Western Sahara

International Law, Justice and Natural Resources

Damien Kingsbury

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317338680
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

As the Spanish were preparing to leave colonized Western Sahara in 1975, Morocco invaded, sparking a war with the Western Saharan Polisario Front. About 70% of Western Sahara was occupied by Morocco, which stations up to 140,000 soldiers in the territory, primarily along a 1700 kilometre long sand berm that is protected by one of the world's largest fields of landmines. In 1991, Morocco and the Polisario Front agreed to a truce ahead of a referendum on Western Sahara's future. However, Morocco has since refused to allow the referendum to take place, and has begun the extensive exploitation of Western Sahara's non-renewable natural resources. This has both highlighted the plight of the Saharawi people who live in refugee camps in Algeria and in occupied Western Sahara, and pushed the Polisario Front back to a position where it is openly canvassing for a return to war. This book was originally published as a special issue of Global Change, Peace and Security.

The role of resources in the resolution of the Western Sahara issue

Damien Kingsbury

Faculty of Arts and Education, Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia

The westernmost corner of Algeria, near the border with Morocco, Western Sahara and Mauritania, is a desolate and unforgiving place, where summer temperatures reach and sometimes exceed 50 degrees C. This barren plateau type of desert is known as hammada and has historically been referred to as ‘the Devil’s Garden’. It is an apt name for an environment where sustaining life is impossible without complete reliance on external support.

It is in this area, near the Algerian town of Tindouf, that the Popular Front for the Liberation of Saguia el-Hamra and Rio de Oro (Frente Popular de Liberación de Saguía el Hamra y Rio de Oro, or Polisario Front) administers refugee camps for Saharawi people displaced by Morocco’s 1975 invasion of Spanish Sahara (later known as Western Sahara). Between around 100,000 and 165,000 people live in the six camps in the area,¹ surviving on aid from Algeria, South Africa and the wider international community. The Polisario Front also administers the ‘liberated’ territory of Western Sahara, known as the Saharawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR).²

It is in this all but forgotten place that the four-decades-old claim to Western Saharan independence was again building towards armed conflict. A growing young population, educated but with very few jobs, almost no opportunities and little future, was pushing for its administration to reclaim their land from Moroccan occupation. As the Saharawi refugees wait in these remote and desolate camps, their compatriots in occupied Western Sahara are regularly subjected to abuse and oppression; dissent is not allowed in occupied Western Sahara and is dealt with harshly, often through extra-judicial means.

Meanwhile the relative wealth that the Saharawi people regard as their birthright and which might provide a basis for them to build more complete lives in a future independent state is being sold off to foreign companies, in return for which they receive nothing. Almost all of these resources are finite and such financial legacy as might have been available to the SADR is being depleted by Morocco as a colonial occupier.³ Faced with being locked into an indefinite and futile future in ‘the Devil’s Garden’ or pressing the issue militarily, with some hope of breaking the current deadlock, the latter was increasingly the preferred option.

The papers in the collection consider aspects of the role of Western Sahara’s resources in finding a resolution to the status of Saharawi refugees and Morocco’s illegal military occupation of Western Sahara. In part, Western Sahara’s natural resources might provide an avenue for finding a way towards a resolution of this issue but, probably more so, the lack of access to those resources by the Saharawi people, and their being plundered under Moroccan administration, is an increasing source of conflict. There is, therefore, an increasing likelihood that, should the issue of Morocco’s occupation of Western Sahara not be settled, there will be a return to war in north-west Africa.

This potential and increasingly likely return to war will destabilize north-west Africa at a time when much of North Africa is already in turmoil. The costs to the Saharawi, and perhaps to Morocco, Algeria and the region, will be high.

Background to the conflict

The oasis of Tindouf, in the middle of this otherwise uninhabitable land, had been settled in 1852 by one of the Saharan tribes, the Tajakant, which, along with other regional tribes, was descended from the Arabic Beni Hassan tribe that had conquered the north of Africa in the eleventh century and which blended with local Berber and Tuareg tribes. As a result of tribal conflict, 43 years later, the Tajakant were displaced by the Reguibat tribe, which continues to dominate not just this town but has become the dominant tribe in the region, including in Western Sahara. The colonial French did not reach Tindouf until 1934, when they established it as an outpost of French Algeria.

Although Morocco claims historical ownership of a much greater region than it now occupies, historical maps show that, for example, in 1595 it was divided into two provinces, together being smaller than current Morocco. The following century, an expansionist Morocco seized territory as far south as Senegal, but in 1765 signed a peace treaty with Spain recognizing it did not have authority over Tekna tribes in the border area between Morocco and Western Sahara. While the Tekna continued to acknowledge Moroccan sovereignty, their territory marked the boundary of the Moroccan state.

The Spanish had, since the seventeenth century, used ports in what was to become Western Sahara to facilitate the slave trade from Mauritania. When the French occupied Algeria and imposed a protectorate over Morocco, they set the southern limit at the Draa River (just north of the current southern border). The French did not delineate the southern land border in the desert on the basis that it was uninhabitable. Growing tensions between Spain and France over regional control resulted, in the 1884 Berlin Conference at which the region was divided between colonial powers, with, Spain controlling the north of Morocco and what was to become Spanish Sahara between just south of the Draa River in Morocco and Mauritania. The Reguibat resisted Spanish colonialism, not being subdued in what was Spanish Sahara until 1934, a half a century after Spain’s colonial takeover.

Following its independence from France in 1956, Morocco had claimed the oasis of Tindouf, but so had the recently independent Algeria. In the 1963 ‘Sand War’, Algeria ensured that Tindouf remained as part of Algeria and thus set the international boundaries of the new state.⁴ However, Tindouf is in an otherwise inhospitable region, and the area to the south of it is perhaps even more so. This is the area of six self-administered Saharawi refugee camps, administered independently by the Polisario Front which claims to be the legitimate representative of the Saharawi people of former Spanish Sahara.

Morocco’s invasion

From the dying days of European colonialism, the position of the United Nations had been that there should be a referendum among the indigenous population of Spanish Sahara in order to settle the status of the Spanish colony. With the growth of a new national consciousness among still colonized peoples, in 1971 a group of Saharawi students formed a political organization that, two years later, would become the Polisario Front. The intention of the Polisario Front was to end Spanish colonialism in what was then Spanish Sahara, to which end the organization initiated a guerrilla campaign against the colonial administration.

The Polisario Front grew quickly, especially with the defection of Saharawi Spanish troops. Spain backed the National Saharawi Union Party (Partido de Union Nacional Saharaui – PUNS), privileging ties with Spain, Morocco moved to claim Spanish Sahara on the basis of claimed historical links between its royal family and the Saharawi people, while Mauritania claimed Spanish Sahara based on a common ethnicity. In June 1975, a visiting UN envoy, Simeon Ake, noted that there was ‘overwhelming consensus’ in Spanish Sahara for independence.⁵

However, Morocco had claimed the territory since its own independence and had won and lost territory to the colonial Spanish in the late 1950s. In response to this move towards decolonization, the Moroccan army began attacks from early October 1975 and the following month initiated its ‘Green March’ of about 350,000 militarily supported civilians to occupy Spanish Sahara. Under pressure from Morocco, in mid-November 1975, Spain signed the ‘Madrid Accords’ which divided the colony between Morocco and Mauritania (not published by the Official State Bulletin and hence not formalized), just four days later ratifying the contradictory ‘Law on the Decolonization of Sahara’.

As Morocco and Mauritania invaded, war with the Polisario Front ensued. In February 1976, the Polisario Front declared the Saharawi Arab Democratic Republic. With war raging, Saharawi refugees flooded across the border to what were to become the camps near Tindouf. Though severely outnumbered, the Algerian-backed Polisario Front had initial military successes to the extent that, in 1978, the understaffed and divided Mauritanian army had to withdraw. The following year, Mauritania formally recognized SADR. By August 1979, however, Morocco had annexed that southern part of Western Sahara abandoned by Mauritania. Between 1982 and 1987, Morocco built a series of six walls, each further consolidating its territorial control over Western Sahara, the last partitioning Western Sahara with around 70% of the territory inside the ‘useful’ zone and the arid and resource-poor outer region (‘liberated zones’) remaining under SADR control.

Under international law, Morocco’s invasion of Spanish Sahara remains illegal.⁶ However, the functional military stalemate created by the construction of the 1987 wall meant that, as the Cold War was drawing to an end, the parties agreed to an internationally monitored referendum on self-determination for the Saharawi people in 1988, ratified in 1991.⁷ This was to be implemented and monitored by the United Nations Mission for Referendum in Western Sahara (MINURSO), which has continued to have its mandate renewed by the UN Security Council, despite its inability to implement most of its originally stated agenda. Morocco has since refused to allow the ballot. Initial disputes were over who would be eligible to vote, with the Polisario Front arguing in favour of those included in the last Spanish census and their descendants, and Morocco claiming the right to vote by settlers since then.

There have been a number of attempts to find a settlement to the Western Sahara problem but, despite no progress, the 1988 ceasefire between the Polisario Front and Morocco (ratified by the UN in 1991) has held. Morocco’s rejection of a vote has led to a stalemate. There have been further attempts to find a resolution, including the Houston Agreement of 1997 for a referendum in 1998 and the subsequent Moroccan-drafted ‘Baker Plan I’ of 2001⁸ and ‘Baker Plan II’ of 2003, which was endorsed by the United Nations Security Council (UNSC)⁹ but which Morocco refused to accept. The Baker Plans were followed by the Manhasset Negotiations of 2007–8, which similarly failed to find a solution to the deadlock.

This, however, could change. Morocco has put forward an ‘autonomy’ proposal for Western Sahara, in which the territory could be self-administering within the state of Morocco. However, there is little faith among the Saharawi in that autonomy being genuine, and it does not include an alternative to autonomy. The Polisario Front has, however, said it will accept the autonomy proposal if the Saharawi people are allowed to vote on it. They expect the proposal would be rejected, thereby further establishing grounds for the alternative of independence. Hans Corell, meanwhile, has written that the UNSC should simply declare Western Sahara independent. Corell also noted that companies were entering into illegal contracts with the government of Morocco for exploitation of Western Sahara’s natural resources.¹⁰

Western Sahara continues to be listed by the UN as a non-self-governing territory, with Spain as its de jure administering authority, which Spain refuses to accept.¹¹ For Spain to represent Western Sahara in the UN would rai...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. The role of resources in the resolution of the Western Sahara issue
• 2. The taking of the Sahara: the role of natural resources in the continuing occupation of Western Sahara
• 3. Western Sahara, resources, and international accountability
• 4. The status of Western Sahara as occupied territory under international humanitarian law and the exploitation of natural resources
• 5. The hidden cost of phosphate fertilizers: mapping multi-stakeholder supply chain risks and impacts from mine to fork
• 6. The role of natural resources in the building of an independent Western Sahara
• 7. Independence by fiat: a way out of the impasse – the self-determination of Western Sahara, with lessons from Timor-Leste
• 8. Saharawi conflict phosphates and the Australian dinner table
• Index