Old and New Colonizers

A year before, Madrid had finally committed to hold a referendum on its colony’s status, years or even decades after most other European powers had divested themselves of their large continental holdings in Africa. Inside Western Sahara, Spain was under pressure from the armed Sahrawi nationalist movement, the Frente Polisario, which advocated for pan-Afro-Arab liberation through socialism, democracy, and nonalignment.

The nationalists who created Polisario in 1973, led by El-Ouali Mustapha Sayed, built upon several decades of struggles against Spanish colonization, often in conjunction with anti-imperialist movements in Morocco, Algeria, and Mauritania. A joint French-Spanish counterinsurgency effort in 1958 brought some calm to Western Sahara until a new liberation movement emerged in the mid-1960s, only for it to be violently suppressed once again by Madrid in 1970.

Inspired by the Algerian and Palestinian struggles, Polisario’s socialist-leaning ideology and efforts to achieve national self-determination through force of arms soon placed it at odds with the reactionary interests of the Moroccan monarchy. Hassan II was ramping up his repression of the Moroccan left in the early 1970s as his regime reeled from repeated coup attempts by elements in the armed forces.

Polisario’s main political rivals when they launched their guerrilla war were neocolonial Sahrawi elites who were being groomed as a comprador class to govern Western Sahara in light of Madrid’s massive investments in phosphate extraction. Many of these imperial collaborators defected to the Moroccan side in 1976. Nearly fifty years later, they continue to perform a similar political function in support of Morocco’s illegal annexation.

Internationally, the United Nations had placed Western Sahara on its official list of non-self-governing territories (colonies, protectorates, etc.) in the 1960s. By the early 1970s, the UN General Assembly had started calling for Western Sahara’s outright independence. To prevent this outcome, the Moroccan monarchy first sought to delay Spain’s referendum by bringing its own territorial claim to Western Sahara to the ICJ.

After Morocco gained independence from France in 1956, the monarchy had asserted the country’s historical claim not just to the Spanish colony of Western Sahara but also to the whole of Mauritania, northern Mali, and a significant slice of western Algeria — all of which were then under French control. Although Morocco’s leaders deemed an invasion of Mauritania too challenging on the eve of its independence in 1960, Hassan II did launch an abortive invasion of weakened yet newly liberated Algeria in the 1963 Sand War.

In the years that followed, the Moroccan monarchy faced an increasing number of domestic and external challenges. A Cold War ally of France and the United States, and a well-known backchannel to Israel, the country’s neo-feudal regime ran contrary to regional trends, particularly in the Arab world. The socialist and republican political currents that directly inspired Polisario were then embodied in the likes of Gamal Abdel Nasser, Hafez al-Assad, Houari Boumédiène, Gaafar Nimeiry, and Muammar Gaddafi.

With global oil prices skyrocketing in response to the 1967 and 1973 Arab-Israeli Wars, Hassan II’s promises of economic development — in a country that was then, as it still is now, highly agrarian — also began to face a harsh new reality of permanently inflated energy prices. With the toppling of the Libyan monarchy in 1969, observers widely assumed that his days in power were numbered. Two coup attempts in the early 1970s were hardly surprising given the regional context at the time.

To survive, Hassan II needed a new national cause to rally the country behind him, one that would reassert the institutional primary of the Moroccan monarchy over all other aspects of the state, especially the mutinous military. A war with Spain would be just the trick, as popular anti-colonial sentiments were still fresh in the minds of many Moroccans.

Thwarting Independence

Having failed to secure a juridical finding in its favor at The Hague, the Moroccan monarchy began to prepare for war with Spain. Those who attended the ICJ hearings on Western Sahara in the summer of 1975 had already discovered that the court was unsympathetic to Morocco’s evidence and arguments.

In what must have been an almost comedic moment, the Moroccan delegation presented a diplomatic exchange allegedly showing foreign recognition of Moroccan sovereignty over the coast of Western Sahara in the event that shipwrecked sailors were taken captive. However, in the actual text of the document, the Moroccan monarch admits that he has no control over those areas and peoples.

Morocco’s case was further undermined by a UN fact-finding mission that same summer. It found little evidence of popular Sahrawi support for annexation by Morocco (or free association with Spain) and instead suggested that Polisario had become “a dominant political force,” based on “mass demonstrations in support of the movement in all parts of the Territory.”

Having failed to secure control of Western Sahara through legal and diplomatic means, the military option was the only one Morocco had left. In the months leading up to October 1975, a Moroccan military buildup commenced along its southern border with Spanish Sahara, and skirmishes soon followed. One did not need spies or satellites to know that Morocco was preparing for war with Spain in late 1975, as it was all over the international media.

Nonetheless, on October 3, 1975, the CIA gave an unambiguous warning to Kissinger, who was then both national security advisor and secretary of state: “King Hassan has decided to invade the Spanish Sahara within the next three weeks.” As the CIA report made clear, Hassan II had lost hope of securing a diplomatic victory through an ICJ endorsement and was now intent on a military solution.

What had also likely influenced the Moroccan monarch’s thinking were actions that Spain had taken over the preceding weeks that indicated a transfer of power to Polisario was already under way. To win respite from guerrilla attacks, the Spanish colonial administration ceded control over hinterland posts and engaged in prisoner exchanges.

According to Polisario’s leader, El-Ouali, it had reached a final status agreement in mid-September with the Spanish foreign minister, Pedro Cortina y Mauri. Under the terms of the agreement, Polisario would guarantee continuity of Spanish interests (e.g., the rich phosphate mines and offshore fisheries) in exchange for independence.

Washington’s Role

When Hassan II announced his intent to send 350,000 Moroccan civilians to “retake” Spanish Sahara, he wrapped this diversionary political stunt in the color of Islam by calling it the Green March. He also warned Spain that any effort to halt the march would result in military retaliation. Whether or not a secret agreement had been struck, Moroccan forces began to penetrate Spanish Sahara by October 31, 1975, and soon engaged with Polisario fighters.

Spain’s decision to cut a secret deal with Morocco and its junior partner in the takeover, Mauritania, was largely conditioned by the situation that the United States created in Morocco’s favor. Following the announcement of the Green March, Spain had requested urgent Security Council intervention given the explicit threat of force by Morocco.

Three years after Morocco’s invasion, we had already learned why the Security Council failed to act from Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who was the US representative to the United Nations in late 1975. Commenting on the near-simultaneous invasions of Western Sahara and East Timor, he infamously wrote in 1978:

China altogether backed Fretilin in Timor, and lost. In Spanish Sahara, Russia just as completely backed Algeria, and its front, known as Polisario, and lost. In both instances the United States wished things to turn out as they did, and worked to bring this about. The Department of State 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.

Morocco’s invasion of Western Sahara was thus successful because the United States prevented the UN Security Council from acting on its most fundamental duty, which is to confront challenges to international peace and security — especially acts of military aggression by one member-state against another. Of all the crimes of the American empire in the twentieth century, Washington’s support for the invasion is one of its most overlooked but also one of its most enduring.

At a critical meeting on November 3, the high point of the crisis between Morocco and Spain, Kissinger presented President Gerald Ford with two options: Washington could either oppose Morocco or offload the issue to the United Nations. Kissinger deftly corralled Ford into choosing the second option by presenting the first as a messy, no-win situation akin to Turkey’s 1974 invasion of Cyprus — the kind of entanglement a post-Vietnam, post-Watergate US president would want to avoid.

Kissinger then positively invoked Indonesia’s controversial 1969 annexation of West Papua (also known as West Irian) through a referendum that was based on a small number of handpicked electors: “The UN could do it like West Irian, where they fuzz the ‘consulting the wishes of the people’, and get out of it.” Kissinger removed any ambiguity about his preferred outcome at a meeting with his deputies two days later: “Just turn it over to the UN with a guarantee it will go to Morocco.”

Outsourcing the issue to the United Nations did not deliver the guarantee Kissinger wanted. UN experts quickly determined that Western Sahara’s self-determination had not been fulfilled, neither by the vote of several Sahrawi elders who defected to Morocco nor by Polisario’s declaration of the Saharan Arab Democratic Republic. Since then, Western Sahara has remained on the official UN list of non-self-governing territories. As Spain remains the de jure administering power, Morocco’s legal status in Western Sahara since 1976 has been that of an occupier.

Empty Promises

The simultaneous arrival of Moroccan and Mauritanian forces in late 1975, as Spain prepared to evacuate its colony before March 1976, precipitated the flight of nearly 40 percent of the indigenous Sahrawi population to refugee camps in Algeria. Today these refugees, numbering nearly 200,000, continue to live in exile, waiting for the UN to organize the referendum on independence that was promised when peacekeepers arrived in 1991.

The creation of the UN Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara (MINURSO) that year brought an end to the low-intensity conflict waged by Moroccan and Polisario since 1975. By the late 1970s, Polisario had nearly succeeded in driving the Moroccan army out. However, an influx of financing, weapons, and military expertise from Saudi Arabia, France, and the United States then helped turn the tide of the war in Morocco’s favor. This was mainly accomplished through the creation of one of the world’s largest military infrastructure projects: the 1,700-mile wall that consolidated the occupation by dividing Western Sahara.

Twenty-five years have passed since the UN halted all progress toward Western Sahara’s long-delayed independence referendum. A similar decolonization referendum went horribly awry in East Timor in 1999. When the Timorese voted for independence, the UN Security Council had to intervene forcefully against Indonesia in the aftermath as its paramilitaries went on the rampage, looting and killing. Morocco, like Indonesia, had no intention of respecting a vote for independence in Western Sahara unless it was forced to do so under Chapter VII of the UN Charter, the very mechanism whereby Washington could have stopped Morocco in 1975.

After three decades of false starts and empty promises, Polisario resumed attacks against Morocco’s positions along the wall in 2020. A few weeks later, Donald Trump recognized Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara in exchange for Rabat’s normalization of relations with Israel through the Abraham Accords.

Committed to defending Israel’s interests, the Biden administration refused to rescind Trump’s proclamation. Emboldened by bipartisan US support for the illegal occupation of Western Sahara, Madrid and Paris soon gave their backing to Rabat’s annexationist plans. Meanwhile, Moroccan–Israeli military cooperation accelerated, even as the genocide in Gaza unfolded.

This October, the Trump administration sought to further consolidate the Morocco–Israel–United Arab Emirates alliance by pushing through a UN Security Council resolution that would have effectively recognized Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara. In what seems like an unbelievable historical irony, this resolution would have been passed on the very day when, fifty years earlier, Morocco’s military had invaded Western Sahara to prevent the country’s independence.

However, opposition from Moscow and Beijing poured cold water over these efforts from the United States and France. The resolution that did pass on October 31 was significantly less ambitious, though it still represents an effort by Washington and Paris to force the Sahrawis to negotiate away their right to independent statehood. Western Sahara and its supporters now find themselves looking to China as the only credible defender of the postwar international order left among the permanent five members of the Security Council.