Summary

As Spain – in the 1970s – was undergoing a difficult transition from the dictatorship of Generalissimo Franco towards a democracy Morocco – in the wake of considerable domestic turbulence – annexed the former Spanish colony of the Western Sahara. Morocco claimed that it was merely restoring its territorial integrity, disrupted by French and Spanish colonialism. The claim was challenged by Sahrawi nationalists in the Polisario Front, backed by Algeria.

In the dispute, two quite different approaches to sovereignty are confronting – a state centered Moroccan and a nation centered Polisario. In fact, the conflict has also become a sign of the wider dispute over regional hegemony between the two leading North African states. And above all: the United States has been a faithful supporter of Morocco over the past thirty years, though not as strong as it used to. And Algeria has dramatically improved its relations with the United States.

The article has also been published in Le Monde diplomatique (Spanish ed.)

The article

Just over thirty three years ago, as Spain was undergoing a difficult transition from the dictatorship of Generalissimo Franco towards a democracy, Morocco, in the wake of considerable domestic turbulence in the previous four years, annexed the former Spanish colony of the Western Sahara.

Although its actions flouted resolutions in favour of self-determination by both the United Nations and the Organisation of African Unity (today the African Union), Morocco claimed that it was merely restoring its territorial integrity, disrupted by French and Spanish colonialism.

Observers noted, however, that King Hassan had, during the previous two years, also manipulated the kingdom’s longstanding claim to the region to maximise the monarchy’s domestic support.

1975: decision of the International Court of Justice

It was a claim challenged by Sahrawi nationalists in the Polisario Front, backed by Algeria, who both relied upon the decisions of the international and regional organisations cited above, and on the advisory decision of the International Court of Justice, issued in October 1975.

At the request of the United Nations General Assembly a year before, the Court had considered submissions from Morocco, Algeria and Mauritania on the issue, reaching the conclusion that, although Western Saharan tribes had had liens of fealty with the Moroccan sultanate in pre-colonial times, these did not amount to legitimate claims of territorial sovereignty, as Morocco claimed.

This judgement was exploited by both sides; Morocco claimed that the first part justified its claims, while the Polisario Front insisted that the second part implicitly required a process of self-determination.

1975–2009: positions have not changed

In essence, these positions have not changed over the last three decades, raising the question, given the enduring intransigence of the immediate parties to the dispute, whether any resolution can reasonably be expected in the foreseeable future.

There have, of course, been tactical changes – Mauritania was forced to abandon its claim in 1979 by the military actions of the Polisario Front. In September 1991, the United Nations succeeded in imposing a ceasefire, monitored by a special mission, MINURSO. The mission has been deployed for the last fifteen years, against the promise of a referendum, endlessly delayed by disputes over who should participate.

Algeria, too, has restrained the Polisario Front from taking up the military option once again. In reality, however, none of those involved are willing to fundamentally moderate their positions; Morocco still insists upon its sovereign claim and the Polisario Front will not compromise on its demand for a referendum on self-determination.

The essence of the dispute

The reason for the enduring nature of the dispute is simple; both sides claim the sovereign right to control the territory and this right, by its very nature, cannot be compromised. Sovereignty, after all, is classically a statement about the articulation of exclusive and indivisible power and cannot be fragmented.

Even though in recent years, that bald definition has been modified by arguments about the nature of the legitimacy of the expression of sovereign power by states, it remains essentially unchallenged in international law.

The Western Sahara dispute does raise challenges to this traditional position, however, and it is these potential challenges that suggest that a solution to the dispute might eventually emerge.

This is because the dispute has brought together two quite different approaches to sovereignty.

• The Moroccan position is based on the classical expression of sovereignty as the
  inherent right of a state to express sovereign power over its territory
• The Polisario Front insists that sovereignty is legitimised only when it reflects the right
  of a nation inhabiting a territory to claim sovereignty over it – the essence of
   self-determination, in short.

The problem for the United Nations and, by extension, for the African Union, is that neither has ever resolved the contradiction between state and nation, since they have simply assumed the two to be coterminous. International law, however, favours the former definition, although there has been increasing pressure for the latter to be adopted instead, ever since the end of the Cold War.

It is not that international organisations have been unaware of the contradictions; they have simply never confronted them. The United Nations, after all, has always assumed that the domestic affairs of states – the arena of sovereign authority – are not normally its concern, yet it has long promoted the right of “peoples” to self-determination through General Assembly Resolution 1514 (1960)(Note 1)  , if only in the developing world . (Note 2)

More recently, in the contemporary world of pre-emptive intervention favoured by major states – particularly the United States and Britain, with other European states teetering on the brink of acceptance – the United Nations has adopted the principle of “Responsibility to Protect”, the right of intervention if a state cannot or is unwilling to protect its population. Yet the reluctance to intervene remains its guiding legal principle.

This, coupled with the unwillingness of either the Polisario Front (with Algeria behind it) or Morocco to compromise, has increasingly irritated the Security Council which thus finds itself powerless to do more than renew the mandate for MINURSO every six months.

Indeed, as King Hassan once said, all Morocco wants is “the stamp and the flag”, the classic symbols of sovereignty. Yet that, in essence, is all the Polisario Front wants too.

All else is negotiable, hence the repeated Moroccan proposals of internal autonomy and the failure of United Nations-sponsored initiatives, such as the two plans put forward by James Baker when he was the United Nations special envoy to the region between 1997 and 2004.
Hence, too, the failure of the four rounds of face-to-face talks sponsored by the United Nations at Manhasset between January 2007 and March 2008, followed by the despairing comments of the then special envoy, Peter van Walsum, that the United Nations would have to compromise on its support for self-determination, comments that ensured his appointment was not renewed last August.

The wider issues

Yet the Western Sahara issue is not just a problem for Morocco and the Polisario Front; there are at least two wider dimensions that affect its outcome.

• One is the tense relationship between Morocco and Algeria inside North Africa.
  Morocco is conscious of its thousand-year tradition of statehood inside North Africa
  and resentful of the way in which France dictated its borders during the colonial period.
  Indeed, Moroccan nationalists still maintain an atavistic claim to the country’s “lost provinces”
  which today form part of Western Algeria and the Moroccan government is still uncomfortable
  with Algerian assumptions of its hegemonic role inside the region.

• Algeria, on the other hand, has built its international reputation on its revolutionary legitimacy
  stemming from the war of independence from France between 1954 and 1962, and its
  leading role within the Non-Aligned Movement in the 1970s.

Self-determination has always been the path to legitimate independent statehood for Algeria,and it has long contested Morocco’s claims to regional leadership, hence the “War of the Sands”between the two neighbours in 1963. Houari Boumediènne, Algeria’s charismatic president duringthe 1970s, always sought regional unity through the construction of a “Maghreb des Peuples”, rather than through what he claimed was the Moroccan vision of a “Maghreb des Etats”.

Thus, in 1975, Algeria, together with Libya, supported the Polisario Front, although Libya later withdrew because, as Colonel Qadhafi claimed, continued support would “balkanise” the Maghrib.

When Algeria sought to renew its vision of regional unity, through the Treaty of Concord and Fraternity in 1984, Morocco was excluded because of the Western Sahara issue.

Morocco riposted by creating the Arab-African Union, with Libya as its partner, which by then had been excluded from the Algerian vision. Although this initiative only lasted a couple of years, it was long enough to make the point that Algeria was not the only country that had sustainable claims to regional leadership.

Then, in 1989, Morocco led the way towards a new regional vision; that of the Maghrib Arab Union. However, tensions between Morocco and Algeria in the 1990s, together with Libyan irritation over North African lack of support for the Lockerbie affair, led to its effective suspension.

In these terms, therefore, the Western Sahara dispute has become a paradigm, indeed even a metaphor, for the wider dispute over regional hegemony between the two leading North African states.

Hence King Mohammed VI’s increasing irritation with Algeria today for not accepting Morocco’s autonomy plans for the Western Sahara and for maintaining the frontier between the two countries closed.

At the same time, President Bouteflika, who was, in fact, Algeria’s foreign minister when the Western Sahara issue first flared up, sees no reason to abandon Algeria’s support for both the Polisario Front and self-determination, as a way of cutting Moroccan pretensions down to size.

Nor does either state operate within a diplomatic vacuum. Morocco has traditionally been a pro-Western bulwark in North Africa and the wider Arab world, particularly during the Cold War, and has, as a result, traditionally benefited from American and European support.

The Western Sahara issue did, it is true, create some embarrassment but apart from initial reticence on the part of the Carter administration in the 1970s and in newly democratic Spain, other European states have tended to seek compromise over the issue and have increasingly leaned towards Moroccan preferences.

This has caused some embarrassment over European fishing policy and, in 2002, the United Nations legal advisor had to rule that a Moroccan oil exploration contract was illegal because the Western Sahara was, according to the United Nations, still a non-self-governing territory, as defined in 1963 when Spain was appointed the administrative power, a right it ceded to Morocco and Mauritania in 1976.

Nonetheless, France and, latterly, Spain have increasingly endeavoured to persuade other countries to accept Morocco’s arguments for Western Saharan autonomy under Moroccan sovereignty.

The Polisario Front has long been active in seeking diplomatic support for its government-in-exile, the Saharan Arab Democratic Republic which, with 125,000 Saharan refugees, has been located and protected on Algerian territory around the western desert town of Tindouf ever since 1975 . Note 3
At one time, up to seventy-three countries did recognise it diplomatically but only one of them – Yugoslavia – was in Europe. In any case, the one state which was crucial, because of the diplomatic pressure it could bring to bear on the two key protagonists and the role it played in the United Nations, was the United States, and Washington has been a faithful supporter of Morocco over the past thirty years.

Outcomes

Over the last decade, however, that support has not been quite as steady as in the past. The Cold War, after all, is over and the constancy of alliances that characterised that period has eased.

Secondly, Algeria has come to terms with the disappearance of the Non-Aligned Movement and the emergence of hegemonic stability centred around the United States, especially since September 11, 2001 and the start of the War on Terror.

During Abdelaziz Bouteflika’s long presidency, Algeria has successfully rebuilt its international reputation and has dramatically improved its relations with the United States, particularly over a shared approach to trans-national terrorism. Washington, too, has been irritated by the failure of the Baker mission to find a solution to the Western Sahara issue.

Morocco now seems to sense that time is of the essence – hence its pressure on Algeria to collaborate over finding a compromise that would grant Morocco sovereignty at the price of domestic autonomy.

It is also aware that attitudes inside Western Sahara are still hostile to the annexation, as evidenced by the constant round of demonstrations and arrests there Note 4  . Yet, even after more than thirty years, the Moroccan monarchy, for reasons of domestic support, cannot abandon its demands for recognition of its sovereign annexation Note 5 .

Indeed, Morocco believes that its goal is in sight if only international support can be maintained – a reasonable enough assumption, given past experience. Yet Algeria remains the rock that could still cause a shipwreck, and now comes news that the Obama administration may well re-evaluate its policies and alliances in North Africa, which could well spell disaster.

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Notes
1  Ironically enough, Morocco has recourse to paragraph 6 of the resolution, which denies self-determination if it disrupts the pre-colonial integrity of a state, to justify its claim to the Western Sahara. In fact, the exception was only intended to apply to small enclaves separated by colonialist practice, such as Cabinda in Angola.
 
2 The so-called “Blue Water Convention” This assumes that Europe’s and the United States sovereignty has already been reified in stable states, so that issues of self-determination only arise amongst former colonies and in the developing world.

3  The Republic was proclaimed in February 1976, as Spain handed over its administrative powers to Morocco and Mauritania. It claims to be a state-in-exile – a concept unknown under international law although it has been used in political studies since the 1970s. It is used of refugee groups with strong and effective political leadership, either in exile, as with the Western Saharans or under alien occupation, as with the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories before 1993, when the PLO acted as a clandestine state-in-exile. See Keynon-Lischer S. (2006), Dangerous sanctuaries: refugee camps, civil war and the dilemmas of humanitarian aid, Cornell University Press (New York); 19

4  See Human Rights Watch (2008), Human rights in the Western Sahara and in the Tindouf refugee camps, New York (December 2008)
 
5  The Moroccan situation is a very good example of what is known to international relations theorists as the “sunk cost effect”. So much capital – moral and diplomatic as well as financial – has been invested in the Western Sahara that the conviction must be that only further investment can bring success