 |
| Volume XII, Fall 2005, Number 3 |
| |
BOOK REVIEW
|
| |
|
| |
Endgame in the Western Sahara: What Future for Africa’s Last Colony?, by Toby Shelley. Zed Books, 2004. 215 pages, including notes and index. $22.50, paperback.
Bill Weinberg
Editor, online journal “World War 4 Report,” deconstructing the global war on terrorism.
After a multigeneration guerrilla struggle has become moribund, an intifada breaks out. A
colonized Arab people revolt against a Western-backed government that occupies their land in
defiance of UN resolutions. Thousands have languished in refugee camps since the occupation
began. The occupying power has divided the territory with a security wall to contain the resistance
and protect settlements. Unemployment and human-rights abuses have long been rife. Despair
explodes into anger. Yes, this could be the West Bank. But it could also be a far larger stretch of
desert and coastline 2,000 miles across North Africa: Moroccan-occupied Western Sahara.
Financial Times reporter Toby Shelley’s Endgame in the Western Sahara is the first real study
of this obscure conflict in over 20 years. The last was Tony Hodges’s Western Sahara: The Roots
of a Desert War in 1983. The timing might prove fortuitous for Shelley, if not necessarily for the
Sahrawis, the indigenous inhabitants of the territory.
After two years of calm, a new intifada erupted in Western Sahara in May, and the contested
offshore oil-exploration zones hold the potential to become strategic as global prices remain sky-
high. But Shelley’s book largely documents how the post-9/11 realignments in the Maghreb
present new challenges for the Sahrawis.
A more hopeful analogy to Western Sahara is East Timor; and José Ramos Horta, its independence
leader and Nobel Laureate, has written the introduction to Shelley’s book. In 1975, that same
fateful year that Portugal ceded and Indonesia (illegally) annexed East Timor, a similar drama played
out in what was then called Spanish Sahara. As Spain withdrew, Morocco and Mauritania illegally
divided the territory between them. And (as in East Timor) the anticolonial rebels continued their
guerrilla struggle against the new masters. In 1980, Mauritania pulled out, and Morocco’s King
Hassan II quickly annexed their portion of the territory. Another ten years of war followed before
the Polisario Front guerrillas signed a ceasefire, but the promised UN-sponsored referendum on
independence for Western Sahara has fallen victim to global power politics. The country remains
occupied, divided roughly east-west by the Moroccan army’s sand berms. With South Africa’s
1990 withdrawal from Namibia, Western Sahara is now Africa’s last colony.
Not one country on earth recognizes Morocco’s claim to sovereignty over Western Sahara.
Some 60 (including, of course, East Timor) recognize the Polisario Front’s exile government. But this
hasn’t done the Sahrawis much good. Since 2001, the UN’s pointman on Western Sahara, former
U.S. Secretary of State James A. Baker, has been pushing various versions of a plan under which
Morocco’s settlers in the territory would be able to vote in the referendum. This is unacceptable to
the Polisario, which wants the vote restricted to the 74,000 native residents counted in the last
Spanish census and their descendants. Morocco has approved 100,000 applicants to participate in
the vote and views the referendum, including an option for independence, to be an onerous
compromise. Baker is alleged to have told Polisario diplomats in London in 2000 that Western
Sahara is “not Kuwait;” the world would launch no massive campaign on behalf of its sovereignty.
Meanwhile, tens of thousands of Sahrawis remain in a harsh exile at refugee camps around Tindouf,
an old caravan town across the Algerian border, in one of the least habitable parts of the Sahara.
Morocco protests that Polisario has been holding hundreds of Moroccan prisoners of war at the
camp since the 1970s. The Sahrawi protest that Morocco remains unaccountable on the status of
hundreds of “disappeared” from the occupied territory. Morocco exploits the territory’s phosphate
mines and fisheries and has invited international oil companies to chart (not yet drill) in Western
Sahara’s claimed offshore zone. The U.S. company Kerr McGee and the French TotalFinaElf have
taken the bait, while still claiming “neutrality” in the conflict.
The Polisario Front, especially in its period of war with Morocco in the late ’70s and ’80s, has
been sustained by Morocco’s rivalry with Algeria. When the crisis began, Algeria was at least
nominally socialist, a leader of the Nonaligned Movement, an OPEC price hawk and symbol of
Third World nationalism. Morocco was a conservative monarchy and Cold War ally of Washington
and the West. When Sahrawi refugees fled to Algerian territory in 1975, Algiers naturally became
Polisario’s sponsor. (They had previously had a friend only in Libya’s Muamar Qadhafi.) So it
seems inevitable that Polisario’s fortunes would fall victim to the recent Morocco-Algeria rapprochement
prompted by the shared threat of Islamist militancy – and avidly encouraged by the
West.
The rapprochement is by no means complete. It is Morocco that is leading the way into free-
trade agreements and “antiterrorist” cooperation with the United States, and the two regional
powers remain ostensibly at odds over Western Sahara. But Algeria is now thoroughly post-
socialist, and, as ideological differences have eroded, new interlocking enemies have emerged: the
(now somewhat dormant) Islamist guerrillas in Algeria and the (increasingly active) Islamist cells
and networks in Morocco. Polisario has to an extent outlived its usefulness to Algiers, which has
softened its opposition to the Baker plan.
Morocco accused Polisario of being a Soviet pawn in the Cold War, and now of being in
league with Islamist militants. In fact, they seem to be fairly non-ideological ethnic nationalists.
Polisario itself turned post-Marxist in the ’90s; in its camps at Tindouf, class distinctions, petty
crime, the practice of Islam and such once-outmoded traditions as dowries are all growing.
Polisario’s followers are demoralized by the stalemate of “no war, no peace.”
Protests in Laayoune, the territory’s capital, in 2003 – and again in May 2005 – have somewhat
reinvigorated the struggle. Morocco likes to claim that Sahrawi protests over civil rights and
unemployment are unrelated to independence sentiment, but the recent round of protests began
with a small march demanding freedom for detainees and quickly mushroomed into days of overtly
pro-independence demonstrations that filled the streets and led to widespread clashes with
security forces. The regional political balance, however, remains far less favorable to Sahrawi
independence than it was a generation ago.
Shelley is deft at untangling the knot of geostrategic interests that has bound Western
Sahara’s destiny (despite a few minor flubs like referring to Clinton’s defense secretary, William
Cohen, as a member of the Bush administration). Unfortunately, he provides little and late discussion
of the ethnic dimension to the conflict or the “deep history” that animates it. (This material
was given in-depth treatment in Hodges’s long out-of-print work.) We are on page 109 before
Shelley mentions Hassaniyya, the Sahrawis’ regional dialect of Arabic, a key wellspring of their
identity. It is only on page 170 that we are told that Polisario stands for the “Front for the Liberation
of Saguia el Hamra and Rio de Oro,” and we are never told exactly that these entities are the old
Spanish administrative divisions for the colony. In fact, Shelley leaves the word “popular” out of
the title, making the first syllable of “Polisario” mysterious.
Shelley’s nonlinear patchwork of the territory’s history begins in 1885, when Ma el-Ainin took
up arms to resist the newly arrived Spanish. El-Ainin was a Berber Sufi warrior who fought both
the Spanish and French with aid from the Moroccan sultanate. We are given the briefest sketch of
the career of this fascinating harbinger of anticolonial struggle, and even less about the way of life
he sought to protect. Shelley recognizes that the conflicts of the region are those of “nation-states
attempting to formalise and solidify relationships that, prior to the arbitrary territorial divisions of
the colonial era, were malleable, or to express inter-communal relations in terms of territorial
sovereignty.” But he tells us little about what those “malleable relationships” were.
In 1975, the World Court, ruling in a case brought by Morocco and Mauritania, found that
both had historical links to Western Sahara, but these were insufficient to justify a claim of
sovereignty over the territory. There were ties of allegiance between some local tribes and the
Moroccan sultanate, but not enough to constitute “exclusive state activity.” Mauritania and
Western Sahara had both been part of Bilad Chinguetti – lands loyal to the religious city of
Chinguetti in contemporary Mauritania – but this did not constitute a “corporate entity.” Yet
neither was pre-colonial Western Sahara terra nullius, land governed by no-one. So Spain’s old
claim had also been illegitimate.
The Sahrawis ceased to be nomadic in the colonial era, we are told. One wonders if some
remnant nomads persist, or what economic models may be possible for the Sahrawis other than
handicrafts for the modest NGO market (which busies many in the Tindouf camps) or selling
phosphate and oil rights to multinational corporations.
The heirs of Ma el-Ainin fought on into the 1930s, when they were finally subdued by
combined French and Spanish forces. Resistance reemerged as the struggle for Algerian independence
was intensifying in 1958. That year, the French intervened to back up Spanish forces with air
power in crushing a rebellion by Sahrawi desert tribes. In 1965, the UN General Assembly called for
self-determination for the territory. Later resolutions determined that only native inhabitants should
be able to vote (a principle now betrayed by the Baker plan). The 1963 Sand War between Morocco
and newly independent Algeria over Tindouf set the template for the new regional struggle.
In 1973, the Polisario Front launched its guerrilla struggle. When Francisco Franco’s death in
1975 precipitated Spain’s pullout, the hastily reached Madrid Accords sanctified the partition of the
territory by Morocco and Mauritania, and in turn precipitated Morocco’s “Green March,” as the
invasion of that year was called. Thousands fled to Tindouf as Moroccan forces used napalm and
slaughtered livestock to pacify guerrilla-loyalist villages. (Hodges informs us, but Shelley does not,
that the Madrid Accords were brokered with the aid of Henry Kissinger and the CIA’s Morocco
pointman, Vernon Walters.) By 1976, the United States was responding to Rabat’s requests for
increased military aid, although the grisly nature of the Western Sahara campaign prompted Carter
to cut off arms shipments, albeit briefly and ineffectively. By 1977, French aircraft were back in the
picture, this time pounding Polisario positions on behalf of Rabat. By 1981, the year after
Mauritania capitulated to Polisario’s pressure and pulled out, Morocco’s sand berms were under
construction.
The war continued until 1990, when Polisario accepted a ceasefire brokered by the Organization
for African Unity, calling for the referendum the United Nations had endorsed 25 years earlier
to finally take place. But the referendum was delayed time after time, with neither Polisario nor
Rabat able to agree on terms – and time would appear to be on Rabat’s side. French President
Jacques Chirac, welcomed in Algiers on his historic 2003 visit, has adopted the official Moroccan
term for Western Sahara: “provinces in the south.”
The vying claims of the post-colonial Maghreb are replete with ironies and hypocrisies.
Shelley could have had a better time with this: Spain demands the return of Gibraltar from the UK
but still maintains the enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla on the Moroccan coast. In the slightly farcical
2003 military showdown between Spain and Morocco over a barren patch of rock off Ceuta known
to the Moroccans as Leila and the Spanish as Perejil, Morocco accused Spain of colonialism – even
while practicing it in Western Sahara. Nearly forgotten are the Canary Islands, the Spanish-held
homeland of a Berber people just off Western Sahara, which, Shelley briefly notes, saw a “flurry of
pro-independence activities” in the 1970s. Algeria, in turn, sponsors the Polisario rebels for
strategic purposes, while suppressing the national ambitions of its own substantial Amazigh
(Berber) minority – something Shelley refers to only obliquely as “unrest in the Kabyle regions.”
One wonders if Shelley’s title is all that apt. Is this long struggle really approaching an
“endgame”? In a bid for international legitimacy, Polisario’s exile government, the Sahrawi Arab
Democratic Republic (SADR), Shelley tells us, has invited in the Australian oil minnow Fusion to
explore the maritime zone it has no real control over. More recently, SADR has announced a new
round of licensing for this zone that has also failed to attract any industry majors. Especially given
Polisario’s post-socialist posture, even their best-case scenario – an independent state – is fraught
with risk for the Sahrawis. SADR’s success in wooing oil majors could ultimately harm (or, as in the
case of southern Mexico after the ’70s oil boom, devastate) local fishing economies. Polisario’s
repression of protests in the Tindouf camps in 1988 also points to potential post-independence
challenges. So does the fact that Polisario’s long-time leader Mohammed Abdelaziz is likewise
president of SADR, an echo of Yasser Arafat’s dual role as PLO chairman and Palestinian Authority
president. Shelley’s final sentence warns: “In the case of a negotiated return as part of a peace
process that led to independence, those who worked for civil rights under occupation would have
to ensure their values were nourished in a Sahrawi state.”
Only if the struggle in Western Sahara is somehow brought to the world’s conscience is there
much chance that the Sahrawi will have the opportunity to face this challenge any time soon. And
even that necessary start will likely prove insufficient. Widespread media attention hasn’t done the
Palestinians much good either.
|
| |
|
