Salim’s story is not unique in the Western Sahara. In 1975, most of Salim’s family, including his father – a well-known fighter in the independence movement – fled to Algeria with thousands of other Western Saharans. That was the year that Spain abandoned its Saharan colony to Morocco without consulting the wishes of the indigenous population. Rather than live under Moroccan rule, nearly half the population decided to join the independence movement in exile, where neighboring Algeria had offered them safe refuge. There they remain to this day, all of Salim’s immediate family and 150,000 other refugees, living in four self-managed camps near the town of Tindouf, Algeria, dependent on meager international aid and slim hopes that the United Nations Security Council will do something about the ongoing Moroccan occupation of the Western Sahara.
"Can you imagine not being able to see your father, your mother, your brothers and sisters for so long?" Salim asked me.
I met Salim (not his real name) while shopping for local music in the Moroccan occupied town of Al-â€Â˜Ayun, the largest city in the Western Sahara. Laayoune, as the Moroccans call it, is not a pretty place; it’s a sprawling town of recently erected cinderblock buildings, the kind that are so common in the global peripheries. Al-â€Â˜Ayun is the epicenter of the occupier’s efforts to win the hearts and minds of the native population. Indigenous Western Saharans often refer to themselves as simply Sahrawis -Arabic for Saharans. Yet to be Sahrawi is more than just to live in the Sahara. As one Al-â€Â˜Ayun taxi driver qualified to this author in the privacy of his car, "Yes, I am a Sahrawi. A Western Sahrawi, not a Moroccan Sahrawi."
Salim was less circumspect in his rejection of the Moroccan claim on the Western Sahara. "We prefer that occupation to this," he said, gesturing at once towards his television, which was tuned to Spanish satellite news, while also pointing towards some Moroccan settlers outside his shop window.
Salim owns a small music shop in one of the older parts of the city built up during late Spanish colonialism -another failed effort to win the Sahrawis’ hearts and minds. In these dense neighborhoods, often the sites of virulent resistance to the Moroccan occupation, Sahrawis tend to disclose their identity by wearing distinctive traditional clothing over western dress; robes once worn to protect and cool in the desert now serve to maintain an identity under attack from Arabs and Berbers from the north. Acute observers will notice the shift in local speech, from the staccato of Moroccan Arabic to the more singsong dialect of the westernmost Sahara, Hassaniyyah. Music shops, like the one owned by Salim, will blare local Sahrawi bands and classic Hassaniyyah favorites, perhaps as a kind of warning to Moroccans that their Arab techno-pop music is not welcome. The majority of Al-â€Â˜Ayun’s residents are Moroccan settlers, enticed to live there by massive state subsidies on goods, services and incomes. Another chunk of the population is the Moroccan army, reportedly 140,000 strong in the Western Sahara. When visiting, one gets the impression that the Moroccans aren’t going anywhere any time soon.
Another strong indication that the Moroccan government plans on staying put is its current efforts to illegally extract oil and natural gas from offshore reserves. Morocco’s willing accomplice is the Oklahoma City-based corporation Kerr-McGee, which specializes in hydrocarbon extraction and chemical processing. The Moroccan government, under the leadership of the young King Mohammed VI, first announced its plans to exploit the Western Sahara’s offshore reserves in October 2001. At that time, Morocco had divvied the concessions into a northern and southern zone, both just over 110,000 square kilometers, with Kerr-McGee taking the former and French "supermajor" TotalFinaElf grabbing the latter.
Founded in 1929, Kerr-McGee is a Fortune 500 corporation with over $14 billion in global assets and purview over one billion barrels of oil. The Moroccan government has granted Kerr-McGee exploration rights over the Boujdour Block, which encompasses 27 million offshore acres. So far, Kerr-McGee’s activities have been limited to accessing various geological surveys. The exploration contract with Morocco expires in October. Even in the face of international criticism, the contract has been extended every year since 2003, although every other corporation involved in Western Saharan oil exploration has bailed out, leaving Kerr-McGee the lone holdout.
In 2001, the Security Council responded to these "exploration" contracts by calling for an official legal opinion "in the context of international law" from the United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Legal Affairs, Hans Corell. The opinion, offered in February 2002, noted that Morocco’s reconnaissance contracts with Kerr-McGee and TotalFinaElf were not illegal, yet if "further exploration and exploitation activities were to proceed in disregard of the interests and wishes of the people of Western Sahara, they would be in violation of the principles of international law applicable to mineral resource activities in Non-Self-Governing Territories." That is to say, the colonizer cannot benefit from the colony until it consults the wishes of the colonized.
Kerr-McGee was quick to put the right spin on the opinion. As Kerr-McGee’s External Communications Specialist, John Christiansen, explained, "The United Nations Under-Secretary for Legal Affairs confirmed the legality of the permit in 2002." So long as Kerr-McGee’s activities are limited to sizing up the potential oil and gas reserves off the Western Sahara coast, without actually tapping into them for profit, it’s all legal. No harm, no foul.
There is, however, some difference of opinion as to whether or not Morocco can even be considered the "administering" power in the territory. Corell made it clear that Spain could not have legally transferred administrative (i.e., colonial) powers over Western Sahara in 1976. According to the opinion, the Moroccan government is merely the de facto administering power in Western Sahara. Indeed, Spanish foreign minister Miguel íÂngel Moratinos recently informed the parliament, "[A]s far as International Law is concerned, Spain remains the administering power [of the Western Sahara]."
Even the United States, one of Morocco’s strongest allies, recognizes the illegality of Morocco’s occupation. Following the conclusion of a bilateral free trade deal with Morocco, U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick said, "The United States and many other countries do not recognize Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara." Thus he concluded, "The Free Trade Agreement will not include Western Sahara."
Occupying the Western Sahara has never been a profitable venture for the foreign invaders. Not the least because the Western Sahara is a place only Sahrawis could love. The territory is largely bereft of the rolling sand dunes and oases reminiscent of such recent Orientalist classics as Laurence of Arabia and The English Patient. The Western Sahara is topographically diverse, with deep river gullies and rugged boulder mountains bursting from the desert floor, yet the climate is suited to little more than camel and goat herding. Pre-colonial Sahrawi culture was largely destroyed during the Spanish occupation, as successive droughts accelerated the processes of subjugation, sedentarization, urbanization and colonial cooptation of traditional political and social institutions. Resistance, however, could not be extinguished. Sahrawi students inspired by late Arab and African liberation movements, as well as Che Guevara and Frantz Fanon, spearheaded the rise of Western Saharan nationalism in the late 1960s, hoping to inspire a participatory re-imagination of their society along the lines of radical Afro-Arab nationalism. Yet despite the twin disruptions of colonialism and nationalism, the United Nations recognized in the 1990s that it could not understand the structure of Sahrawi society – past and present – without consulting the indigenous elders (i.e., Sahrawi Shaykhs).
For much of Europe’s history since the Renaissance, the Western Sahara was known as Rí o De Oro because Spanish traders had thought they found the Senegal River, the real river of gold. Given that the foreigners were prone to raid the coast for slaves, Sahrawis organized counter-attacks that eventually drove Europeans away, just as the "New World" was grabbing Madrid’s attention. Spanish fishermen, however, soon discovered that the waters of the Western Sahara offered some of the richest catches in the entire known world. Spaniards did not return to the mainland until the late nineteenth-century, in a desperate bid to grab a piece of the Sahara during Europe’s scrambling of Africa. Yet only in the 1960s, when Spanish colonial officials discovered one of the world’s richest phosphate reserves not too far from Al-â€Â˜Ayun, did the long years of occupation and subjugation appear to have finally paid off for Madrid.
The only problem was that the United Nations now wanted Spain out of Western Sahara. While Spain ignored demands to decolonize through a popular referendum in Western Sahara, Moroccan ultra-nationalists, following independence from France in 1956, claimed that most of Northwest Africa belonged to a very imagined community called "Greater Morocco." Things finally came to a head in 1975, when Morocco’s king Hassan II declared his intent to march 350,000 civilians into the Spanish Sahara the same day the International Court of Justice denounced Morocco’s historical claim to the territory, October 16. Besides, The Hague argued, every other colony in the world had the right to self-determination, to choose independence, division or integration with another state, and so should Western Sahara. King Hassan went ahead with his march. Then secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s advice to his staff shortly before the march was "Just turn it over to the UN with the guarantee it will go to Morocco." The U.S. representative at the United Nations, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, later bragged, "In both [East Timor and Western Sahara] the United States wished things to turn out as they did, and worked to bring this about. The Department of States desired that the United Nations prove utterly ineffective in whatever measures it undertook. This task was given to me, and I carried it forward with no inconsiderable success."
King Hassan’s interest in taking Western Sahara was one part ideological (recovering a small chunk of "Greater Morocco"), two parts political (re-energizing his unpopular rule and diverting a military that had twice recently tried to kill him) and one part financial (Morocco was one of the world’s largest phosphate producers). The only problem was that no one expected the Western Saharan independence movement to put up much of a fight, least of all the U.S. officials that backed Hassan. The highly mechanized Moroccan army could not compete with the nimble guerilla units of the Popular Front for the Liberation of the Saguia el-Hamra and the Rí o D’Oro, the Polisario Front, named after the two regions of Western Sahara. By 1979, Moroccan forces had been driven into three isolated pockets and the Polisario had free reign of most of the territory. Seeing that a faithful client regime was in trouble, the Reagan Administration poured a massive amount of military aid into Morocco’s war for the Sahara. Not counting Egypt, Morocco has received more aid from the United States than any other African country. In the early 1980s, the International Monetary Fund offered what was then one of the largest structural adjustment packages in the institution’s history, leading to bread riots in Morocco, met with massive state repression. Over the course of the 1980s, Morocco built a series of heavily mined and massively garrisoned sand-walls that now unevenly bisect the territory from north to south, effectively stalemating the war.
Serious United Nations involvement started just as the Cold War was finally thawing. While Franco-American aid had helped King Hassan from losing his desert gamble, international pressure forced him to commit to holding the referendum he denied the Western Saharans in 1975. In 1991, a United Nations mission arrived in Western Sahara to organize the referendum and maintain a cease-fire between the two sides. Although colonial authorities had only counted some 74,000 Western Saharans of all ages in 1974, Morocco managed to find some 170,000 voting-age Saharans that Spain somehow missed. The United Nations spent the better part of the 1990s sorting through Morocco’s "Sahrawis," only to have Secretary General Kofi Annan pull the plug on the entire project in 2000 in the shadow of the UN’s 1999 East Timor debacle. Diplomatic rumors have suggested that France and the United States did not want to embarrass Morocco by forcing a referendum that would, under free and fair circumstances, favor independence. Such a vote would be especially awkward for the newly crowned King Mohammed VI, who succeeded his father in the summer of 1999, just as the United Nations was finalizing the referendum voter-list.
Instead, the United Nations re-deputized former US Secretary of State James Baker as the Secretary General’s Personal Envoy to the conflict. (Baker had previously mediated in 1997, saving the referendum from collapse.) Around the same time that Morocco announced its deals with Kerr-McGee and TotalFinaElf, Baker unveiled a plan that would give Western Sahara limited autonomous self-governance within the Kingdom of Morocco for a period of four to five years. Following that, the Western Saharans would be allowed to vote between independence, integration with Morocco, or continuing with the autonomy arrangement. The catch, however, was that Moroccan settlers could also participate in this referendum – indeed as many Moroccans as the government could move into the territory at least one year before the vote.
For some observers, it seemed a little more than just ironic that one of the key members of the George W. Bush team in Florida 2000 was now rigging elections in the third world. In fact, the whole thing had the smell of Texas tea. Not only were Kerr-McGee’s ties to the second Bush Administration and the Baker Institute at Rice University strong, the U.S.’s new ambassador to Morocco, Margaret Tutwiler, was a very close and personal friend of Baker, as well as a longtime Republican activist. As working oilrigs were popping up all over West Africa, from the Gulf of Guinea to the shores of Mauritania, it seemed that it would not be long before Morocco would start pumping the Western Saharan seabed, supplying the not-so-distant U.S. eastern seaboard. Not surprisingly, Kerr-McGee’s political donations are almost entirely to Republicans. Before
The Polisario, however, had its own hydrocarbon powerhouse in its corner, Algeria, which is a major natural gas exporter to the United States. Since 1975, Algeria has backed Western Saharan independence with money, guns and diplomacy. Although Algeria was on the wrong side of the fence during the Cold War, since 9/11 the Bush Administration has found an unlikely, yet willing, ally in Algerian president Abdelaziz Bouteflika. Having fought its own "war on terror" in the 1990s against Islamic guerillas, Algeria’s military-led government has been willing to exchange valuable intelligence for long-sought lethal counter-insurgency hardware from United States. Thus when Algeria backed the Polisario in its firm rejection of the 2001 "Baker Plan," the pressure was on United Nations to come up with something more agreeable. Baker’s 2003 plan beefed up the autonomy and limited the participation of Moroccan settlers to those present since 1999. The Polisario, perhaps with nudging from Algeria, accepted the plan. Unsure as to how its own citizens would vote, Morocco has henceforth rejected any plan that contains provisions that would allow the territory to become independent. Baker’s plan remains on the table, but Morocco is no longer willing to play that game.
In the meantime, the Polisario-led government in exile of Western Sahara, the Saharan Arab Democratic Republic (SADR), launched its own counter-bid for the same hydrocarbon concessions off the coast. The Anglo-Australian company Fusion Oil, already well established in West Africa, agreed to look at the available data for the SADR. Shortly before Fusion dissolved in 2004, it concluded, based on existing data, "there could be a viable petroleum industry off the coast of Western Sahara." Last month, the SADR offered licenses for these areas, actionable after independence.
The Polisario has also benefited from the work of international grassroots organizations working to protect the resources of Western Sahara under Morocco occupation. In 2003, the Norwegian firm TGS-NOPEC, which conducted the offshore surveying for and Total and Kerr-McGee, came under intense pressure from activists to get out of the Sahara. Although TGS completed the survey, it quickly distanced itself, stating that it "has no agreement to participate in, or profit from any future exploratory drilling or any production or exploitation of mineral resources from the area." Total later dropped out in December 2004, ostensibly for business reasons. With Kerr-McGee as the sole player officially involved, Norwegian activists targeted their country’s investments in the company, winning a $50 million plus divestment from the national pension fund. Yet the Moroccan government and Kerr-McGee show no sign of relenting. Citing its own ethical guidelines, the Norwegian Finance Ministry’s advisory council said, "The Council regarded [the exploration] as ‘a particularly serious violation of fundamental ethical norms’ e.g. because it may strengthen Morocco’s sovereignty claims and thus contribute to undermining the UN peace process."
Several weeks after my encounter with Salim, I met his family while traveling to the Western Saharan refugee camps in Algeria for research. Salim’s father – a tired yet passionate nationalist, large and imposing, his skin hardened and his hair sun-bleached white – could hardly believe that I had spoken with his son less than a month prior. They had been separated for over a quarter-century with only indirect contact before the advent of cell phones. Salim’s father insisted that I stay for dinner. Like all the thousands of other families in the four camps, Salim’s family divide their time between a large tent for hot summer days and a mud-brick dwelling for cold winter nights and the frequent sandstorms. Spending most of our time in the tent, over three glasses of heavily sweetened green tea, we talked about Salim, his shop in Al-â€Â˜Ayun and his desire to pursue graduate studies in Archaeology in Spain.
That night they treated me to goat meat and heart kabobs. In a place where most meals consist rice, rice, and more rice (protein deficiency is rampant), this was a veritable feast. I felt ashamed that they lavished me with such a gift as I mined their memories for their lived experiences of war, dispossession and betrayal at the hands of the Security Council. Salim had said that the Moroccan occupation was a lie, and that I would find the truth in the refugee camps.
Indeed, nothing obscures more than belligerent occupation and those that seek to profit from it. In the through-the-looking-glass world of neocolonialism, Kerr-McGee believes it is acting well within ethical reason. "Kerr-McGee," Christiansen explained, "supports the ongoing efforts of the United Nations to find a permanent and amicable solution to the Western Sahara issue." He then added, "Kerr-McGee, by its Reconnaissance Permit, has not prejudged or prejudiced such efforts, and we hope to make a contribution to the development of this area and its people." Yet if Kerr-McGee finds evidence of hydrocarbons off the coast of Western Sahara, the Moroccan regime has one more major reason not to let go.
Reason and occupation are about as amiable as oil and water.
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