Looking back at the Sahara
It has been just 155 years since the Spanish admiral Casto Méndez Núñez left us his lapidary "better honour without ships than ships without honour", which we might well believe to be the apocryphal motto of Spanish diplomacy, apparently determined to contradict that aphorism of the Count of Romanones which read: "In foreign policy, only interests have primacy".
Being of the opinion that of all the causes lost and to be lost, that of the Polisario Front is perhaps the most chimerical, I believe it is useful to take a serene look back, to better understand the reasons that led us to end up as the administering power over the Sahara, UN dixit, and the quixotic nature of our colonial enterprise there.
Fortunately, we do not have to go back to the mists of time, but to 1885, when the Berlin Conference took place, one of the results of which was the assignment by the European powers to Spain of the territories to the east of the Canary Islands, in other words, Western Sahara.
The Spanish presence materialised gradually, first with the establishment of fisheries, and later with the establishment of a protectorate stretching south to north from Cap Blanc to Cap Boujdour, under the aegis of the Treaty of Lyil with the tribal chiefs of the region, and subsequent border agreements with France between 1900 and 1924.
However, Spain never really took possession of the Sahara, since it did not define a policy for the exploration and exploitation of its natural resources, nor did it ever have a serious strategy for such a late colony. It was not until 1947 when, thanks to the discovery of phosphate deposits by the geologist Alia Medina, the Spanish Government began to take an interest in the extractive potential of the Sahara, which included huge deposits of chromium, nickel and wolfram, as well as smaller deposits of precious metals. But the world of the 1950s was very different from the 19th century. The European powers had been left in the cold after the Second World War, which led to an international process of decolonisation, sponsored by the new real powers, the US and the USSR, to which Morocco was no stranger.
Thus, Morocco gained independence in 1956, and the idea of 'Greater Morocco', promoted by the Moroccan nationalists of the Istiqlalde Al-lal El Fassi party, was put on the table. Spain's response, newly accepted at the UN, was to enact a Decree Law, whereby the Sahara became a Spanish province, administered by a governor general. With this nominal ploy, Franco's government sought to circumvent the international decolonisation rules promoted by the United Nations. At the same time, in Algeria -also a French province- a war of independence was breaking out, led by the Algerian National Liberation Front.
From the very beginning, the UN framed the problem in terms of decolonisation, something that did not fit in with the respective aspirations of Spain and Morocco, so that the positions of both countries became entrenched. The Moroccan diplomatic offensive was met by a Spanish response in the form of a proposal for a referendum on self-determination, which Rabat responded to with a proposal for binding arbitration by the International Court of Justice in The Hague. Faced with the ensuing impasse, the multitude of liberation groups active in the Sahara came together in the Polisario Front, whose hegemony was challenged by Spain with the creation of the Sahrawi National Union Party.
Events were precipitated by the United Nations General Assembly's recognition of the Polisario Front's representativeness in 1972, which it interpreted as legitimising it to take up armed struggle against Spain and Morocco, imitating its co-religionists in the Algerian National Liberation Front. The 1975 inconclusive ruling of the International Court of Justice, while urging Spain to leave the Sahara, rejected the validity of Morocco's claims to sovereignty on historical grounds. Morocco, however, took advantage of the precarious situation of a Spain on the verge of regime change to occupy Spain's possessions with the support of the United States and France. With the departure from the Sahara, Spain became a mere spectator of the conflict between Morocco and the Polisario, although this did not prevent Spanish citizens from falling victim to terrorist attacks by the Polisario Front until late in the 1980s. From then until 2019, the Sahara conflict took a secondary place to the trepidation that has characterised the Arab world since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Donald Trump's deal with Morocco and Israel just after the deadline brought the Sahara back into the limelight, unsettling both the Polisario and Spain, which is still falling victim to its historical neglect.
On this occasion, however, we do not seem to have a time-out again, so perhaps it is time for the Spanish Government to reflect on the aforementioned Romanones quote, and to recognise of iure what is already happening in practice before it becomes a fait accompli that relegates us to irrelevance.