The Polisario and its last losing horse race

1. A drowning man clinging to a drowning man
2. The ANC and the FLN are moribund liberation movements
3. Two losing horses in the Middle East
4. Pyongyang's voice a losing bet
5. The blind leading the blind

As happened in Bolivia in 2019 when the alleged electoral victory of authoritarian President Evo Morales, who was forced to resign and leave power under pressure from the opposition, was challenged, today protests fill the streets of Venezuela in rejection of the return of Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro, whose re-election is still in dispute, prompting Brazil, Colombia and Mexico to insist on an “impartial verification” of the electoral process, while in Nicaragua, the brutal campaigns of repression against the opponents of the tyrant Daniel Ortega stripped his re-election as president in 2021 of all credibility, and turned his repressive regime into a pariah strongly condemned by the international community.

This type of autocratic presidents who oppress their people and involve their countries in adopting hostile positions against the territorial integrity of Morocco, by recognizing a phantom republic, is the model with which the Polisario leaders identify themselves, and not with the model of presidents of the democratic left whom the separatist propaganda describes as “traitors” of a supposed Saharawi cause, simply because they adopted courageous and realistic positions regarding the artificial conflict over the Moroccan Sahara.

A drowning man clinging to a drowning man

There is no doubt that this resounding fall of outdated models of leftist populism in Latin America is these days bringing the Polisario leadership to the brink of a nervous breakdown, making its separatist dreams disappear like bubbles in the air, especially since the separatist gang has always sought to consolidate friendly relations within Latin American leftist movements and governments claiming “revolutionary anti-imperialism”. Today, the Polisario finds itself increasingly isolated in this region of the world, especially after declaring its break with the Spanish state, following its declaration of support for the proposal for autonomy under Moroccan sovereignty, and also after Morocco strengthened its relations with numerous Latin American countries in the context of a proactive and effective diplomacy on the South American continent.

Like a drowning man clinging to another drowning man, the Polisario will continue to bet on its traditional Latin American friends, at least for the sake of an ideological support that is not worth a damn. In reality, the few living bastions left to the Polisario in Latin America are countries that are either seeking to correct the mistakes made by their previous pro-polisario governments, or countries that, while still blinded by their ideological illusions, are trapped in their internal crises, but which no one imagines would be able to play any role in the development of the artificial conflict over the Moroccan Sahara.

The ANC and the FLN are moribund liberation movements

At the African level, the separatists and their Algerian tutors are betting on a staunch ally, but in accelerated decline, it is the African National Congress ANC, which lost in the general elections of May 29, 2024 its absolute majority in the National Assembly for the first time since the end of apartheid and the election of Nelson Mandela in 1994. After three decades of political domination and burdened by multiple corruption scandals and so many unfulfilled promises, Mandela's now minority party will have to govern for the first time as part of a coalition. This new political situation could therefore have a significant impact on the country's international relations over the next five years.

It is certain that the general lines of South Africa's foreign policy will remain substantially unchanged in the short and medium term. International relations will continue to be guided by the Constitution and underpinned by the ANC's ideological embrace of Pan-Africanism and anti-Western internationalism. However, it would be difficult to discount the fact that South Africa's Government of National Unity (GNU) could mark a turning point in the country's international relations. The focus will be on how the mechanisms of foreign policy formulation may change and the broader geopolitical environment in which those changes will take place.

Several experts had addressed the issue of South Africa's inability to exert its power and influence not over countries on the continent, but even over its neighbors at the regional level, some of these experts explained this inability by the simple fact that there is no South African model capable of pulling southern Africa out of its socio-economic depression, nor leaders like Mandela who can coordinate other elites and make them adopt realistic political behavior based on good governance.

There is no doubt that the voice of the ANC at the African continent level has less and less weight every day, especially after the return of the Kingdom of Morocco to the African Union and after having gradually consolidated itself as an important economic force in sub-Saharan Africa. This new reality was clearly underlined by the Kingdom of Morocco's Foreign Minister Nasser Bourita, who, commenting on the visit of UN Special Envoy Staffan de Mistura to South Africa at the end of January 2024, was not exaggerating when he stressed that South Africa “has neither weight nor influence in the Moroccan Sahara conflict”.

In addition to that, it is interesting that an in-house witness has questioned the separatist thesis in the Moroccan Sahara conflict, as according to the Pretoria-based think tank Institute for security studies the “quest for Western Sahara's independence seems to be on the wane, as more and more countries are backing Morocco's plan for ‘autonomy’ rather than independence. The report stresses, based on statements by South African officials, that the French, Spanish and U.S. recognition of Morocco's sovereignty over the Sahara is a blow to the separatist front. But what is even worse (or rather better), is that the so-called “ambassador of the Polisario to the African Union” recognizes, according to the same source, the inability of the Front to mobilize international support.

The ANC is today, like the FLN, a moribund liberation movement, which at the same time that it is losing that undisputed legitimacy of the struggle against Apartheid, seems to be heading towards a period of political weakness and geopolitical decline, which means that the horse most bet by Algeria and its separatist militias at the level of the African continent, is today a tired horse, completely exhausted, and that will not be able to recover nor be worthy of running any continental race.

Another bad company dragging the Polisario on the African continent is to be found in Zimbabwe, where the separatist gang counted for many years on the unconditional support of a former guerrilla named Robert Mugabe. This “liberation icon” metamorphosed into an aging autocrat who, during 37 years in power, turned his country into an enduring and violent dictatorship under international sanctions, before he was succeeded by the former dolphin supported by the party in power since independence (Zanu-PF) Emerson Mnangagwa, whose reputation for being even more authoritarian than Mugabe, earned him the nickname “crocodile”. In the context of authoritarian and discredited continuity, the Polisario-friendly “crocodile” president obtained last year a second term at the head of the country after a vote strongly rejected by the opposition, exactly as it happens with the Latin American “friends”.

Surely the Polisario leaders and their Algerian puppeteers, unlike all the democrats of the world, are today with their souls on edge in the face of the possible collapse of Chavism in Venezuela, but also in the face of the uncertain future of the Iranian regime, which plans to become a major player in the Moroccan Sahara conflict by selling Algeria drones destined for the Polisario, which it considers to serve its strategic interests in the area.

Two losing horses in the Middle East

Even in this corner of the world, things are not going as the Polisario would have wished, while the protest movement “Women, Life, Freedom” born after the death of Mahsa Amini in September 2022 has lost strength, the mullahs' regime continues to lose all legitimacy in the eyes of the civilian population, and most particularly after the assassination of Ismael Haniyeh, head of Hamas, in the middle of Tehran, which inflicted on it a real humiliation among its population, but what left him today more than ever too fragile and extremely unpopular, is that after promising already a month ago, a “harsh punishment” for Israel for the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh, he has not been able to do anything, most likely he does not know how to carry out an attack big enough to fit his own rhetoric and satisfy the Iranian hardliners, without also urging a devastating response from Israel and perhaps also the United States.

For the moment, the regime stands on the pillars of repression and oil revenues, but it can be said that it has already collapsed at the ideological level, and indoctrination no longer serves it well with the Iranian youth, even the clerics increasingly doubt the sustainability of their country's regime in its current form.

Another favorite horse of the Polisario losing speed on the Middle East race track, a so-called pro-Iranian Party of God (Hezbollah), which for twenty-five years has exercised real dominance over Lebanese life, supplanting the army and opening its own front against Israel along the border between the two countries, while most Lebanese reject Lebanon's involvement in the war and see Hezbollah as a threat to the country's stability.

The dominance of this Iranian armed and supported Shiite movement over crucial decisions in Lebanon, over its local politics, its national army and its intelligence services, has made it not only a “state within the state”, but a “state above the state”, but outside Lebanon, it only plays the role of a paramilitary group at the service of the Iranian agenda to destabilize other countries. It is no secret that some leaders of the Shiite party go to Algeria to train the Polisario militias, nor is it a secret that the Polisario is financed by a money laundering network linked to Hezbollah. But the most remarkable thing in this regard is that the Shiite ally of the Polisario etas included on the list of terrorist organizations of several states, such as the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia, as well as the European Council and the Cooperation Council for the Arab States of the Gulf.

Pyongyang's voice a losing bet

In the Far East, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea was the first non-African state to recognize the “fictitious republic” a month after its self-proclamation. Since then, the Polisario has an exemplary ideological ally, a rare and endangered species, characterized as a Stalinist-style dynastic totalitarianism, which brutally imposes internal loyalty and absolute control over a population living in a suffocating and claustrophobic environment, more or less like in the camps of the Tindouf detainees. But this is not what really worries the Polisario and his Algerian tutor, what worries them most is that in Kim Jong-Un's country, nothing goes as they would have wished to win their North Korean bet in favor of the separatist thesis, or as we say in Arabic “the winds blow in a way that the ships do not want”, and it is that the strong winds of international isolation are pushing the ship of the North Korean regime into dangerous waters. In other words, we can say that the current geopolitical context means that Pyongyang's voice has a very limited impact on the international community, and that its presence on the world stage is reduced to being the object mainly of condemnation and sanctions.

The blind leading the blind

In politics it is important to have reliable partners and to weave strategic alliances to obtain the necessary support for the cause being defended, therefore when a political actor wants to ally himself with another, he is looking for a useful and trustworthy partner, who gives him sincere advice, who provides him with real support, who demonstrates a lasting commitment, who influences his way of thinking and acting, not as in the case of the Polisario Front whose allies are a real disaster embodied by obsolete fossil parties or emerging movements, coming from the deepest pits, allies such as the Communist Party of Cuba, the United Socialist Party of Venezuela, the Movement for Socialism in Bolivia, the North Korean Workers Party, the Hezbollah party in Lebanon, Sumar; Podemos; Bildu; Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya and what is left of the communist scrap in Spain, the party-state called the National Liberation Front in Algeria.... that the only thing they do is to deceive the Polisario and to sell him false illusions so that he continues another half century fantasizing about the mirage of a satellite “republic” on the territory of the Jeriphian Kingdom.

When the monk Adso of Melk in The Name of the Rose warned of “the blind leading the blind and plunging them into the abyss” he was referring to the spiritual blindness and lack of discernment of some characters, especially monks, who allow themselves to be guided by superstition, ignorance and worldly passions instead of reason and true faith. For as in Humberto Eco's parable of the blind men, it seems that our separatists trapped in political blindness, today more than ever need, instead of being led by false teachers, to be guided by reason and clairvoyance, to avoid sinking even deeper into the abysses of frustration and perdition, when then it would be too late to remember that the homeland is indulgent and merciful.

That the Polisario itself will one day do its mea culpa seems an unlikely prospect, for just as it would be unthinkable that the Polisario could change its long-standing friends for more credible ones, it would be useless to ask why the Polisario only has the exclusive support of autocratic regimes and fossilized parties, why it is so surrounded and absorbed by suspicious friendships. The answer is very simple, tell me who you hang out with and I will tell you who you are, for what is the Polisario if not a Stalinist organization whose deceased leader Mohamed Abdelaziz remained in “power” for forty long years, that is three years longer than Mugabe? what is the Polisario if not a single anti-democratic party? an armed group in the pay of one state to destabilize another state? a separatist gang that in addition to moral scandals, crimes of genocide and embezzlement of foreign humanitarian aid, is now at the center of a money laundering scandal through Hawalas (mandates), circulating through an informal network for the transfer of funds?