43 - Crimea in the Desert: A Frozen Conflict Persists
On western Africa’s Atlantic Ocean coast, facing the Canary Islands, Morocco annexed its own Crimea in 1975. Spain had just withdrawn from its Spanish Sahara colony in the face of agitation and demands by the Polisario Front, a pro-independence liberation group composed of, and representing, the Sahrawi people of the territory.
Morocco’s rapid invasion of its southern neighbor quickly made it the ruler of the northern two-thirds of the Colorado-sized land. Mauritania, also mostly desert, grabbed the southern third of the ex-colony. Mauritania wraps around the Western Sahara (as the disputed land is now known) in the south and east. The prizes for both conquering armies were large deposits of phosphates.
The Polisario Front was soon at war against Morocco and Mauritania. Ever since, the Front and Morocco have warred for hegemony along an accessible coast and across a largely inhospitable dry land that consists mostly of rolling dunes.
The Front is now headquartered outside the Western Sahara, in southwestern Algeria. At Tindouf, in the far southwestern Sahara region of Algeria, the Front and refugees from decades of combat are stuck in temporary camps that have long ago become permanent.
The 20 percent of Western Sahara that is still in indigenous hands largely lies east of a 400 mile fortified sand berm that Morocco long ago erected to prevent the Front or the Sahrawi people more generally from returning to the coastal settlements of the Western Sahara. Those places are now filled largely by immigrants from Morocco encouraged financed by its powerful monarch. As a result, as in the Occupied West Bank of Israel/Palestine, Moroccans have gradually replaced Sahrawi as the dominant ethnic group.. Today, two-thirds of the Western Sahara’s citizens (including those in Algeria) are Moroccan Arabs and Berbers; a third, perhaps 250,000, are native Sahrawi. Nearly that same number of Sahrawis are refugees in Algeria, waiting forlornly to regain their homeland.
Morocco’s invasion, just like Putin’s in Ukraine, violated international law. Furthermore, Morocco’s transfer of its citizens into the Western Sahara was accomplished as a direct affront to the relevant provisions of Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949. The Geneva Conventions regulate how wars are to be fought (Russia has not abided by their rules) and forbid occupying powers to transfer their citizens into conquered lands.
After Spain’s abrupt withdrawal, the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic on behalf of Western Sahara’s nominal citizens, went to war against Morocco (in the north of the former colony) and Mauritania in the south. The Polisario Front, backed militarily by Algeria, managed to cut Mauritanian supply lines and oust that African country’s forces from the Western Sahara in 1979. But it could not dislodge the much more numerous and better armed Moroccan regular army in the rest of the land. More than 150,000 Moroccan troops now regularly patrol the Western Sahara
In 1991, the two sides agreed to a UN-mediated settlement plan. Along with a UN-monitored ceasefire, this initiative divided Western Sahara along the sand berm, established a buffer strip and a restricted zone to separate Moroccan and Polisario forces, and aimed to settle the dispute through a vote on self-determination. The UN was meant to organize the poll of preferences, but Morocco has repeatedly resisted holding such a vote.
In 2007, Morocco put forward a plan to give autonomy to the former colony, by then heavily populated by its own citizens. But Morocco would still retain sovereign control of the state. The U. S. and France supported this new way of solving the Western Saharan problem. But the Polisario Front balked; it was a clever way to deny the Sahrawi people their right to self-determination.
From 2007 to 2020, Morocco solidified its conquest of the Western Sahara and its virtual incorporation into its monarchical realm. Hostilities were intermittent and of low intensity until 2020, when cadres of the Front blockaded a strategic road linking Morocco to Mauritania. The Front mounted daily attacks on Moroccan military units. The UN peacekeeping mission long in the territory failed to intervene successfully.
Trump decided in 2020, despite the Front’s pleas, to overturn long established U. S. State Department policy and confer recognition on Morocco’s invasion in exchange for Morocco’s recognition of, and establishment of diplomatic ties to, Israel. President Biden has not as yet addressed this lingering issue, but Spain this year also accepted Morocco’s fait accompli. Additionally, the African Union has accepted Morocco back into its continental compact despite many years of condemning Morocco’s obliteration of indigenous claims to land and rights.
A bipartisan group in the U. S. Senate seeks to withdraw our implicit acceptance of the Moroccan takeover and its refusal to hold the long-postponed referendum. An appropriations bill backs that endeavor. But more significant global concerns obviously crowd out any forward momentum regarding the Western Sahara.
Today, the Polisario Front still attempts to confront Morocco’s army and to reclaim the land it asserts is its own. The berm persists, and Morocco is effectively sovereign, just as Putin is in Crimea. But, injustice or no, Morocco is unlikely ever to be removed from its hegemony along the phosphate coast. Like Russia in Crimea, might has overruled human rights and essential liberties.