By Pablo Molina Asensi
With Spain changing its position regarding the future of its former colony, the conflict continues to evolve after years of stagnation, with continuing questions over human rights, the political future of the territory, and the status of the Sahrawi refugees.
Credit: Saharauiak
On March 14, Spain announced its change of position in relation to Western Sahara in a letter written by socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez and addressed to King Mohammed VI of Morocco. In it, Sánchez outlines that the Spanish government sees Morocco’s proposal of an autonomous Western Sahara under Moroccan sovereignty as the “most serious, credible and realistic basis for the resolution of this conflict”, even as it stops short of recognizing Morocco’s annexation of Western Sahara.
The decision has proven controversial and has been criticized by the opposition across partisan and ideological lines, with groups as diverse as left-wing regional nationalists and the right-wing People’s Party having supported a motion in Spain’s congress that criticizes the government’s change in position.
The reversal has even caused a response from within the government, with the leftist junior coalition partner, Unidas Podemos, having restated its commitment to Sahrawi self-determination.
The sudden reversal from Spain’s previous position of relative neutrality has also been met with condemnation by civil society groups sympathetic to the Sahrawi cause. In a letter signed by representatives of several such groups, they express their concern “for the current situation of the Sahrawi people as a consequence of the declarations of the prime minister of Spain in support of Morocco’s proposal.”
In the letter, the groups also encourage Sánchez to visit the refugee camps in Algeria where about 173,000 Sahrawi refugees continue to live for him to “learn first-hand the situation in which a considerable part of the Sahrawi people live in within the Sahrawi refugee camps in Tindouf.”
Xavier Serra, president of CEAS-Sahara and one of the letter’s signatories, expressed his complete opposition to the change in position, citing three reasons. First of all, he said, the decision goes against international law, pointing to Western Sahara’s status as a non-self-governing territory according to the UN in which a process of decolonization was never properly completed.
Serra also says that “in any case, any change in position must be through the United Nations and with the agreement of both parts, that is, the Kingdom of Morocco and the Polisario Front, which is recognized by the United Nations as the representative of the Sahrawi people. There is no third way.”
Serra also argues that Spain’s new position goes against the will of most Spaniards, and referred to Spain’s colonial presence in Western Sahara from the 1884 Berlin Conference to the 1970s, including a two-decade period where the territory became an integral Spanish province. Additionally, Serra condemned Spain’s 1976 withdrawal from Western Sahara as an abandonment of the Sahrawi people which took place “in an absolutely shameful way and was not recognized by the international community.”
The strongest response came from abroad, with Algeria, the Polisario’s main supporter, withdrawing its ambassador to Madrid as a result of the change in stance.
Ahmed Boutache, Algeria’s ambassador to the United States, said that “the last decision of the Spanish government is absolutely the wrong one, because, in the first instance, Spain is the country that bears the biggest and the first responsibility in the inception of this conflict,” adding that “it is not acceptable that they had left the territory they occupied for so many years without doing it in a very organized matter so not to let the circumstances generate any conflict, ay crisis, but unfortunately, they did exactly the contrary.” From the ambassador’s perspective, Spain’s move away from what he described as its previous balanced and reasonable position will only deepen the crisis in Western Sahara.
The change in position of the territory’s former colonizing power has also been met with condemnation by members of the Sahrawi community. Mahjoud Mleiha, a human rights activist and head of the external relations committee of CODESA, a human rights group in the occupied territories of Western Sahara, said that “Spain is not only the former colonial power, but it is still the administrative power in Western Sahara according to international law, a capacity that cannot be withdrawn without allowing the people of Western Sahara their right, their fundamental right to self-determination.”
Mleiha added that “in the eyes of international law, Spain is the number one responsible for what is happening in Western Sahara,” and that “abandoning the territory back in 1975 was an illegal abandonment of the territory.”
Mleiha said that the Madrid Treaty, according to which Spain divided the territory of its former colony between Morocco and Mauritania “is totally null and void, and has no legal basis.”
Mleiha compared Spain’s historically evasive attitude towards Western Sahara with the more constructive attitudes of former colonial powers regarding decolonization, pointing to Portugal’s efforts to secure an independent East Timor after the former Portuguese colony was invaded by Indonesia in 1975.
He also talked about the Spanish population’s support of the Sahrawi cause, saying “we see that the Spanish people are more responsible than their own government.”
To Mleiha, Spain’s change in position constitutes a “betrayal” of the Sahrawi people, but he says that it is not the first one. “We’ve experienced the first and biggest betrayal in 1975 when they gave us away to other expansionist regimes, we have seen 45 years where Spain has always been part of the problem, not part of the solution, and this adds up to a large record of misconduct by the Spanish government.”
Credit: ECHO
Morocco has engaged in continuous human rights abuses in the large part of Western Sahara that it controls, with Amnesty International reporting the arrest and imprisonment of Sahrawi journalists and activists, including the rape of an activist’s sisters and 80-year-old mother in 2021.
Mleiha himself claims to have been a victim of Moroccan repression, and describes having been kidnapped by Moroccan officers in the Moroccan city of Agadir in 2008 as he was helping translate for foreign observers during the trial of a group of Sahrawi prisoners.
Mleiha says he was then taken to a police station, where he was held for two days and tortured, and he “spent 48 hours, from which I think approximately 28-30 hours under torture, hanged with the handcuffs on top.”
Mleiha says he was beaten, insulted, and kept in very cold temperatures before he was brought before a judge and accused of an attempted murder that had taken place years before, the culprits of which were never caught.
The victim ended up denying Mleiha had any involvement, and after being released conditionally, he left for Europe. He has not returned to Western Sahara since.
Mlaiha also found the spyware Pegasus on his phone, which Amnesty International confirmed. While Mleiha says he has no evidence that the Moroccan government was behind the use of the software, NSO, the Israeli firm that owns the software, only sells it to governments. Mleiha could not think of any other government that could have an interest in spying on him.
Human rights have long been a source of concern in Western Sahara. Meriem Naïli, a French Ph.D. candidate who has done research on human rights mechanisms as part of MINURSO, the stalled UN mission to organize a referendum on the status of Western Sahara, said that human rights have become a key issue in the territory. Naïli said that the suggestion of adding human rights monitoring components to the peace process has antagonized the parties, especially Morocco.
Naïli described that in interviews with UN personal envoys to Western Sahara, she was told that there was “no way to bring up the human rights question on the table when discussing with Morocco, because they would not come to the table.”
The Moroccan embassy did not respond to a request for comment.
While the Polisario Front has not faced the level of criticism that Morocco has received, it still governs its territory in Western Sahara and the Tindouf camps as a one-party state, claiming that multi-party democracy will be implemented once Sahrawi self-determination is achieved.
Dr. Jacob Mundy, director of the Peace and Conflict Studies program at Colgate University, summarized the Polisario’s attitude as “we’re in a constant state of emergency, a state of crisis we’re an independence movement, a national liberation movement, we cannot afford to have party division.”
Mundy added that there is a perception within the Polisario that any debates that take place out in the open could be exploited by Morocco, saying “It’s an organization that tries to handle its disputes and its divisions, whether it’s between those who are maybe a bit more religious than others, while some are very secular, still very Marxist in their orientation. You have youth who want to have a say in what’s going on, whereas the leadership is quite old.”
Mundy compared the Polisario’s situation with that of Algeria’s National Liberation Front (FLN), the party that led Algeria’s fight for independence from France and that has ruled the country almost uninterruptedly since.
“The problem in Algeria, as we know,” says Mundy “is that the FLN didn’t give up power after independence, so the question for Polisario is “OK, you say you’re committed to multi-party democracy […] what guarantees could they give us that they will open up to multi-party contested democracy?”
Mleiha says that he and CODESA have disagreements with the Polisario, especially over the pace of the transition to democratic rule and the importance of having civil society groups independent from the Polisario. However, they still recognize the Polisario Front as the legitimate representative of the Sahrawi people, and Mleiha describes the vigor of political debate within the Polisario that he was able to see as an observer during the Front’s 2015 congress.
He said that in a room in the presence of the Sahrawi president and Polisario leadership he saw “young people, and old people, taking the stage and taking the microphone, expressing their opinions freely, criticizing, sometimes aggressively, the president of the Polisario and the elite, in the room, and every person can go express himself and go back to his seat with no harm.”
He compared this to the political climate in the Moroccan-controlled sections of Western Sahara, saying that he thought “Oh damn, in the occupied territories, if you just say “self-determination” you will end up in jail.”
Credit: ECHO
The recent change in Spain’s position comes after two years of new developments in a conflict that had stalled for decades. Since 1991, when a cease-fire was brokered between the two sides, there had been no armed conflict between Morocco and the Sahrawi. However, in 2020, as part of the US-led effort to improve relations between Israel and some Arab countries, the US recognized the Moroccan annexation of Western Sahara. Earlier in the year, the Polisario announced its intention to return to armed struggle after Morocco entered a Polisario-controlled sliver of land to the territory’s south to open up a road to Mauritania.
Ambassador Boutache said that while it remains difficult to foresee what the future of the conflict could entail, there is a risk of the situation continuing to deteriorate.
The ambassador said that there was a posibility of escalation due to an increasingly assertive Morocco, stating that “unfortunately, instead of reversing its position and coming to its senses, Morocco is becoming more and more aggressive.”
As evidence of this escalation, the ambassador pointed to Algerian allegations that Morocco attacked a convoy of trucks near the border between Western Sahara and Mauritania.
Mundy predicts that the general situation in Western Sahara is unlikely to improve in the near future, saying “for a long time, it seemed as if until there was some sort of crisis, the UN and the most concerned powers weren’t going to do much over Western Sahara because it was always kind of a secondary or tertiary concern in international affairs.”
He added that while the situation in the region certainly matters to the people there, it often does not have repercussions beyond Morocco, Algeria, and Western Sahara, making it more pressing for countries like Spain to maintain good relations with Morocco.
“The Spanish government learned what it means to not have good relations with Morocco, and the price wasn’t worth bearing,” he said in reference to an episode in 2020 which saw Morocco encourage migrants to cross into the Spanish city of Ceuta in North Africa as a response to Spain allowing the Sahrawi president, Brahim Ghali, to be treated for COVID-19 symptoms in the country.
In an article published on May 2021 on the European Council on Foreign Relations site, Mundy and ECFR Senior Policy Fellow High Lovatt proposed an alternative to either Morocco’s autonomy plan or independence. The article puts forward the idea of Western Sahara entering into a free association arrangement with Morocco, which would put it into a similar position to which the Pacific Island nations of the Cook Islands and Niue have with New Zealand and Palau, Micronesia, and the Marshall Islands have with the United States. Under such an arrangement, Western Sahara would have full control over its internal policies, while Morocco would assume primary responsibility for the territory’s external affairs and defense.
Mundy explained that the issue that he and other academics have with Morocco’s autonomy proposal is that it does not offer a middle ground between independence and integration, but rather just a kind of integration.
“The problem with Morocco’s autonomy proposal is that it really doesn’t offer autonomy […] the local authority has some devolved governance, but it’s not clear that it is free from being abolished by the central government,” he said.
Mundy also added that authoritarian states like Morocco have a poor track record of respecting autonomy, and that “even democratic states really struggle with dealing with autonomy”, he said, pointing to the pro-independence movements in Catalonia and Scotland.
Within the broader conflict over Western Sahara, the refugees that were displaced by the original 1975 conflict remain an issue. The camps, originally meant to be a temporary measure until a return to Western Sahara could be organized, have stood for 47 years, with no end in sight to the conflict. While some refugees have chosen to settle in the open Algerian desert surrounding the camps, the Polisario has proposed a return of at least part of the camps’ populations to the town of Tifariti, in the Polisario-controlled part of Western Sahara.
Mundy says that the camps are in an extremely inhospitable region, where high temperatures and water scarcity are a constant concern. In comparison to that, he says that “when I traveled to Tifariti, I found to be much more hospitable, you could almost get ocean air sometimes, it was a much less oppressive environment.”
He added that the possibility of a relocation of the refugees to Tifariti has provoked a strong reaction from Morocco and that this avenue represents “one of the underexplored pressure points that you could put on Morocco.”
However, Mundy believes that concerns over the war and security will keep any realistic push for resettlement in Western Sahara from coming to fruition.
Mundy also says that it is highly unlikely that the refugees will simply resettle in Algeria, as this would fundamentally weaken the Polisario’s push for independence, “if you resettle them, then it sort of undermines the idea that they need to go back to Western Sahara […] an effort to end the refugee crisis in Western Sahara by resettling them in either Mauritania or Algeria does kind of undermine the political importance of what the camps represent, in terms of a right to return, because it’s kind of like accepting that it’s no longer urgent.”
Algeria’s position is that the return of Sahrawi refugees can only take place in the context of a political resolution in Western Sahara. Ambassador Boutache said that Algeria has a long history of hosting refugees, but that their presence in the country is a temporary solution until refugee populations can return to their respective homelands, saying “what is obliging these people to live elsewhere is just the possibility to have temporarily better conditions of living as long as their own countries are occupied,” adding that “Today, the Sahrawi people living in Algeria are more or less in the same situation […] but of course, they continue to maintain very strong relations with their motherland, they continue to work for the Sahrawi cause, they are very active militants, they do whatever they can to bring a solution, to liberate their territory from the Moroccan occupation, and there is not a shadow of a doubt that once the territory is liberated they will, of course, settle in their own homeland.”
Ultimately, the positions of outside powers might matter little to the Sahrawi people. As Mahjoud Mleiha puts it, “the position of Sánchez is an illegal position, and he does not have the right to decide on our behalf. Not Sánchez, nor Trump, not Biden, nor Macron, not anyone. The only party that can decide the future of Western Sahara is us, the Sahrawi people.”
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