Professor Stephen Zunes
University of San Francisco
Self-determination,
decolonisation and human rights
with reference to the Western Sahara
==> long version PDF formate
Back in the 1980s, when I was active in the international
anti-apartheid movement, I not only looked forward to the day when the
people of South Africa would be free, but the principled leadership
that a free South Africa would bring to the international
community. Nothing illustrates this better than South Africa’s
efforts on behalf of the right of self-determination for the people of
Western Sahara. It is South Africa, more than any other country
in recent years, which has prevented Morocco and its allies from
prevailing at the United Nations in their efforts to legitimize their
illegal annexation of their southern neighbor. It has been South
Africa, more than any other nation in recent years, which reminded the
international community that is not simply a “disputed territory,” but
a case of a long-overdue decolonization.
While the Algerians have also taken impressive leadership on this issue
– going as far back as 1974, if not earlier – their efforts have often
been interpreted by some as being motivated primarily by their own
geopolitical interests. No such claims can be made about South
Africa, however, which has taken on this issue in a particularly timely
and selfless manner.
I recall visiting the refugee camps and surrounding areas in western
Algeria and the liberated zones of Western Sahara back in 1987, when
the war was still raging. At one point, I was shown an array of
Moroccan weapons captured by the Polisario Front, including some
armored personnel carriers. I couldn’t help but notice a number
of inscriptions in Afrikaans, clear evidence that South Africa’s
apartheid regime was directly arming the Moroccan conquest. It is
not surprising that a government that would not allow
self-determination of its own people would be supporting the efforts of
those who would deny it to others.
Similarly, it is not surprising that a government that eventually
emerged from such a difficult and protracted freedom struggle would
ally themselves with those still engaged in their own freedom
struggle. It is perhaps ironic that South Africa – one ostracized
by the United Nations during the apartheid years for its failure to
live up to the UN’s principles of self-determination during its
occupation of Namibia – now has to remind the United Nations to uphold
these very principles in relation to Western Sahara.
As a result of Morocco’s failure to allow the referendum to move
forward and the ability of France and the United States to block the
United Nation Council from enforcing its resolutions that they
cooperate with the process, the Clinton administration successfully
convinced UN Secretary General Kofi Annan and his special envoy James
Baker 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.
This proposal was incorporated in the first Baker Plan presented in
early 2001, which would have held the plebiscite under Moroccan rule
after a four to five year period of very limited autonomy with no
guarantee that independence would be one of the options on the
ballot. This first Baker Plan received the enthusiastic backing
of the incoming Bush administration, which had come to office in part
through Baker’s role as lead counsel for the Republican Party regarding
the disputed Florida vote the previous November, leading some analysts
to note that it was only appropriate that he would put forth a plan
that would effectively give legitimacy to a rigged election. Most
of the international community roundly rejected the proposal, however,
since it would have effectively abrogated previous UN resolutions
granting the right of self-determination with the option of
independence and would have led to the unprecedented action of the
United Nations placing the fate of a non-self-governing territory in
the hands of the occupying colonial power.
As a result, Baker then proposed a second plan where, as with his
earlier proposal, 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 far more significant autonomy for
the four to five years prior to the vote, independence would be an
option on the ballot, and the United Nations would oversee the vote and
guarantee that both advocates of integration and independence would
have the freedom to campaign openly. The UN Security Council
approved the second Baker plan in the summer of 2003.
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 autonomy and risk
the possibility they would lose the plebiscite – rejected it.
Once again, the United States and France blocked the United Nations
from enforcing its mandate by pressuring Morocco to comply with its
international legal obligations.
In what has been widely interpreted as rewarding Morocco for its
intransigence, the Bush administration subsequently designated Morocco
as a “major non-NATO ally” in June of 2004, a coveted status currently
granted to only fifteen key nations, such as Japan, Israel and
Australia. 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, though – in
a potentially significant precedent – Congress insisted that it not
include products from the Western Sahara.
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 most of Morocco in recent years under
the young King Mohammed VI, who succeeded to the throne following the
death of his father in 1999, gross and systematic human rights
violations in the occupied Western Sahara and Sahrawi-populated
segments of southern Morocco continues unabated, with public
expressions of nationalist aspirations and organized protests against
the occupation and human rights abuses routinely met with severe
repression.
The Sahrawis have fought for their national rights primarily by legal
and diplomatic means, not through violence. Unlike a number of
other peoples engaged in national liberation struggles, the Sahrawis
have never committed acts of terrorism. Even during their armed
struggle against the occupation, which ended fifteen years ago,
Polisario forces restricted their attacks exclusively towards the
Moroccan armed forces, never towards civilians.
The irresolution of the Western Sahara conflict has important regional
implications. It has encouraged an arms race between Morocco and
Algeria and, on several occasions over the past three decades, has
brought the two countries 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.
Over the past three decades, the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic has
been recognized as an independent country by more than 80 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 Organization for African Unity) since 1984
and most of the international community recognizes Western Sahara as
Africa’s last colony. By contrast, with only a few exceptions,
the Arab states – despite their outspoken opposition to the Israeli
occupation of Palestinian and Syrian land – have supported Morocco’s
occupation of Western Sahara.
With Morocco’s rejection of the second Baker Plan and the threat of a
French and American veto of any Security Council resolution that would
push Morocco to compromise, a diplomatic settlement of the conflict
looks highly unlikely. 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.
As happened during the 1980s in both South Africa and the
Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories, the locus of the Western
Sahara freedom struggle has recently shifted from the military and
diplomatic initiatives of an exiled armed movement to a largely unarmed
popular resistance from within. In recent years, young activists
in the occupied territory and even in Sahrawi-populated parts of
southern Morocco have confronted Moroccan troops in street
demonstrations and other forms of nonviolent action, despite the risk
of shootings, mass arrests, and torture.
The failure of the Kingdom of Morocco and the Polisario Front to agree
on the modalities of the long-planned United Nations-sponsored
referendum on the fate of Western Sahara, combined with a growing
nonviolent resistance campaign in the occupied territory against
Morocco's 31-year occupation, has led Morocco to propose granting the
former Spanish colony special autonomous status within the
kingdom. The plan has received the enthusiastic support of the
American and French governments as a reasonable compromise to the
abiding conflict. As illustrated below, there are serious problems with
this proposal. However, the very fact that Morocco has felt
obliged to propose a special status for the territory constitutes an
admission that their previous insistence that Western Sahara was simply
another part of Morocco was false. As I and other visitors to
Western Sahara in recent years have noticed, not only has Morocco’s
33-year campaign of assimilation failed, but the younger generation of
Sahrawis is at least as nationalistic as their parents.
It is unfortunate, therefore, that the Moroccan plan for autonomy falls
so well short of what is required in bringing about a peaceful
resolution to the conflict. Moreover, it seeks to set a dangerous
precedent which threatens the very foundation of the post-World War II
international legal system.
To begin with, the proposal is based on the assumption that Western
Sahara is part of Morocco, a contention that has long been rejected by
the United Nations, the World Court, the African Union and a broad
consensus of international legal opinion. To accept Morocco's autonomy
plan would mean that, for the first time since the founding of the
United Nations and the ratification of the UN Charter more than sixty
years ago, the international community would be endorsing the expansion
of a country's territory by military force, thereby establishing a very
dangerous and destabilizing precedent.
If the people of Western Sahara accepted an autonomy agreement over
independence as a result of a free and fair referendum, it would
constitute a legitimate act of self-determination. However, Morocco has
explicitly stated that its autonomy proposal "rules out, by definition,
the possibility for the independence option to be submitted" to the
people of Western Sahara, the vast majority of whom - according to
knowledgeable international observers - favor outright independence.
Even if one takes a dismissive attitude toward international law, there
are a number of practical concerns regarding the Moroccan proposal as
well:
One is that the history of respect for regional autonomy on the part of
centralized authoritarian states is quite poor, and has often led to
violent conflict. For example, in 1952, the United Nations
granted the British protectorate (and former Italian colony) of Eritrea
autonomous, federated status within Ethiopia. In 1961, however, the
Ethiopian emperor unilaterally revoked Eritrea's autonomous status,
annexing it as his empire's fourteenth province, resulting in a bloody
30-year struggle for independence and subsequent border wars between
the two countries, which has taken hundreds of thousands of lives.
Based upon Morocco's habit of breaking its promises to the
international community regarding the UN-mandated referendum for
Western Sahara and related obligations based on the cease fire
agreement eighteen years ago, there is little to inspire confidence
that Morocco would live up to its promises to provide genuine autonomy
for Western Sahara.
Indeed, a close reading of the proposal raises questions as to how much
autonomy is even being offered. Important matters such as control of
Western Sahara's natural resources and law enforcement (beyond local
jurisdictions) remain ambiguous.
In addition, the proposal appears to indicate that all powers not
specifically vested in the autonomous region would remain with the
Kingdom. Indeed, since the king of Morocco is ultimately invested with
absolute authority under Article 19 of the Moroccan Constitution, the
autonomy proposal's insistence that the Moroccan state “will keep its
powers in the royal domains, especially with respect to defense,
external relations and the constitutional and religious prerogatives of
His Majesty the King,” appears to afford the monarch considerable
latitude of interpretation.
In recent years, there has been talk from European academics and
diplomats, among others, that some sort of compromise, or “third way”
between independence and integration such as the Moroccan autonomy
plan, is the most realistic formula to end the conflict. Citing
the dominant conflict resolution literature, this analysis notes how
insistence upon a “winner take all” approach - such as a referendum
offering a choice between autonomy and integration - is unworkable.
While encouraging such compromise and trying to find a win/win
situation is certainly the preferable way to pursue a lasting peaceful
settlement regarding most ethnic conflicts and many international
disputes, Western Sahara is a clear-cut case of self-determination for
a people struggling against foreign military occupation. This is not a
matter of “splitting the difference,” given that one party is under an
illegal foreign military occupation and the other party is the
occupier. This is why the international community rejected Iraq’s
proposals in 1990-91 for some kind of compromise regarding its
occupation of Kuwait. The Polisario Front has already offered
guarantees to protect Moroccan strategic and economic interests if
allowed full independence. To insist that the people of Western Sahara
must give up their moral and legal right to genuine self-determination,
then, is not a recipe for conflict resolution, but for far more serious
conflict in the future.
Morocco has succeeded in resisting its international legal obligations
for more than three decades because of its support by permanent members
of the UN Security Council. As a result of the French and
American veto threats, the UN Security Council has failed to place the
Western Sahara issue under Chapter VII of the UN Charter, which would
give the international community the power to impose sanctions or other
appropriate leverage to force the Moroccan regime to abide by the UN
mandates it has up until now disregarded. Polisario's unwillingness to
compromise further should not be seen as the major obstacle impeding
the resolution of the conflict.
Similar support from Western industrialized nations for Indonesia for
many years had prevented resolution to the occupation of East Timor. It
was only after human rights organizations, church groups and other
activists in the United States, Great Britain and Australia
successfully pressured their governments to end their support for
Indonesia's occupation that the Jakarta regime was finally willing to
offer a referendum which gave the East Timorese their right to
self-determination. It may take similar grassroots campaigns in Europe
and North America to ensure that western powers live up to their
international legal obligations and pressure Morocco to allow the
people of Western Sahara to determine their own destiny.
The growth of the nonviolent resistance struggle in the occupied
territories offers a unique opportunity to build international
awareness of the conflict among civil society organizations that could
offer much-needed solidarity with the freedom struggle inside Western
Sahara. Such massive nonviolent action and other forms of
noncooperation provides and important signal to the Moroccan occupiers
and the international community that the people of Western Sahara still
demand their freedom and will not accept any less than genuine
self-determination.
The use of nonviolent methods of resistance also makes it easier to
highlight gross and systematic violations of international humanitarian
law by Moroccan occupation forces, gaining sympathy and support from
the international human rights community and provide greater pressure
on the French, American and other governments which continued to
provide security assistance to Morocco and otherwise support the
Moroccan occupation.
There is a small but growing movement in Europe supporting the
Sahrawis’ right to national self-determination, as well as similar
civil efforts in South Africa, other African countries, Australia,
Japan and the United States. At this point, however, it is too
small to have much impact on governmental policies, particular those of
France and the United States, which are the two governments most
responsible for the failure of the United Nations to enforce its
resolutions dealing with the conflict. This can change,
however: Just twelve to fifteen years ago, there was relatively
little civil society activism regarding East Timor either.
Subsequently, though, concerted efforts by peace and human rights
activists, church groups, and various NGOs in Canada, Great Britain,
Australia, the United States, and elsewhere eventually forced these
countries to end their support for the Indonesian occupation. As
a result, East Timor is now free.
A similar campaign may be the best hope for the people of Western
Sahara and the best hope we have to save the vitally important
post-World War II principles enshrined in the United Nations Charter
I fully acknowledge that I am not an expert on the Maghreb. I am
not an uncritical supporter of the Polisario Front. I acknowledge
that the numbers of people most immediately impacted by the Moroccan
occupation, on a global scale, is relatively small. What
motivates me to address this issue is that basic principles of human
rights and international law must be upheld, even if it sometimes
inconveniences my government and that - as with any fundamental moral
or legal principle - it must be applied consistently. Back in the
mid-1990s, I served on the board of the North American Coordinating
Committee of NGOs on the Question of Palestine. At a forum I
attended at the United Nations, an Arab delegate gave a passionate
speech against Israeli occupation policies, citing the fundamental
right of self-determination, the importance of enforcing UN Security
Council resolutions, the illegality of an occupying power transferring
its civilian population into occupied territories, the obligation to
uphold internationally-recognized human rights. There was nothing
in that speech with which I could disagree. Ironically, however,
the delegate represented the government of Morocco, which was engaged
and continues to engage in the same violations of these fundamental
international legal standards.
If the international community cannot fulfill its responsibilities on
this issue - where the legal and moral imperatives are so clear - how
can we deal with more complex issues? If the international
community can not uphold the fundamental right of self-determination,
how can we successfully defend other human rights? If the
international community cannot enforce a series of UN Security Council
resolutions regarding such a blatant violation of the UN Charter as a
member state invading, occupying, annexing and colonizing a neighboring
country, how can we enforce other provisions of international law?
The stakes are not simply about the future of one small country, but
the question as to which principle will prevail in the 21st century:
the right of self determination, or the right of conquest? The
answer could determine the fate not just of the Western Sahara, but
that of the entire international legal order for many decades to come.
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