No, Morocco is not an occupying power in "Western Sahara"

The article by Mr. Gilles Devers, Polisario's lawyer at the European Union, on the Sahara issue published in the newspaper Le Monde should appeal to the conscience of anyone allergic to untruths and approximations. In his eyes, Morocco would be an occupying power, even a rogue state that flouts international law with impunity.
 
Mr. Devers ignores, or knowingly confuses, historical facts in his quest to mislead the uninformed public. In his fundamentally anti-Moroccan analysis, Devers ignores the fact that Morocco was the only country to claim the territory between 1956 and 1965. Mauritania also began claiming it, in order to push Morocco to recognize it as an independent state. The article also pretends to forget that it was at Morocco's initiative, in December 1966, that the UN General Assembly adopted resolution 2229, asking Spain to allow the Sahrawis to decide their own future. Until then, the UN Assembly called on Spain to negotiate with Morocco the fate of Ifni and the "Spanish Sahara".
 
Then, because the Spanish side showed no willingness to do so, Morocco called on it to allow the Sahrawis to decide their own fate through a referendum. And when Morocco opted for this solution, it made it clear that this in no way meant that it was giving up its claims to sovereignty over the territory.
 
The author also fails to mention that, at the 18th summit of the Organization of African Unity in Kenya in June 1981, King Hassan II proposed holding a referendum in 1982. A proposal that Algeria and the Polisario had rejected. The Polisario also refused the Moroccan proposal to base the referendum on the 1974 census.
 
Nearly three decades later, faced with the failure of the UN to organize a referendum, its Secretary General Kofi Annan, in February 2000, asked his Personal Envoy James Baker to explore the various means of reaching a consensual political solution.
 
Meanwhile, in a November 2001 meeting with Baker in Texas, Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika proposed a partition of the disputed territory, an offer that Morocco formally rejected. If Algeria and the Polisario are so committed to the principle of self-determination, why did they flout it twice, in 1981 and 2001?
 
The Polisario is not the legitimate representative of all Sahrawis. This organization was created by Sahrawis, but outside Sahrawi territory, and has remained in exile for a long time.
 
Thus, the Polisario cannot claim to represent all Sahrawis, let alone those living in the Sahara. It represents only the voiceless Sahrawis in the Tindouf camps, the majority of whom are from Niger, Mali, Mauritania and Algeria. It has created its legitimacy through deceptive means and with the support of Algeria and media whose coverage tends to omit the subtleties and nuances of the conflict.
 
The only legitimate representative of the Sahrawis was the Jemaa, or assembly, which was elected by the tribal leaders. On October 12, 1975, the Jemaa and the Polisario held a meeting in Ain Bentili, at the end of which the Polisario declared that it would study the Jemaa's proposal. In late October of the same year, Jemaa held a meeting in Gueltat Zemmour. According to American journalist David Lynn Price, there are three versions of the conclusions of this meeting. According to the first version, 74 of the 103 Jemaa members voted in favor of integration with Morocco and Mauritania. According to the second version, defended by Algeria, 67 members pledged allegiance to the Polisario as the legitimate representative of the Sahrawis.
 
In the third version, Bachir Oueld Brahim, a member of the Jemaa, was kidnapped by the Polisario while in Gueltat Zemmour to join Morocco. He was reportedly beaten and tortured and taken to Algeria. In addition to him, 86 other members of the Jemaa were also kidnapped and taken to Algeria.
 
Throughout his stay in Tindouf, Bachir Oueld Brahim displayed his support for Algeria. But in January 1976, he managed to return to Morocco, where he swore allegiance to King Hassan II. Khatri Jemmani, leader of the Jemaa, also swore allegiance to Morocco immediately after the Gueltat Zemmour meeting. Many Sahrawis followed in Brahim's footsteps after the Green March, returning to Morocco and expressing disillusionment with the way Algeria had taken control of the Polisario to use it to its advantage.
 
According to former Polisario members, such as Mustafa Salma Oueld Sidi Mouloud and Bachir Edkhil, the Jemaa never ceded its legitimacy to the Polisario, because fundamental disagreements remained between the two organizations. The Jemaa sought a peaceful solution to the Sahara issue, while the Polisario chose the armed struggle, with the support of Algeria and Libya.
 
Devers also rehashes the myth that the 1975 decision of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) established that Morocco had no sovereignty over the Sahara. In doing so, he not only deliberately failed to mention that the ruling recognized the existence of allegiance ties between the Sahrawi tribes and Morocco, but also ignored the dissenting opinions of some judges who took part in the ruling.
 
The first was Judge Fouad Ammoun, who stated that there were legal ties of a political nature between the Sahara territory and Morocco. He added that "in any event, allegiance to the Sultan was equivalent to allegiance to the state.
 
The second was Judge Forester, who expressed his categorical disagreement with the ICJ's conclusion. In particular, he expressed dismay at the Eurocentric way in which the judges approached the conflict, as if Morocco's state structure should resemble the state structure of European countries. Forester argued that the ICJ should have made an effort not to view African problems through a fundamentally European lens.
 
In addition to Forester and Ammoun, Judge Boni questioned the legality of the ICJ ruling. Even though he had voted in favour of the two issues before the court, Boni remained convinced that the court did not take sufficient account of the "local context".
 
He said the tribunal ignored the religious ties between the Moroccan sultans and the Sahrawis, under which the sultans were the Commanders of the Faithful. He said the local population considered the sultans as their leaders in religious and temporal affairs.
 
Contrary to Mr. Devers' allegations, the ICJ's advisory verdict is no longer a reference in the UN process for resolving the Sahara dispute. From now on, the Security Council resolutions are the main reference for any discussion on the solution to be adopted in order to break the political and diplomatic deadlock. However, since 2007, all Security Council resolutions have placed particular emphasis on the fact that any solution to the conflict should be based on compromise and guided by realism.
 
The option of independence is unrealistic, because Morocco will never accept the establishment of an independent state on part of its territory, which would in effect be a satellite state dependent on Algeria, and whose existence would upset the strategic balance in the region.
 
Establishing a country of less than 80,000 inhabitants (based on the 1974 Spanish census, defended by Algeria and the Polisario) on an area of more than 300,000 km2 means accepting the creation of another state in a Sahelo-Saharan corridor that is plagued by constant waves of insecurity. Supporting separatism in the Sahara means opening itself up to the idea of providing a breeding ground for terrorist groups and transnational criminal organizations.

 
Samir Bennis is a senior policy advisor in Washington. He is an expert on Moroccan foreign policy and is the editor of the English-language news magazine Morocco World News.