The conflict between Morocco and Algeria over the Western Sahara is now nearly a half-century old. Across the Western Sahara, most residents want peace. The U.N. Security Council established the United Nations Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara (MINURSO) in 1991 to organize a census among Western Sahara’s residents ahead of a referendum to determine the region’s preferred status. It has yet to do so. MINURSO, meanwhile, has cost donor nations hundreds of millions of dollars essentially to employ a few Bangladeshis, Pakistanis, and Russians whose greatest visibility is at the bars and restaurants of region’s towns and resorts.
The Western Sahara is historically Moroccan. Five of the eight dynasties that have ruled Morocco since the late eighth century A.D. also ruled what today is the Western Sahara. The real origin of a separate Western Sahara came against the backdrop of the 1884-1885 Berlin Conference. Spain, not wishing to be left out of the scramble for Africa, seized the barren Western Sahara from Morocco, dividing it into the southern Río de Oro and northern Saguia el-Hamra. European powers recognized Spanish claims, but the locals never did. After the 1911 Agadir Crisis, the Spanish established formal protectorates over chunks of Morocco, along both the northern coast minus Tangiers and the Spanish-occupied areas of the Sahara; the French ruled supreme everywhere else. The Spanish never really asserted enough control to administer the Sahara until 1934, though, and only then just barely.
Morocco gained independence in 1956, and Spain forfeited its claims in northern Morocco except for two small enclaves. The following year, Morocco formally laid claim to the Western Sahara to reunify the country after its colonial division. As the Spanish prepared to evacuate, the Moroccans sought International Court of Justice endorsement of their position against Algeria’s Cold War claims that the Sahara instead belonged to the Polisario Front, a Marxist front group that Algeria created for its Soviet patrons just a couple years before when they saw the writing on the wall.
Morocco formally laid claim to the Western Sahara to reunify the country after its colonial division.
International jurists seldom eschew their own country’s positions, and this was especially so during the Cold War. The resulting decision split along the Iron Curtain. The court president was Polish, one judge Soviet, and another from the Soviet African client state Benin. The Indian judge was also unapologetically pro-Soviet on behalf of the Non-Aligned Movement.
The court disputed Morocco’s claim that the Western Sahara was effectively empty when the Spanish armies colonized it but found overwhelmingly that there were legal ties between the Western Sahara and the Kingdom of Morocco consistent with Morocco’s claims and that several Sahrawi tribes held allegiance to the Moroccan sultan.
As Spain prepared to evacuate, Morocco took no chances. It organized the Green March, sending 350,000 Moroccans unarmed into the Sahara to reclaim the land as theirs. Not to be outdone, on February 27, 1976, the Polisario Front declared the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic that it claimed Morocco illicitly occupied. Algeria backed the group that claimed it fought to liberate its country. The subsequent conflict killed 7,000 Moroccan soldiers and 4,000 Polisario guerillas, as well as several thousand civilians. Fighting displaced tens of thousands of others. Morocco essentially ended its terror problem with a wall: A huge, 1,500-mile-long berm and trench system. After the Soviet Union’s collapse and a final failed offensive in 1989, the Polisario’s leadership recognized that, lacking both popular support and military strength, they never would achieve their aims by force. It was against this backdrop that the U.N. stood up MINURSO.
As it became clear that the Polisario lacked popular support—Sahrawis favored Morocco’s relative freedom to the Polisario’s totalitarian dictatorship—Algeria sought to manipulate the referendum by registering non-Sahrawi Algerians and Sahrawis without roots in the Western Sahara. Morocco, meanwhile, has functionally controlled the Western Sahara since 1975. In 2020, the United States acknowledged reality and recognized the Sahara as an integral and indivisible part of Morocco.
[U.N. Special Envoy Staffan de Mistura] seeks to preserve the organization and with it, the refugee crisis itself.
Enter the United Nations. Special Envoy Staffan de Mistura, after having failed in his previous portfolio of Syria, now handles the Western Sahara. Last week, he formally proposed partitioning the Western Sahara between Morocco and the Polisario. In effect, he would take a peaceful settlement and upend it in a way where the only beneficiaries would be himself, his prestige, and his budget. His proposal betrays principle. Progressives like to speak of battling settler-colonialism, but what de Mistura would do is essentially revive, rather than reverse, the legacy of a Spanish land grab.
Nor would he help those in Algeria’s Sahrawi refugee camps. In a repeat of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency disaster, he seeks to preserve the organization and with it, the refugee crisis itself. Many Sahrawis trapped in Algerian refugee camps wish to return to Morocco, but both the Polisario and the Algerian military refuse to allow them, for fear of exposing their sham cause or losing access to the humanitarian aid from which Algeria profits. De Mistura’s actions also threaten to upend peace elsewhere by creating a precedent for the United Nations and Turkish aggressors to violate Cypriot territory with an unjust partition.
MINURSO has failed. Secretary-General António Guterres’s refusal to end zombie agencies and missions is a stain on his record and a testament to United Nations fraud, inefficiency, and abuse. If he will not do the right thing, it is time that the United States, France, and other friends of Morocco do so by deducting the MINURSO budget from their U.N. contributions and for Morocco to declare all MINURSO employees persona non grata.
