An interesting contrast is with Western Sahara, where for 10 years the cash-strapped U.N. has been pouring $50 million a year into the sand and yet effectively capitulating in the face of Moroccan intransigence. On the face of it, in a report to the Security Council on Feb. 18, Kofi Annan seems to have conceded Moroccan victory, unless someone, somewhere, does something. He has asked James Baker, the former U.S. secretary of state and Annan’s envoy on a Western Sahara settlement, to try again.
Once again the main problem is Moroccan government-sponsored appeals against the U.N’s rejection of 79,000 would-be voters, shortly to be followed by another 60,000, who will also appeal. The U.N.’s list so far accepts only 86,000 voters out of 196,000 applicants.
The original Spanish census, conducted just before it abandoned the territory, included 74,000 electors and the new figure that the U.N. commissioners have accepted as genuine is probably that plus births and minus deaths since the Spaniards walked away from their former colony.
The Moroccans presented many tribal groups from the south of Morocco as Western Sahara voters, in the hope that they could swamp the referendum. When that was thwarted by the U.N. registration teams, the Moroccan government resorted to the appeal process. The current deadline for the referendum is July this year, but Annan, in effect, told the Security Council that there was no chance of it taking place if the appeals go ahead.
Kofi Annan
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The appeals could be turned off by Rabat as fast as they turned them on, but the U.N. is too diplomatically coy to actually say so. So far the new king has not shown signs of new policies. In fact only last week his foreign minister, Mohamed Benaissa, sent to Annan a letter announcing the traditionally hedged Moroccan commitment that, "by agreeing to this referendum, Morocco remains forever attached to the integrity of its territory and sovereignty."
In other words, Morocco will procrastinate until it thinks it can win the referendum on independence, or until the far more likely contingency that the rest of the world will forget about the issue and let Morocco get away with the annexation, regardless of previous Security Council decisions.
In fact, other UN diplomats say that Kofi Annan’s report is actually an attempt to stop Polisario from being completely ignored, since there is heavy French and American pressure to let the Moroccans have their own way.
The question is, what can be done to change Morocco’s attitude? It is true that no one in his right mind would want to meet an angry Jim Baker on a dark night. Despite his demonstrated powers of persuasion, however, in this case he does not have the Clinton administration behind him. Morocco’s long-standing ties to Israel means that it can count on friends inside the Beltway to temper any enforcement that could be considered against it, unless its procrastination just gets too exasperating for all concerned.
The Europeans do not think it is worth sacrificing their principles just so the Gore campaign can look good to the pro-Israel community in the U.S. the Europeans even suspect that it is not the Israelis driving the issue but some American Jewish groups who are using the campaign to pull in donations from their constituencies.
And so while Iraqi children die in their thousands because of sanctions against Saddam Hussain’s weapons programs, Energy Secretary Bill Richardson decides that Israel, unique among nuclear powers who have not signed the disarmament treaty, will have access for its scientists to U.S. nuclear laboratories. There may seem to be a hint of inconsistency here—but who’s looking for trouble with Friends of Israel in a U.S. election year?
-from The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs April 2000
