The Saharawi Arab Democratic Republic’s quest for self-determination received endorsement from President Thabo Mbeki on Wednesday when he accepted the credentials of its ambassador, Bahia Sadafa, in Pretoria.
”The Saharawi people must enjoy the same rights as the people of Morocco and South Africa and the whole of Africa enjoy,” he said.
South Africa formally recognised the Saharawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR), which has been under Moroccan rule since 1975, in September this year — a day before the Pan African Parliament sitting — sparking Rabat to recall its diplomat from Pretoria. It ruled out for ever Moroccan attempts to get the SADR expelled from the African Union as a condition for its return to the body.
A Moroccan delegation that visited African countries after the South African diplomatic move got short shrift and was reduced to asking Zimbabwe to mediate in the crisis caused by its rejection of the United Nations peace plan. This calls for a referendum in the occupied territory using a voters’ roll negotiated by both sides in Africa’s last colonial conflict.
But next year Morocco will celebrate the 30th anniversary of its invasion of the Western Sahara, defiant and intransigent as the day the late King Hassan II led the so-called green march into the territory abandoned by Spain. With French support, the new monarch, King Mohammed VI, continues to thumb his nose at the international community.
Dris Basri, who as interior minister was the hard man for Hassan II, recently reminded his compatriots that the Western Sahara is not Moroccan. He was sacked by Mohammed VI as the precursor to a programme of reform that never happened.
Recently the multinational oil company Total stopped exploration in Saharawi following a United Nations ruling that the Moroccan-issued licenses for such operations were illegal. Norwegian companies followed suit after unambiguous warnings from Oslo. This leaves American Kerr McGee as the only remaining offender.
France was hoping, if not for tangible support from the Spanish socialist government of José Luis Zapatero, then at least for an acceptance that Paris should drive the Western Sahara process from a European perspective. But Zapatero is maintaining that Spain is the closest European country to the conflict — both historically and physically — and that it should either steer the process or, at the very least, have a significant voice in doing so.
European solidarity movements met in Zaragosa, northern Spain, last month to provide moral and political support for the 200 000 Saharawis who have lived in refugee camps in southern Algeria since 1975.
Saharawi President Mohamed Abdelaziz appealed for the next such gathering to take place in the liberated zone of his country, from which the occupiers have retreated to refuge behind a 1 200km-long sand wall.