Morocco: Challenging AU Reform & Peacebuilding in Western Sahara

[caption id="attachment_13081" align="aligncenter" width="600"] A Ghanaian peacekeeper with the UN Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara (MINURSO). Photo by United Nations Photo, via Flickr. Creative Commons.[/caption]

After a 33-year absence, Morocco rejoined the African Union (AU) in January 2017. Morocco had left the union due to a conflict over Western Sahara, an area which Morocco controls but the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR) claims independence for. Morocco's re-entry into the AU has raised the inter-African political stakes several notches, as it brings a new strategy for occupying Western Sahara at the expense of the SADR. The goal: SADR de-recognition by the AU.

Morocco apparently seeks to move away from the Arab Maghreb Union (which is known by the French acronym UMA), a regional economic community which serves as the AU's North African pillar. The UMA has not achieved anything close to its potential, in part thanks to the continuing conflict between Morocco, Algeria, and SADR over Western Sahara. As the UN Security Council backs renewed talks on Western Sahara, will the UMA play a role in the solution? If so, how?

The continuing struggle over Western Sahara adds yet more uncertainty to prospects for peace and security in the North African Maghreb, the region's integration into a reformed AU system, and Mediterranean stability and security. The United Nations has yet again taken notice of this unresolved self-determination issue, but that by no means guarantees any renewed progress toward solving what is a tripartite conundrum between Algeria and Morocco, with SADR sandwiched in the middle. Ultimately, only in the context of the AU can this Gordian Knot be broken.

Morocco and the AU

For years, many countries, particularly South Africa and Algeria, have backed Western Saharan liberation in zero-sum terms — meaning independence under SADR as the only possible option. This joint South Africa-Algerian "liberation solidarity" has run its course and has to be judged an abject failure. Rabat's re-entry into the AU, even without SADR's ejection from the body, for now, reflects a major shift in the continental balance of forces. All Morocco has to do — and is doing — is bilaterally persuade AU member states to de-recognize SADR, as it recently did in the case of Zambia, and Rabat's economic diplomacy will yield a slow-motion removal of SADR from the AU. At this point, Morocco has the diplomatic initiative bolstered by its considerable economic heft; this is especially so with Libya in disarray.

Algeria's seemingly sclerotic authoritarian regime is in no better position in this consequential tug-of-war over the Maghreb and Africa's future. And the UN Security Council is revisiting the Western Sahara conflict at a time when the P5 are preoccupied with North Korea and conflicts in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

The AU has appointed former Mozambican president Joaquim Chissano as its High Representative for the Western Sahara. Perhaps this may turn out to be something more than a "holding action" while counteracting Rabat's strategy of retaining control over this territory. Here, there is a compelling logic in the AU chairpersonship shifting from eastern and southern Africa to the continent's more northerly centre-west, in Chadian foreign minister Moussa Faki, balanced by Chissano being picked to tackle the Western Sahara issue.

Former Mozambican president Chissano is not only one of the most highly regarded elder statesmen within the Southern African Development Community (SADC), he is also one of the few former heads-of-state to be awarded Mo Ibrahim's Prize for Achievement in African Leadership. If South Africa (consumed as ever in its convoluted domestic politics in the run-up to the national election in 2019) and Algeria could adjust their conception of self-determination to support a Faki-Chissano partnership, they could find a new solution for the Western Sahara issue.

Can an AU guided by Faki and Chissano break out of the outdated mode of self-determinative "independence" as "liberation" to achieve an historic compromise that would enhance Africa's regional and continental integration and its strategic autonomy?

Autonomy: Within or outside Morocco?

Any AU solution should be premised on the defragmenting of Africa. The continent needs no more new "states" or statelets. Rabat has a compelling case for its position in the Western Sahara dispute due to the illogic of Western Sahara as a sovereign independent state. While Moroccans (and for that matter hardly anyone else) do not come right out and state the obvious, the case for a vast territory of little more than 300,000 people being accorded the status of a sovereign independent state is untenable — and increasingly so when considering the prevalence of state failure and the economic and governance unsustainability of many AU members.

Apart from the obvious example of South Sudan (where there might have been possibilities of regional autonomy within a united Sudan and under the East African Community), there are any number of other African "national" untenabilities. Think of Lesotho and Swaziland or The Gambia or even, as big and populous as it is, the Democratic Republic Congo.

Morocco's position is that "self-determination" can be satisfied by "autonomy," which is quite right except that Rabat gives this option a bad name by stipulating that autonomy be exercised under its sovereignty (i.e. occupation). This essentially negates autonomy as a real option for self-determination in the eyes of the Sahrawis and their supporters.

A solution, instead, could be to tie self-governing autonomy to the operationalizing of the Arab Maghreb Union.

In February 2017 Morocco requested membership within the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), one of the continent's largest and most important regional economic communities. If acceded to, this would deal a blow to UMA, a regional community composed of Algeria, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, and Tunisia, now mostly dormant but designated as the African Union's North African pillar. Revitalizing UMA instead could be a solution to the Western Sahara impasse.

There is no reason why the AU could not take the initiative by partnering with the UN in placing a new referendum resolution on the table on autonomy: within or outside Morocco. In the case of the latter, this would take the form of a special AU "regional integration territory" of UMA headquartered within Western Sahara. The SADR, retaining its AU membership, would be designated a "UMA autonomous republic" under a Sahrawi-led tripartite economic and security cooperation commission including both Algeria and Morocco (with Tunisia an added possibility).

For good measure, under a new autonomy referendum, Rabat could be required to provide specific guarantees to SADR, the AU, and the UN on Sahrawi "national identity" and how Western Sahara remaining within its jurisdiction would be the more attractive option.

Unless the Sahrawis, South Africa, and Algeria can come up with new thinking to counter the obvious but cynically self-serving logic of the status quo of occupation, there will be no satisfactory solution to the Western Sahara problem. In fact, a non-solution is probably more in Morocco's interest than a real solution, given the current thrust of its diplomacy.

Saharan peacebuilding as regional integration

At the time of writing, Morocco has applauded a UN resolution reportedly pushed by the United States that would sanction SADR's Polisario Front (the armed wing of the liberation movement) if it does not withdraw from the Guerguerat buffer strip within 30 days.

What should be considered frustrating in this regard is the potential benefit that a solution to the Western Sahara issue could bring. A tripartite SADR-Morocco-Algerian economic and security commission overseeing an autonomous Western Sahara could field a UMA regional stabilization force comprising Moroccan, Algerian, and SADR forces under joint UN-AU command. Such a force, perhaps with contingents from Tunisia, Mauritania, and Lake Chad Basin countries as well could guarantee peace and security in the Maghreb, extending into the southern Sahara in cooperation with ECOWAS and ECCAS. A UMA tripartite commission, as part of a trans-Mediterranean zone of peace and cooperation initiative, could motivate regional development projects for financing by the South African-based regional BRICS facility. Morocco, meanwhile, could discover its strategic leadership role as the premier bridge-builder between Africa and Europe.

In short, an all-round win-win as opposed to a zero-sum resolution to the long-running Western Sahara conflict could be the tip of the iceberg of a transformation and stabilization of one of the world's most threat-laden regions. And irony of ironies, South Africa's involvement would symbolize the liberation of southern Africa rebounding to liberate Africa's last colony — which turns out not to have been in the south, but in the north. The pan-African dream of a truly united continent between the Maghreb and sub-Saharan Africa will have finally been realized.

Francis A. Kornegay, Jr. is an alumnus of the Wilson Center and resides in South Africa, where he is a senior fellow at the Institute of Global Dialogue at the University of South Africa. The Institute of Global Dialogue is a member organization of the Southern Voices Network for Peacebuilding.

On May 23, 2017, the Institute for Global Dialogue and Africa Solidarity for SAHRAWI will convene a seminar titled "The Future of the Sahrawi Republic," examining the difficult questions Western Sahara poses on the nature of sovereignty, self-determination, and regional integration.