This section covers the pre-history of the Western Sahara region with the early human migrations that eventually gave rise to the people known as the Saharawis today, and spans to the period  ending with Spain’s abandonment of its colony in North West Africa in late 1975. This event set  the scene for the ensuing  conflict that continues to date between the Saharawi liberation movement and Morocco.

Contents

Early period

Sanhaja Berber nomads are believed to have started migrating into the area of modern-day Western Sahara around 1,000 BC. After the arrival of the camel from the east in AD 50, the Sanhaja periodically controlled the lucrative trans-Saharan trade routes. But from the seventh century they began to experience fierce competition from Zenata Berbers to the north, who eventually took over the trade routes. In the eleventh century, the Sanhaja rose to dominance again with the emergence of the Almoravids, followers of a fervent Islamic movement who conquered vast swathes of west and north Africa and ruled for a century in southern Spain.

The direct descendents of present-day Saharawis represent a fusion between the Sanhaja Berbers and Arab tribes originating from Yemen. Invasions by the Beni Hassan in the fifteenth century led to the gradual domination and Arabization of the Sanhaja. This gave rise to a new ethnic group called the Beidan or Moors, whose language evolved into Hassaniya. The area they occupied was known as Trab Ab-beidan (the land of the whites), its limits defined mainly by natural barriers such as the Atlantic coast to the west; Ouad or Wad Noun in the north; the Senegal River to the south; and the hostile, barren desert to the east.

Those nomadic pastoral tribes roamed mainly along Western Sahara’s coastal area and developed different political structures from those that largely occupied modern-day Mauritania. They did not form emirates as in Mauritania and, when not fighting amongst themselves, regulated their affairs and relations by inter-tribal assemblies like the djemaa or ait arbain (the council of forty). These would meet to organize collective defense and raids, resolve civil disputes, and punish crimes. Primary loyalties were to family, faction, and tribe. The Saharawis never constituted a nation as such in pre-colonial times ( Hodges 1983 ).

By the eighteenth century, a certain degree of stability was introduced into the region of Saguiat el Hamra, today’s northern part of Western Sahara, when it became known as the ‘Land of the Saints’. Smara, the first pre-colonial town, was founded as a sacred centre of learning, attracting people from far and wide in search of religious instruction.

Spanish colonialism and Saharawi resistance

Spain’s initial interest in Western Sahara was driven by the desire to protect its nearby Canary Islands and the fishermen that operated from there. In 1884, it proclaimed a protectorate from Cape Bojador to Cape Blanc along the Western Sahara coast and set up a trading post in Dakhla (‘Villa Cisneros’ in Spanish). This act was then ratified during the carving up of Africa by the European powers in the Berlin Conference of 1885. France, meanwhile, had become the dominant power in north-west Africa and sought to extend its possessions. It took three Franco-Spanish treaties in 1900, 1904, and 1912 to define the borders of Western Sahara.

Until the late 1930s, Spain’s rule in Western Sahara was confined to a limited presence along the coast. It did not venture much into the interior nor meddle with the affairs of the Saharawi tribes. Relations with the new rulers were fairly reasonable. In fact it was against France’s aggressive colonial agenda that the Saharawi tribes directed their fiercest resistance. Western Sahara’s interior became an ideal springboard for launching attacks against French targets in Mauritania and Morocco. These intensified between the years 1923 and 1934, until France threatened to occupy Spain’s territories if it did not crush Saharawi resistance activities. This led to the ‘pacification’ of the Saharawi tribes through joint Franco-Spanish military co-operation. Only in 1934 did Spain finally take full possession of its colony.

In the late 1940s, the discovery of the biggest high-grade phosphate deposits in the world ushered in a new era of deepened colonial interest in Western Sahara. But in 1956, as Morocco gained its independence from France, the spectre of renewed resistance looked to threaten Spain’s plans. Members of Saharawi tribes had enthusiastically signed up to join the Army of Liberation, a broad anti-colonial struggle against the French and Spanish. The Saharawis formed their own wing. At this stage, however, it was hardly a nationalist movement, as the primary concern was to drive out foreign rule in the region rather than to build a nation.

Spain’s colonial hold was under attack, and France’s surrounding colonies in Algeria and Mauritania were also threatened, so the two countries once again co-operated to stamp out the destabilizing uprisings. This became possible with the complicity of the newly independent Moroccan government. In February 1958, in a military action known as the Ecouvillion Operation, the Saharawi wing of the Liberation Army was brutally put down. In return for helping to cut off their source of supplies and munitions from southern Morocco, Spain awarded Tarfaya to Morocco a couple of months later, in the Cintra Agreements ( Diego Aguirre 1988 ). This strip, historically inhabited by Saharawis, lay directly north of today’s Western Saharan border and had a distinct administrative status from the rest of Spain’s colony. Saguiat el Hamra and Rio de Oro, the remaining regions, were then jointly declared a Spanish province and the colony was renamed Spanish Sahara.

Many of those who had fought in the Liberation Army fled to the Tarfaya region and for nearly a decade, Saharawi resistance was laid to rest.

The rise of Saharawi nationalism

Spain’s mission to exploit the mineral wealth of Western Sahara in the 1950s and 1960s led to crucial changes in the Saharawi socio-economic reality ( Seddon 1989 ). Most importantly, large numbers of Saharawis forcibly settled and urbanized; and coinciding with a gradual decline in their pastoral economy, they became cheap labour to work in the phosphate mines and expand the colonial infrastructure. Saharawis of different tribes and castes alike were living and working together in the growing towns of the territory and were being subjected to the same conditions of oppression and exploitation. These various processes, by the late 1960s, had sparked renewed anti-colonial sentiments and had created the conditions for the emergence of a Saharawi identity that went beyond traditional kinship ties.

Towards the end of 1967, Harakat Tahrir (the movement for the liberation of Saguia el Hamra wa Oued ed-Dahab) was formed. Unlike previous forms of resistance, it was the territory’s first urban-based political movement. Headed by Bassiri, a Koranic teacher in Smara, Harakat Tahrir called for the de-colonization of the territory and demanded wide-ranging social and economic reforms. It also sought radical changes to the Saharawi institution of sheikhs and the ineffective, undemocratic political mechanisms set up by the colonialists to ‘represent’ Saharawi interests. The movement attracted a broad base of support, particularly from the Saharawi youth, the unskilled and semi-skilled labour force, and, more alarming yet for the Spanish, a significant number of soldiers from the Nomadic Troops.

Under Franco’s dictatorship this phenomenon was intolerable. When the movement decided to present its list of demands and grievances in 1970 through a peacefully organized demonstration, it was dealt with in a decisively harsh manner. Saharawis were killed, the leader was never seen again, and many members were arrested and imprisoned for months. Harakat Tahrir collapsed. Nonetheless, these events were to prove key for spurring on developments that were taking place elsewhere.

The Polisario Front: the beginning of armed resistance

By 1970, an academic elite of some forty Saharawi students from the Tarfaya region were enrolled at the Mohammed V University in Rabat. They were influenced by radical student politics in Morocco, the rise of Third-World liberation movements, and the events in Spanish Sahara. Seeing themselves as the nucleus for a new liberation movement, they began recruiting Saharawis within Morocco and beyond, in Spanish Sahara, and from the Diaspora in Mauritania and Algeria. Initially, they also sought the support of the Moroccan government in their quest to end Spanish rule, but this changed after anti-Spanish demonstrations, staged in southern Morocco in 1972, led to widespread arrests. This incident, along with contact with former members of the Harakat Tahrir who sought independence rather than integration with Morocco, took the Rabat group in a more strongly nationalistic direction. The new centre of activity shifted to Zouerate in Mauritania, and on 10 May 1973, the Polisario Front declared its birth. It also aimed to build a nation that eradicated all forms of inequality and would use armed struggle to achieve total freedom from colonial rule.

Ten days after its inception, the Polisario Front launched the first of its hit-and-run attacks on Spanish targets. Despite being a small, poorly armed group, the effectiveness of the guerrilla fighters grew over the next two years. The level of support gained from the Saharawi population also grew dramatically.

The United Nations, the International Court of Justice and Saharawi self-determination

In 1963, Western Sahara was included in the UN list of Non-Self-Governing Territories, which effectively identified those countries to be de-colonized. By 1966, the UN General Assembly had adopted its first resolution, requesting Spain, as administering power, to organize a referendum on self-determination for the people of Western Sahara. At the time, the OAU Council of Ministers also adopted the first of many resolutions on Western Sahara, calling for its ‘freedom and independence’.

Spain did not indicate its readiness to implement the UN resolutions until eight years later, in 1974. Pressured by the increasingly emboldened Polisario operations, the Spanish announced plans to hold a referendum within the first six months of 1975. But at the very first signs of Spanish intentions to promote self-rule for Western Sahara, Morocco began to vigorously lobby support for its sovereignty claims over the territory. It even threatened military action if Spain included an independence option in the referendum. Mauritania, for reasons of self-preservation, also made a bid for part of Western Sahara. Tensions rose and the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution at the end of the year requesting Spain to postpone its planned referendum, in order to obtain an advisory opinion from the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague.

A UN visiting mission to the region in May 1975 witnessed unprecedented support for the Polisario Front, and confirmed in its report that a huge majority of Saharawis wanted independence and rejected the territorial claims of both Morocco and Mauritania. The ICJ’s advisory opinion of 16 October 1975 vindicated these sentiments, declaring unequivocally that it had found no historical or legal ties whose nature either established Moroccan or Mauritanian territorial sovereignty over Western Sahara or impeded the application of the principle of self-determination.

Three historical events played an important role in influencing the view of the ICJ. These concerned treaties between the Moroccan sultans and European countries signed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Two of them with Spain, in 1767 and 1799 respectively, clearly indicated that beyond the Wad Noun region (now in southern Morocco) the sultans could not be held responsible for anything that befell Spaniards operating there, as their dominion did not extend that far. And in the nineteenth century, the sale to Morocco of an English trading post in the Tarfaya region was carried out with the understanding that, as it was not under the sultan’s domain, it had no right to give any part away without first obtaining explicit consent from Britain.

Website:

International Court of Justice – http://www.icj-cij.org/icjwww/idecisions/isummaries/isasummary751016.htm

The Greater Morocco Thesis

Morocco’s sovereignty claims over Western Sahara originate in the Greater Morocco Thesis. First promulgated in 1956 by the leader of the Istiqlal party, it asserted that Western Sahara, Mauritania, part of Mali, a big chunk of the western Algerian desert, and even part of Senegal all belonged to a distant, mythic Morocco. This view, endorsed by the monarchy, referred to a period in the sixteenth century when the Moroccan empire held sway over vast stretches of land up to Timbuktu.

In practice, Morocco’s numerous claims proved to be full of contradictions and inconsistencies. As early as 1957, a Moroccan delegate to the UN claimed Mauritania and Western Sahara. Yet in 1966, Morocco mysteriously ignored its expansionist dreams and expressed support for the rights of the Saharawi people to exercise self-determination, at a meeting of the UN Special Committee on Decolonization. This position was reiterated quite consistently until 1974. In fact, as late as 1973, in two separate tripartite summits, Morocco joined Algeria and Mauritania in the same pledge of support.

Meanwhile, by the early 1960s, Morocco had quietly dropped its claims to parts of Mali and Senegal in exchange for desirable economic and diplomatic outcomes. The claim to Mauritania was upheld throughout the 1960s; but then in 1970, the Moroccan king Hassan II signed a treaty of friendship and co-operation with Ould Daddah, the Mauritanian president, and granted the country full diplomatic recognition. Once again territorial claims were dropped. As for Algeria, Morocco’s failed 1963 military campaign to forcefully take part of its neighbour’s western desert eventually led to the signing of a convention, in 1972, recognizing the existing borders between the two countries.

When claims to Mauritania and parts of Algeria were dropped, only Western Sahara remained. Although this was strongly resented by the Istiqlal party, Hassan II believed that in the case of Western Sahara, self-determination would lead to eventual integration with Morocco. In 1974, however, when this appeared unlikely, the Moroccan government abandoned its commitment to self-determination and once again asserted its right to direct annexation.

The political survival of the monarchy had, by this time, become inextricably tied to its determination to claim Western Sahara. This was starkly evident when Hassan II defied the landmark ICJ opinion of 16 October and announced on the same day that he would launch the Green March. Some 350,000 Moroccan unarmed citizens would be mobilized to enter into Western Sahara and reclaim the ‘ancestral lands’. Although roundly condemned by the UN, Spain, and Algeria, this act decisively set the stage for the ultimate endgame.

Spanish abandonment and double invasion

Towards the end of its colonial era, Spain had begun to reap substantial economic benefits from the rich phosphate deposits in Western Sahara; and by 1975, it had become the sixth major exporter in the world. Hassan II’s astuteness in pushing his claim to Western Sahara lay in pandering to Madrid’s economic interests in the territory while also exploiting the fragile internal political situation that prevailed due to Franco’s failing health. Hassan II gambled that with the right kind and amount of threat to the Spanish colony, events would turn his way. It paid off.

Indeed, Spain was very keen to avoid any kind of military confrontation with Morocco. A military incursion into Western Sahara on 31 October followed by the highly publicized Green March of Moroccans crossing into Spain’s colony on 6 November broke Iberian resolve. Key Spanish historians believe that had Franco been alive, the Saharawis would have obtained their independence ( Diego Aguirre 1988 ). But from the moment he became incapacitated to make decisions—ironically, the day after the ICJ opinion—different factions in his government took over. The ones willing to negotiate with Morocco ultimately prevailed. For as long as possible, however, Spain kept up the appearance of negotiating the gradual transfer of power to the Polisario. Back in Madrid, a deal was secretly hatching to hand administrative control over to Morocco and Mauritania, and by 14 November, the Tripartite Madrid Accord was signed. Spain was assured a 35 per cent share of the phosphate wealth.

The Polisario, who had come to represent Saharawi aspirations, vigorously opposed the deal, but it was already too late. Spain’s rapid evacuation from the colony before the end of the year was coupled with the build-up of Moroccan and Mauritanian forces along the northern and southern borders. The double invasion that followed was resisted by the Polisario forces, sparking armed hostilities that would endure for sixteen years.

By early 1976, Western Sahara was divided and occupied by the two neighbours. Morocco had secured about two-thirds of the northern part of the territory and Mauritania the remaining third in the south. When a defeated Mauritania renounced its claims over Western Sahara in 1979, Morocco annexed the rest of the territory.

author: Danielle Smith

Websites:

Western Sahara Online – http://www.wsahara.net/

ARSO – http://www.arso.org

Reading material:

Link to FMO, CIA World Factbook, Landmine Action, Nick Brooks

{link to DVBS’s contribution to FMO}