“For France”, occupied Western Sahara’s “present and future fall under Morocco’s sovereignty”, declared French President Emmanuel Macron, drawing a standing ovation from the lawmakers he was addressing in the parliament of its former colony Morocco earlier on October 29.
“The sole and exclusive sovereign over Western Sahara is the Sahrawi people. [Neither] Macron, nor anyone else, has the right to decide on their behalf,” retorted the government of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR), as Western Sahara is officially known.
This government, led by the Polisario Front (PF) which is recognized by the UN as the sole representative of the Sahrawi people, is in control of the Free Zone – or the Liberated Territory – amounting to a fifth of Western Sahara. With the military and financial support of the US and France and the complicity of Western Sahara’s former colonizer France, the Moroccan army annexed the remaining 80%, including the whole of its coastline, in 1975 and continues occupation to date.
Morocco’s claim to sovereignty over Western Sahara is not recognized by the African Union (AU), of which the SADR is a member-state. The UN includes it in the list of Non-Self-Governing Territories where decolonization is yet to be completed. Its General Assembly regards Moroccan presence in Western Sahara as an illegal occupation. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) maintains there is no “tie of territorial sovereignty between the territory of Western Sahara and the Kingdom of Morocco.”
Macron’s decision to grant French recognition of Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara also contravenes the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU). In a ruling earlier that month on October 4, CJEU reiterated that the fisheries and trade agreements between the European Union (EU) and Morocco involving natural resources extracted from Western Sahara were illegal because Morocco has no sovereignty over this territory.
The judgment requires these illegal agreements to cease within a year. In less than a month, Macron entered France into fresh deals worth USD 10.8 billion, pledging “investments” he claimed would “benefit local populations” in Western Sahara.
“Past international investments in Western Sahara’s resources, such as in the [extraction of] phosphates and fisheries,” have yielded little benefit to the Sahrawi people, Kamal Fadel, Western Sahara’s Representative to Australia and the Pacific, told Peoples Dispatch. “The influx of foreign capital only tends to further entrench the occupation by supporting Morocco’s infrastructure and military presence in the region.”
Most of the jobs created in the process are handed to Moroccan settlers to incentivize them to stay put in the occupied territory. The remaining jobs are doled out to a few in exchange for their “loyalty and obedience”, while the Sahrawi masses are condemned to live under “poverty, oppression and abuse”, added Babouzeid Lebbihi, President of Collective of Sahrawi Human Rights Defenders (CODESA).
Leaders of this organization, along with other Sahrawi activists, suffer constant harassment at the hands of the occupation authorities, whose security forces regularly besiege homes, confiscate properties, and take political prisoners, several of whom have been subjected to torture and rape.
In December 2020, Trump announced the US recognition of “Moroccan sovereignty over the entire Western Sahara territory,” in exchange for Morocco’s normalization of ties with Israel, legitimizing the apartheid settler colonial state’s occupation of Palestine.
Taking office a month later in January 2021, the current US President Joe Biden reiterated the endorsement of Moroccan occupation. A year later, in March 2022, Western Sahara’s former colonizer Spain followed suit, before France crossed that bridge earlier this week. Earlier this year, the AU also decided to suspend the members of representatives of SADR from meetings with international partners.
These developments undermining the prospects of a sovereign SADR “fuel discontent among Sahrawis and escalate regional unrest,” warned Fadel.
“Gaza has changed the whole equation,” said Babouzeid. “For more than three decades, the Sahrawi people under occupation have bet on political action and peace in order to avoid bloodshed, and today our land is being sold to the occupation by imperialist powers.” With major powers like France “adding fuel to the fire… I believe that the situation will explode in the region,” he added.
“Under the legitimate leadership of the Polisario Front, the Sahrawi people remain resolute in resisting Moroccan occupation, with all legitimate means, including armed struggle,” warns the Sahrawi government.
The history of Western Sahara is more complicated than this article suggests. Until France and Spain divided the Moroccan Sultanate -AKA the Alawi Sultanate- during the scramble for Africa, it was all part of Morocco.
I have no idea how this could be solved, other than uniting the entire of Maghreb. On one hand Morocco has historical claims to the Western Sahara, on the other the monarchy is reactionary and corrupt and the people of Western Sahara have a right to self determination. Though in the grand scheme Sahrawis are not a distinct group of people than their Arab and Amazigh neighbors.