Polisario on the ropes: UN will never recognise Western Sahara as an independent state

In short, the veteran Saharawi leader comes to say that the decision to resume the war against Morocco taken by the leadership of the Front in November 2020 was the biggest mistake made by Brahim Ghali since his installation as secretary general of the movement and president of the "Saharawi Republic" in July 2016: "You cannot declare a war when you do not have and do not use the means to win it".

Bachir Mustafa Sayed, brother of Polisario founder El Uali Mustafa, a member of the Moroccan Communist Party during his student years at the Mohamed V University in Rabat, is considered a proponent of the old theory of "guerrilla warfare" in vogue in the 1960s and 1970s in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Bachir has repeatedly criticised the "armchair revolutionaries" and opportunists embedded in the ranks of the Sahrawi independence movement, advocating armed struggle and sabotage actions with weapons and explosives by "the militants of the interior" in reference to the Saharan territories under Moroccan administration.

To counter the mirage of "liberating the Sahara with arms" that he preaches in his article in the magazine Futuro Saharaui, and which is causing unease in the ranks of the Front, Bachir promises "the accession of the Saharawi Republic to the United Nations", something absolutely unrealistic and meaningless.

To admit a new country to the international organisation, a series of conditions are necessary. In the current situation, the Polisario Front can only meet the first of these requirements: writing a letter to the UN Secretary General requesting its admission and accepting the rules of the international organisation.

As for the second requirement, the Polisario Front will not be able to obtain it. Once the letter has been admitted to the UN Secretary General, the latter transmits it to the Security Council, which has to approve the admission of the new member by 9 votes out of 15, provided that the five permanent members of the Council (the United States, Russia, China, Great Britain and France) have given their "placet". This will not happen: the United States will never vote in favour of Western Sahara's admission as a new UN member, nor, probably, will France or Britain.

But even in the hypothetical case that the Security Council accepts the request, it would have to pass it on to the General Assembly for adoption. And this procedure would require two-thirds of the Assembly's members, i.e. 128 countries out of 192 in the UN.

And here comes the second impossible impediment. At the height of its political acceptance, thanks to Algeria's efficient diplomatic apparatus as the sponsor of the Sahrawi independence group, the proclaimed "Sahrawi Republic" (SADR) was recognised by 84 countries. Since the 1990s and in the first quarter of the current century, SADR has only received half as many formal recognitions, which is a far cry from the 128 positive votes required by the General Assembly to accept a new candidate.

There remains a third impediment that the Sahrawi independence movement (separatist according to the terminology used by the Moroccan government) is currently unable to overcome. The UN can accept Western Sahara as an independent nation, but it is quite another thing to accept that the Polisario Front and its governmental machinery (SADR) represent it exclusively. Various representatives of the UN Secretary-General have repeatedly met with representatives of Saharawi currents that are not included or represented in the Polisario, such as the Jat Achahid movement, the Saharawi Association for the Defence of Human Rights (ASADEDH), and in particular the Movement Saharawi for Peace, led respectively by Mahayub Mohamed Salek, Messaud Ramdan and El Hach Ahmed Baricalah.

None of these movements are part of the Polisario Front, nor are they associated with it by their leaders, nor are various associations defending prisoners and those who disappeared in the Sahara during the so-called ‘years of lead’ during the reign of Hassan II. Even in the hypothetical case of the UN recognising Western Sahara as an "independent nation", the world organisation would do its utmost to ensure that it functions on the basis of democratic criteria and representativeness of all its social, cultural and political components, as it has done in the past with countries such as Angola, Mozambique, Nicaragua, Namibia, and so many other former colonies that gained independence in the 1960s and 1970s.