Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, April 2002, pages 57-58

United Nations Report

U.N. Mission to Western Sahara Nearing Eleventh Anniversary of Ineffectiveness

By Ian Williams

James Baker commonly is referred to as the former U.S. secretary of state. In fact, however, he now has been U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s personal envoy for the Western Sahara for a longer period—five years.

MINURSO, the U.N. Mission to the Western Sahara, is now approaching 11 years of utter ineffectiveness and, as Kofi Annan pointed out, has spent some half a billion dollars in the process.

The recent Secretary General’s Report to the Security Council did include more options than usual. One was trying to enforce the original referendum, which the Moroccans and their French patrons will not allow, because they would lose the vote. The second was Baker’s proposal for a period of autonomy under Moroccan rule followed by a referendum which Polisario and its friends will not allow, because the Moroccan settlers would be allowed to vote and Morocco would win.

The third and more novel proposal is for partition, which the Moroccans have branded as a backdoor attempt by Algeria to gain access to the Atlantic, and which neither Polisario nor Algeria can be seen backing at the moment—even if it gives them a lot more than the current thin strip of territory between the Moroccan sand berm and the Algerian border.

The final proposal was for the U.N. to wash its hands of the problem and walk away from it. While it is a superficially attractive solution to many Council members, it is not one that is sustainable. There are too many issues of serious principle involved. The Saharwi Republic is recognized by many non-aligned states, who see the Moroccan occupation as a betrayal of all the principles of decolonization and self-determination on which their own legitimacy depends.

In the end the Council, with its normal decisiveness, decided to do nothing and to postpone the issue by “rolling over” the funding for MINURSO for another two months. There were subtle differences, however. Past threats to walk away from the problem having proved ineffectual, this time the resolution did not hint at that possibility. And hovering in the background now is the idea of partition.

This judgment of Solomon, like that of the great King himself when he offered to partition the disputed infant, may be intended to shock the parties. It certainly put the cat among the pigeons of Morocco. One can’t help wondering whether it also was a subtle reminder to the Moroccans of a huge particular weakness in its overall very weak claim to the whole territory. The original clandestine deal with Spain partitioned the Western Sahara between Mauritania to the south and Morocco in the north. It was only when Polisario effectively defeated the Mauritanian forces and Mauritania abandoned its claim in 1979 that Morocco occupied the south as well.

Adding to Rabat’s nervousness was a report by Hans Corell, the U.N.’s under secretary general for legal affairs. The study had been requested by the Security Council to look at the recent oil exploration contracts that Morocco had granted to a French and an American company. Corell concluded that Morocco had absolutely no legal rights to the territory, but that since the contracts were for exploration, they were not illegal in themselves—although it would be entirely different if they were for exploitation of the resources.

The report enhanced the uneasiness of many Security Council members over the Western Sahara situation. Although none of them want to exert themselves to force Rabat to comply with international law, they are uneasy at the consequences of whitewashing such an egregious flouting of it, as expressed by the World Court, the General Assembly and the Security Council.

A Sign for Sharon

In Ariel Sharon’s office there is probably a sign saying “Breaches of International Law ’R Us.” Faced with the latest attacks on the Palestinian Authority, the Arab group returned yet again to the Security Council for an open debate, which was led off by a fairly strong statement from Kofi Annan in which he told members that the conflict “risks sliding towards full-fledged war.” The secretary-general pointed out that “Security cannot be dealt with in isolation. It has to have a context. It has to be addressed alongside key political issues, particularly the question of land and economic and social issues including the increasingly critical desperate condition of the Palestinians.

“It is imperative that both parties exercise maximum restraint,” he added, “particularly with regard to attacks against civilians. It cannot be overemphasized that both sides must adhere to their obligations under international law to protect basic rights of civilians, including the right to security.”

Annan concluded by saying that it was “imperative” for the Security Council and the “wider international community to work in a concerted manner with the parties” toward peace.

Of course, this looks very balanced and anodyne to most of the world. Hiding in that diplomatic language, however, is a rebuttal of two core Anglo-American-Israeli positions: firstly that the violence is all Arafat’s fault, and secondly that the Security Council should not get involved.

The resolution that the Arab group was proposing has mutated several times even before it was formally offered. In response to Annan’s statement, the clause calling for U.N. monitors was set aside. Palestinian representative Marwan Jilani said, “After the secretary-general’s statement, the French and even British were positive about its new ideas, so we decided to work with them. The secretary-general called for new ideas. And then came the Saudi initiative.

“We were trying to avoid an American veto,” Jilani added, “trying to get the Council to draft its own vision of a settlement which would pick up the issues, such as occupation, the normalization of relations and providing an aid package.”

When the French canvassed the package, however, the U.S. was not overwhelmed, and the UK response was to fudge until they got an American lead. And, of course, the Arab group needs some time to achieve a consensus on the Saudi suggestion of normalization.

At the end of the two-day debate, Jilani saw a consensus on several elements: that there was no possible military resolution, that security issues were not enough—and even the Americans mentioned Palestinian statehood. “The Council has never dealt with the idea of a Palestinian state,” he noted, “so for us that would be an element that we could capitalize on in a consensus resolution.”

Prince Abdullah’s initiative was surprisingly helpful. On the face of it, at any time in the last 20 years the Israelis could have had peace by offering the terms suggested, but the new elements were the context, the person who made it, and the offer of normalization. Until now the Arab stand was that the degree of peace depended on the degree of Israeli withdrawal. Moreover, Washington can ignore Palestinian demands in a way that it cannot ignore Saudi suggestions.

Typically, the Israelis were surprised that, instead of groveling, the Saudi ambassador attacked their behavior. In fact he was not scheduled to speak at all, but felt he had to when the prince’s suggestions became public. All too often Westerners see the problem simply as one of winning over Israeli public opinion, without taking into account that normalization is a hard sell both to Arab governments and the public, which hardens with every additional Israeli tank in Palestinian refugee camps.

Ian Williams is a free-lance journalist based at the United Nations.

SIDEBAR

A Short History of the Western Sahara

It is worth taking a retrospective look at the Western Sahara issue. Occupied by Spain in 1884, it had little to recommend it—but to be a great European power in those days a nation had to have its own bit of Africa, and Spain was left behind in the scramble. Madrid wasted a lot of its military resources in quelling the mostly nomadic local tribes. The discovery of phosphates, however, caused the winds of change to blow a little more strongly in that corner of the continent. Spain wanted out, Morocco and Mauritania both wanted in, and the locals established Polisario to fight for independence.

In 1974 the Spanish conducted a census, and found 74,000 Sahrawis in the vast territory. The U.N. General Assembly, meanwhile, had referred the impending dispute to the International Court of Justice, which ruled in a landmark decision that the locals were entitled to self-determination. There is little doubt that, at the time, they wanted independence.

At the end of 1975, however, Spain pulled out and Morocco’s King Hassan initiated a “Green March” of 350,000 Moroccan wannabe-Sahrawis into the territory.The deal was that, in return, Morocco would not embarrass Spain’s Generalissimo Francisco Franco by raising the issue of the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla, which otherwise would have somewhat compromised the legal basis of Madrid’s perennial claim to Gibraltar.

Madrid was acting in collusion with Morocco and Mauritania, which proceeded to occupy the southern third of the territory as the Moroccans took the north. The U.N. Security Council passed a resolution condemning the takeover, but then U.S. Ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan boasted rather than confessed in his memoirs of how the U.S. helped thwart U.N. resolutions against Washington’s allies. “China altogether backed Fretilin in Timor, and lost,” he wrote. “In Spanish Sahara, Russia completely backed Algeria, and its front, known as Polisario and lost. In both instances the United States wished things to turn out as they did, and worked to bring this about. The Department of State desired that the United Nations prove utterly ineffective in whatever measures it undertook. The task was given to me, and I carried it forward with no inconsiderable success.”

In 1991, the Moroccans and Polisario agreed to a cease-fire to be followed by a referendum. The first U.N. representative, Swiss diplomat Johannes Manz, newly appointed by then-Secretary-General Javiar Perez de Cuellar, assured a skeptical press conference at the U.N. that the whole operation would be finished in 12 months. The voting rolls, said Manz, would be quite uncontroversial because of the 1974 Spanish census. By the time of the planned referendum, the children registered in that census would be old enough to vote.

The cynics who assumed that King Hassan never would allow a referendum he might lose soon were proved correct, however. Indeed, in case there was any doubt, he kept saying so himself! Instead of a few anomalies in the register being appealed, the Moroccans claimed voting rights for twice as many people who, they claimed, while not on the census were entitled to vote by right of descent. When, after 10 years, it became clear that the U.N. was not going to admit the Moroccans to the list, Rabat lost its enthusiasm for the referendum.

When East Timor, which had seemed an even more hopeless case, shook off the Indonesian yoke, the Western Sahara looked more and more like a case waiting to be solved. It still is.

—I.W.