps more troubling for Rabat, despite divergent interests (Madrid wanted to stay in the Sahara or at least leave behind a subservient local elite, while Algiers wanted to stage a “decolonization struggle” that would result in the emergence of a satellite state it could then use to freely access the Atlantic Ocean and undermine Morocco’s continental depth), Spain and Algeria were willing to align their positions around their shared objective of preventing Morocco from recovering its southern provinces.
Given this complex climate, it is no exaggeration to describe the Green March as a strategic epoch-making masterstroke by King Hassan II. Indeed, the march’s peaceful, disciplined, and symbolically potent nature reversed what had been an unfavorable situation for Morocco’s determination to recover its Sahara. More precisely, the march precipitated Spain’s withdrawal from the region without military confrontation, forced Madrid into a fait accompli with the signing of the Madrid Accords on November 14, 1975, and granted Morocco a decisive geopolitical advantage despite Algeria’s deft weaponization of powerful anticolonial buzzwords to paint the Marxist-Leninist Polisario Front and its “Sahrawi nation” as the victims of an “expansionist and imperialistic” monarchy.
To be sure, the Green March did not immediately hand Morocco the undisputed legitimacy it was after. And this was primarily because of Algeria’s diplomatic activism and indirectly because of the ICJ’s confusing advisory opinion. Yet, with the benefit of hindsight, it is now unmistakably clear that the historic march did help lay the groundwork for a future where the only viable political horizon for the Sahara would either be full reintegration with Morocco, or local autonomy within Moroccan sovereignty.
The Autonomy Plan turned the tides
As for the more recent origin of today’s irreversible Moroccan momentum, it began when Morocco endorsed in 1998 the American suggestion that it propose an autonomy plan in order to break the stalemate of the UN process. As is now well known, the resulting Autonomy Initiative, which Morocco presented to the UN Security Council in 2007, gradually transformed the diplomatic landscape between 2007 and 2020.
It is now a well-established fact among observers of this lingering regional dossier that the US recognition of Moroccan sovereignty in December 2020 was decisive in sealing the irreversibility of Morocco’s proposal as the only viable route out of the Sahara conundrum. Yet, long before the first Trump administration gave Morocco that equivalent of a last-minute goal to shatter any illusions of a miraculous comeback, signs of the implosion of Polisario’s statehood dreams were visible in the immediate aftermath of the separatist group’s embarrassing PR failure in the Guerguerat episode in November 2020.
Before it blossomed after the US recognition, this paradigm shift reached a critical milestone in October 2018 with Resolution 2440, which signaled a clear shift toward the adoption of the Moroccan plan as the only feasible route to a lasting and politically sensible resolution of the territorial dispute. Few months before the UNSC adopted this resolution, the pan-African body, predicting the direction which the UN winds were sailing on the Sahara dossier, solemnly declared at its Nouakchott summit in July 2018 that the UN track – centered on realism and compromise – would henceforth be the only legitimate guideline to solve the Western Sahara equation.
As far as I am concerned, this historical trajectory speaks volumes about the continuity of Morocco’s royal diplomacy. To be sure, King Mohammed VI completed what his father initiated. In other words, the 2007 Autonomy Plan, Morocco’s highly strategic return to the AU in 2017, Rabat’s newfound diplomatic resurgence across Africa and Latin America, the American recognition of Moroccan sovereignty in December 2020, and the subsequent repositioning of Spain and France in favor of Morocco’s territorial integrity, all of these developments were only meaningfully possible and needed in the first place because of what the Green March allowed.
As King Mohammed VI himself said it in his speech celebrating Resolution 2797, each of the separate strategic steps Morocco has undertaken over the past three decades under his wise guidance continued and consolidated the strategy of political moderation and strategic patience initiated five decades ago with the deft organization of the Green March. All of these developments have, taken together, made inevitable the current international consensus behind Morocco’s vision.
In my book, The Self-Determination Delusion, I indeed argued that a self-determination referendum was not only impractical but outright impossible, and that the Autonomy Plan had become the UN’s cornerstone for a genuine and politically realistic solution to what I then called the “Sahara conundrum.” That is, the thesis driving the book is that, since 2007, every Security Council resolution – except for the 2016 hiatus when both UN Secretary Ban Ki-moon and the Obama administration appeared to side with the separatist camp’s self-righteous narrative – has unequivocally welcomed the Moroccan proposal as serious and credible, while merely “taking note” of the Polisario’s counterproposal. In so doing, I argued, the Security Council has for years implicitly acknowledged that only Rabat’s plan provides a practical basis for a lasting solution.
Expect Algeria to try to sabotage or delay the coming political (or implementation) phase
And yet, when I wrote and published that book a year ago, I did not expect the United Nations to genuinely assume its historical and diplomatic responsibilities and finally settle the legal dispute over the Sahara question in barely twelve months. For although I already knew – or was deeply convinced – that the UN’s long march toward resolving this conflict would inevitably culminate in the necessity of a political resolution recognizing Moroccan sovereignty, I believed it might take five years, perhaps even a little more.
This is why I concluded my book by urging Moroccan diplomacy to demonstrate even greater strategic vigilance and situational responsiveness; to redouble its efforts in reclaiming the narrative sphere, which has now become the only avenue still open to Algeria for continuing to deny historical evidence and to hope against hope. Because, given its well-established determination to turn a blind eye to all the reversals or defeats it has experienced since 2007, I expected Algeria to keep mobilizing a certain decolonial pathos in favor of an ill-advised and impossible referendum in the Sahara.
Yes, the latest UN resolution undeniably has the merit of having once and for all closed all the once raging debate over the appropriate form of resolving the Sahara conflict. After handing the Algerian regime a painful blow with the adoption of Resolution 2797, the UN recently added insult to Algeria’s injury with the publication of the Arabic version of the resolution by the UN Secretariat.
The UN has thus made it impossible for Algerian diplomacy to engage in what it has done best for the past decade: make up an alternative reality to the triumph of Morocco’s plan, or deliberately misinterpret the spirit and requirements of the UN resolution to carry on with making its misleading case of the continued relevance of the self-determination referendum as “one of the potential solutions” mentioned by the Security Council. Unlike previous resolutions that referred only to “the two parties” of the Sahara dispute (namely Morocco and Polisario), the new wording refers to “the parties.” This clearly indicates that the Security Council now officially considers Algeria a principal party to the territorial dispute.
The way forward for Morocco amid Algerian obfuscation and fabrication
And yet, even in the face of Morocco’s resounding legal victory against the now cornered and laughable separatist narrative, it still seems pertinent to warn Moroccans against hubris and a certain form of exaggerated triumphalism. Measure and moderation are required of any diplomacy grounded in a lucid recognition of the complexities of political reality (as Morocco’s diplomacy has been over the past two decades). Despite the cascade of setbacks it has suffered for the past months and years, I expect Algeria to continue pushing for derailing, or at least prolonging, the Sahara saga.
In other words, although the Sahara question is all but settled on the legal front as the Moroccan Autonomy Plan has acquired the status of international law with its consecration by the Security Council as the sole framework for resolution, the political question remains to be shaped. Namely, the UN, in discussion with all the parties to the conflict – especially Morocco and Algeria – must now work out the exact form that the implementation of the Moroccan plan must take on the ground.
The latest comments by Algeria’s Foreign Minister have given ample indication of Algiers’s readiness to drag its feet in a bid to undermine the implementation of Resolution 2797. As a result, Moroccan diplomats and strategists should preempt Algeria’s coming sabotage of this next phase by addressing these three questions: What should be the next logical step to pursue in the relatively settled UN process? What will Algeria do in the coming weeks and months? And what should Morocco do in response?
If official statements by Morocco’s Foreign Ministry and other governmental bodies are any indication, it is clear that Rabat is well aware of Algeria’s plan to reject UN calls that it sit at the negotiating table by insisting it is but an observer and a concerned neighbor that has no business at any table aiming to “reach a final solution between the kingdom of Morocco and Polisario.” The point here is that, as the great Moroccan historian Abdallah Laroui has argued in his latest book, published in 2022, and as I show at length in chapters 10 and 11 of my book, Algeria has no interest in ending the dispute because doing so contradicts its political doctrine built on reflexive hostility toward Morocco and its desire to overthrow the Moroccan monarchy. And so, knowing that Morocco knows this, I expect Rabat to work on two fronts in the coming weeks and months.
The first front will revolve around rallying more international support within the UN General Assembly to secure the necessary number of votes to submit a draft resolution to remove Western Sahara from the list of non-self-governing territories. This phase will also entail working toward changing the name of the UN mission in the Sahara, because it makes no sense to keep the word “referendum” in its name when that route has been definitively sidelined and confined to the dustbin.
Since 1991, the General Assembly has continued to involve itself in the Sahara dispute in violation of Article 12, Paragraph 1 of the UN Charter. “While the Security Council is exercising in respect of any dispute or situation the functions assigned to it in the present Charter, the General Assembly shall not make any recommendation with regard to that dispute or situation unless the Security Council so requests,” the article clearly states. However, because the Assembly previously supported the idea of a separate Saharan entity – with many member states openly or implicitly backing separatism – it was difficult for Morocco to push for removing the dispute from the Assembly’s agenda.
Now that Resolution 2797 has cemented Morocco’s sovereignty over the Sahara, at a time when at least 125 of the 193 UN Member States support Moroccan sovereignty over the Sahara or acknowledge that the Autonomy Plan is the only basis for reaching a final settlement, there is no longer any reason for this issue to remain on the General Assembly’s agenda. Morocco is now in a position to secure the necessary quorum to achieve this objective.
To do so, Morocco would need the support of 97 countries, bearing in mind that, under the General Assembly’s procedural rules, Morocco only requires a simple majority of the member states present and voting.
The second front, which is actually almost umbilically linked to the first, will see Morocco focus on intensifying efforts to get the AU to revoke the membership of the separatist Polisario Front. Because, at the end of the day, why keep the group as a member of the continental body when international law now makes clear that its self-styled breakaway entity – the self-styled SADR – is destined to be obsolete and be integrated within the sovereignty of Morocco?
Yet this, too, may not prove an easy objective to achieve for two reasons. First, because of the Algiers-Pretoria nexus in continental geopolitics over the Western Sahara dossier. And second, because of the misleading “Sahrawi decolonization” mantra still prevailing in some left-leaning intellectual and activist circles across the continent, including in Nigeria and Kenya, whose respective governments have already signaled their readiness to embrace Morocco’s sovereignty over the Sahara. Ultimately, however, with the African Union now remarkably in favor of settling the Sahara question on Morocco’s terms, completing the job on this front will not be as difficult as turning the tides at the UN General Assembly.
Since Morocco’s return to the AU in 2017, the genuineness of the kingdom’s commitment to Africa and the ensuing deepening of its continental leadership has seen Rabat orchestrate an impressive diplomatic remontada on the African scene. Many former African allies and sympathizers of the Polisario have either openly disowned the separatist group, subtly distanced themselves from it, or solemnly embraced Morocco’s Autonomy Plan by opening consulates in Laayoune or Dakhla.
For all these reasons, I strongly believe that the conclusion I arrived at in my book still stands: While Moroccan sovereignty remains the incontrovertible, inescapable destination of the Sahara, there are still some bumps in the road. And Morocco will have to address those roadblocks through diplomatic foresight, strategic patience, and considerable investment in the cultural scene (media, thinktanks, and universities) to mainstream the narrative of the historical, anthropological, sociological, and legal Moroccanness of the kingdom’s southern provinces.
