In a desert nation in northwestern Africa, an Arab Muslim people have been engaged in a nonviolent struggle against a repressive U.S.-backed foreign military occupation that has largely been ignored by the peace and human rights community here in the United States.
Western Sahara is a sparsely-populated territory about the size of Colorado, located on the Atlantic coast just south of Morocco. Traditionally inhabited by nomadic tribes with a long history of resistance to outside domination, Estern Sahara - then known as Spanish Sahara – was occupied by Spain from the late 1800s through the mid-1970s. The nationalist Polisario Front launched an armed independence struggle against Spain in 1973 and Madrid eventually promised to allow for independence by 1976. Irredentist claims by Morocco and Mauritania were brought before the International Court of Justice, which ruled in 1975 that – despite pledges of fealty by certain tribal leaders in the territory to the Moroccan sultan centuries earlier and ties between some Sahrawi and Mauritanian tribes – the right of self-determination by the ethnically-distinct indigenous population of the territory, known as Sahrawis, was paramount. A special U.N. Commission, which visited the territory that same year, reported that the vast majority of Sahrawis supported independence.
In November 1975, longtime Spanish dictator General Francisco Franco, on his deathbed and under considerable pressure from the United States, which did not want to see the leftist Polisario come to power, reneged on Spain’s promise to allow the Sahrawis the right of self-determination and instead agreed to partition the territory between the pro-Western countries of Morocco and Mauritania. As Moroccan forces moved into Western Sahara most of the population fled into refugee camps in neighboring Algeria. Morocco and Mauritania rejected a series of unanimous U.N. Security Council resolutions calling for the withdrawal of foreign forces and recognition of the Sahrawis’ right of self-determination. The United States and France, meanwhile, despite voting in favor of these resolutions, blocked the United Nations from enforcing them. The Polisario – which had been driven out of most of the territory’s population centers along with much of the civilian population – declared independence as the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic.
Thanks in part to the Algerians providing significant amounts of military equipment and economic support, Polisario guerrillas fought well against both occupying armies. Mauritania was defeated by 1979, agreeing to turn their third of Western Sahara over to the Polisario. However, the Moroccans then annexed that remaining southern part of the country as well.
The Polisario then focused their armed struggle against Morocco and, by 1982, had liberated nearly 85 percent of their country. Over the next four years, however, the tide of the war was reversed in Morocco’s favor thanks to the United States and France dramatically increasing their support for the Moroccan war effort, with U.S. forces providing important training for the Moroccan army in counter-insurgency tactics. In addition, the Americans and French helped Morocco construct an 800-mile “wall” – primarily consisting of two heavily-fortified parallel sand berms – which eventually shut off more than 80 percent of Western Sahara from penetration by Polisario fighters.
(http://flicker.com/photos/sahara/16244657/in/set-1780712)
Meanwhile, the Moroccan government, through generous housing subsidies and other benefits, successfully encouraged thousands of Moroccan settlers – some of whom were from southern Morocco of ethnic Sahrawi background – to immigrate to Western Sahara. By the early 1990s, these Moroccan settlers outnumbered the remaining Sahrawis indigenous to the territory.
The Polisario continued regular assaults against Moroccan occupation forces stationed along the wall until 1991, when both sides agreed to a cease-fire monitored by United Nations peacekeeping forces. The agreement included provisions for a return of Sahrawi refugees to Western Sahara followed by a UN-supervised referendum on the fate of the territory, with the Sahrawi people being given the choice of voting in favor of either independence or integration with Morocco. Neither the repatriation nor the referendum took place, however, due to the Moroccan insistence on stacking the voter rolls with Moroccan settlers and other Moroccan citizens that it claimed had tribal links to the Western Sahara. Despite Secretary General Kofi Annan enlisting former U.S. Secretary of State James Baker as his special representative to help resolve the impasse, Morocco continued to ignore repeated demands from the United Nations that they cooperate with the referendum process.
The Stalled Peace Process
In 2000, the Clinton administration successfully convinced Baker and Annan to give up on efforts to proceed with the referendum as originally agreed by the United Nations ten years earlier and to instead accept Moroccan demands that Moroccan settlers be allowed to vote on the fate of the territory along with the indigenous Sahrawis in a plebiscite that would take place under Moroccan rule. In 2002, the U.N. Security Council approved a proposal where both the Sahrawis and the Moroccan settlers would be able to vote in the referendum, but the plebiscite would take place only after Western Sahara experienced significant autonomy for five years prior to the vote and international guarantees would be in place providing both advocates of integration and independence political freedom to operate openly during that period.
Under considerable pressure, Algeria and eventually the Polisario reluctantly accepted the new plan, but the Moroccans – unwilling to even allow the territory to enjoy a brief period of political freedom – rejected it. Once again, the United States and France blocked the United Nations from enforcing its mandate by refusing to pressure Morocco to comply with its international legal obligations.
Indeed, in what was widely interpreted as rewarding Morocco for its intransigence, the Bush administration designated Morocco in June 2004 as a “major non-NATO ally,” a coveted status given to only a handful of nations, which – among other things – allows them to receive the most advanced U.S. military equipment. The following month, the Senate ratified a free trade agreement with Morocco by an 85-13 margin, making the kingdom one of only a half dozen countries outside of the Western hemisphere to enjoy such a close economic relationship with the United States.
U.S. aid to Morocco has gone up five-fold since the Bush administration came to office, ostensibly as a reward for the kingdom undertaking a series of neo-liberal “economic reforms” and to assist the Moroccan government in “combating terrorism.” While there has been some political liberalization within Morocco in recent years under the young King Mohammed VI, who succeeded his father in 1998, gross and systematic human rights violations in the occupied Western Sahara continues unabated, with public expressions of nationalist aspirations and organized protests against the occupation and human rights abuses routinely met with severe repression.
Earlier this year, Morocco put forth their version of an “autonomy plan,” which would permanently incorporate Western Sahara into the kingdom with a limited degree of self-governance on local affairs and no option for independence. This initiative has been endorsed by President Bush and by major Republican and Democratic Congressional leaders, but has largely been rejected by the international community as a clear violation of the U.N. Charter and other international legal norms which prohibit the expansion of any nation’s territory by force.
The Sahrawis have fought for their national rights primarily by legal and diplomatic means and have refrained from violence ever since the cease fire 16 years ago. Even during their earlier armed struggle against the occupation, Polisario never engaged in terrorism, restricting their attacks exclusively towards Moroccan and other occupation forces, never towards civilians.
Diplomatic and Political Implications
The irresolution of the Western Sahara conflict has important regional implications. It has encouraged a regional arms race and, on several occasions over the past three decades, has brought Morocco and Algeria close to war. Perhaps even more significantly, it has been the single biggest obstacle to a fuller implementation of the goals of the Arab Maghreb Union – consisting of Morocco, Algeria, Libya, Tunisia, and Mauritania – to pursue economic integration and other initiatives which would increase the standard of living and political stability in the region. The lack of unity and greater coordination among these nations and their struggling economies has contributed to the dramatic upsurge in illegal immigration to Europe and the rise of radical Islamist movements.
The majority of the Sahrawi population lives in exile in Algeria in refugee camps under Polisario administration. Despite autocratic tendencies by some in the Polisario leadership, the 150,000 Sahrawis living in these desert camps have developed a remarkably progressive political and social system governed by participatory democracy and collective economic enterprises within a market economy. They have also engaged in general strikes and other forms of nonviolent resistance when the Polisario leadership has been seen to abuse their authority. Though devoutly Muslim, Sahrawi women are unveiled, enjoy equal rights with men regarding divorce, inheritance and other legal matters, and hold major leadership positions in the Polisario, an explicitly secular nationalist organization. Though the United States claims to support democratic governance in the Arab world that respects women’s rights, U.S. policy has been to block the Sahrawis from establishing such a secular democratic country through its support of a repressive foreign military occupation by an autocratic monarchy.
The Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR) is recognized as an independent country by more than 75 governments, with Kenya and South Africa becoming the latest to extend full diplomatic relations. The SADR has been a full member state of the African Union (formerly known as the Organization for African Unity) since 1982 and most of the international community recognizes Western Sahara as being under an illegal foreign military occupation.
With Morocco’s refusal to allow for an internationally-supervised referendum and the threat of a French and U.S. veto of any Security Council resolution that would push Morocco to compromise, a diplomatic settlement of the conflict looks highly unlikely. In addition, with Morocco’s powerful armed forces protected behind the separation wall and Algeria unwilling to support a resumption of guerrilla war, the Polisario appears to lack a military option as well.
Nonviolent Struggle and International Solidarity
As happened during the 1980s in both South Africa and the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories, however, the locus of the Western Sahara freedom struggle has shifted from the military and diplomatic initiatives of an exiled armed movement to a largely unarmed popular resistance from within.
This first major nonviolent uprising began in early September 1999 when Sahrawi students organized sit-ins and vigils for more scholarships and transportation subsidies and an end to human rights abuses. Former political prisoners seeking compensation and accountability for state-sponsored disappearances soon joined the nonviolent movement, along with Sahrawi workers from nearby phosphate mines and a union of unemployed college graduates. The campaign was eventually suppressed.
A second Sahrawi intifada began in May 2005, as thousands of Sahrawi demonstrators, led by women and youths, took to the streets protesting the ongoing Moroccan occupation and demanding independence. The largely nonviolent protests and sit-ins have met with severe repression by Moroccan occupation forces, with leading Sahrawi activists kidnapped and disappeared. Sahrawi students at Moroccan universities have organized solidarity demonstrations while hunger strikes and other forms of nonviolent protests within Western Sahara continue to this day, bringing long-overdue international attention to the freedom struggle for Africa’s last colony.
Yet, here in the United States, a country which has played such a significant role over the past three decades in perpetuating Morocco’s illegal occupation, this revolution is not being televised. Even within the progressive community and among those well-versed in foreign affairs, very few people are aware of the Western Sahara struggle or could even find Western Sahara on a map. However, despite the lack of media coverage, the Sahrawi intifada will likely intensify as a result of the international community’s failure to resolve the conflict.
In the comparable case of East Timor, it was only after human rights organizations, church groups and thousands of activists in the United States and other countries pressured their governments to end their support for Indonesia’s occupation that the Jakarta regime was finally willing to offer a referendum that gave the East Timorese their right to self-determination. It may take similar grassroots efforts to ensure that the United States and other Western powers live up to their international legal obligations and pressure Morocco to allow the people of Western Sahara to determine their own destiny.
For further reading:
Toby Shelley, Endgame in Western Sahara: What Future for Africa’s Last Colony? Zed Press, 2004
Maria Stephan and Jacob Mundy, “A Battlefield Transformed: From Guerilla Resistance to Mass Nonviolent Struggle in the Western Sahara,” Journal of Military and Strategic Studies, Spring, 2006
Stephen Zunes, “The Future of Western Sahara,” Foreign Policy in Focus, July 20, 2007
Associaation for a Free and Fair Referendum on Western Sahara www.arso.org
