On July 9, security guards shot a 24-year-old man on the premises of forestry company Forestal Mininco in the city of Carahue in Chile’s Araucanía region in what the Chilean media described at the time as an “armed confrontation.”
Pablo Marchant Gutiérrez, a Chilean anthropology student who had joined the indigenous Mapuche people’s struggle for autonomy and recuperation of ancestral lands, was found dead after what appeared to be an execution.
Marchant’s killing is the latest incident in the conflict between Mapuche communities and Forestal Mininco, which has been accused of human-rights abuses during violent land evictions in Wallmapu. That is the Indigenous name of the Mapuche people’s ancestral home, which encompasses the southern cone of South America that is divided between the modern states of Chile and Argentina. Because Mapuche culture is tied to the land, its medicinal plants, as well as geographical elements such as lakes, rivers and forests, denying the Mapuche people the right to live there is tantamount to genocide, per the United Nations’ definition.
However, between former U.S.-backed dictator Augusto Pinochet’s terror laws being used to criminalize Mapuche elders and activists, the United States and the United Kingdom arming Chile’s security forces, and the failure of international agencies to treat the Mapuche conflict with urgency, the West appears complicit in the genocide of the Mapuche people.
Questioning Authorities
Not satisfied with the official accounts of events, Marchant’s family requested forensic investigations, from which a sinister picture emerged of what had happened on Forestal Mininco’s premises.
Pablo Marchant Gutiérrez with his mother, Myriam Gutiérrez / credit: Myriam Gutiérrez
The investigation found Marchant was shot in the back, contradicting the police’s account that Marchant had threatened officers with a M16 assault rifle. The report stated he was killed “on his knees” with his head inclined towards the floor, and that his injuries were consistent with that of an execution.
Neither the police nor prosecution services informed Myriam Gutiérrez, Marchant’s mother, of her son’s death. Instead, the Mapuche community relayed the news. Afterward, Legal Services of Temuco—another city in the Araucanía region—called Gutiérrez, saying she needed to be present at the autopsy. However, when Gutiérrez arrived, she wasn’t allowed in the facility.
“To this day, five months on, there has been no form of justice against those who have protected my son’s murderers,” Gutiérrez told Toward Freedom. “I must also point out that these cases are never resolved because the state does not recognize these [recuperation] acts as legitimate—instead, they qualify them as ‘terrorist actions.’”
Toward Freedom contacted Forestal Mininco, the Chilean consulate in London, and Chile’s Interior and Security Ministry, but they did not respond as of press time.
Not long after Marchant’s death, President Sebastian Piñera announced on October 12 a state of emergency in response to escalating tension in the southern regions of the Andean country. Over 1,000 troops are deployed in the Araucanía region, armed with drones, tanks and anti-riot weaponry. The central Chilean region is known for its virgin forests.
Less than a month into the military occupation, security forces opened fire at a roadblock, killing one Indigenous man and injuring several others, including a 9-year-old girl.
Despite the frequency and severity of the violence, political persecution and racism Mapuche communities face have failed to prompt an appropriate response from international agencies. Free from international intervention, Chilean security forces have been able to kill, evict and arrest Mapuche people with complete impunity, all with an eye to protect the interests of industries operating out of contested Indigenous land. This comes despite Chile being a signatory to the 1989 Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention of the International Labour Organization (ILO Convention 169) and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Chile is the only Latin American country that does not recognize the existence of Indigenous peoples in its constitution.
“What the state is doing is colonial domination against the Mapuche people via a repressive genocidal political agenda, in turn denying their right to exist as an autonomous Mapuche nation,” Gutiérrez said. “Pablo knew and understood that people were being repressed and that they had been banished from their land in a brutal and repressive manner.”
Subsidizing Corporations
Chile currently holds the largest planted area of Pinus radiata, or Monterey pine trees, in the world. These fast-growing, medium-density softwood trees are known for their versatile uses, ranging from constructing homes, cabinets, boats and furniture to acting as a noise buffer in residential areas.
The Mininco and Arauco forestry companies own over 2 million hectares (4.94 million acres) of forest and supply 400 different products in approximately 80 countries, including wood chips for paper pulp production.
The forestry sector’s success can be attributed to state subsidies and land grabs facilitated during Augusto Pinochet’s time as the U.S.-backed dictator following the 1973 coup. Pinochet’s extractivist policies ensured more than $800 million in Chilean tax money funded the sector. Large swathes of land previously belonging to the Mapuche people, peasant farmers and state-owned agencies, such as CORFO (Chile’s economic development agency), were seized and handed to Pinochet’s inner circle, including Julio Ponce Lerou, his son-in-law.
“Though most political parties recognize that the conflict with Mapuche people is political and not military, they continue to ignore demands for restitution of their lands, autonomy and self-determination,” Mariqueo said.
Lago Conguillio in 2017 in Chile’s Araucanía region, known for its virgin forests / credit: Flickr/Sarah and Iain
Western Complicity
The military occupation of Araucanía would not be possible without the support of the international arms industry. Multiple human-rights NGOs, such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, decrying human-rights abuses that took place during the 2019-20 social unrest dubbed “El Estallido.” Yet, countries such as the United States and the United Kingdom have continued to supply arms to Chile, whose military expenditure is one of the highest in the world, making up around 1.9 per cent of GDP.
In February, the Biden administration’s first foreign arms sale was to Chile. The $85 million package included:
16 SM-2 block IIIA rail-launched missiles,
two MK 89 Mod 0 guidance section adapters,
one target-detection device kit,
Mod 14 naval guns systems, and
associated training and supplies.
The UK also has armed Chile’s repressive military forces. A Freedom of Information request by British newspaper Byline Times found 50 percent of the £164 million ($217 million USD) worth of arms licenses sold to Chile since 2008 had been granted during 2019-20. This included so-called “non-lethal” weapons, such as smoke canisters, tear gas and other riot-control agents. Those tools were turned on more than 500 Chilean people who lost sight in one or both eyes. A similar tactic had been deployed during the 2019-20 Yellow Vests uprisings in France.
Genocide for Profit
None of the Chilean government administrations since the 1989 transition to democracy have challenged the might of forestry companies in Araucanía.
Whether left-leaning like Michelle Bachelet or extreme-right like Sebastian Piñera, the conflict rages on to the detriment of Indigenous people. It was Bachelet who commissioned the FBI to investigate the existence among Mapuche activists of terror cells linked to guerrilla groups like the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and Basque Fatherland and Liberty (ETA). And it was Bachelet who conceived special unit Comando Jungla, a special military force trained in the Colombian jungle to combat alleged terrorism and narcotics operations in Chile.
“The militarization of the region continues, giving carte blanche to commit all kinds of atrocities against those communities peacefully struggling for the right to live on ancestral land,” Mariqueo said.
Meanwhile, Gutiérrez said her son only sought to help defend Wallmapu.
“He wanted to be among, collaborate and live like a Mapuche.”
Carole Concha Bell is an Anglo-Chilean writer and Ph.D. student at King’s College London.
Editor’s Note: This podcast was originally published by MintPress News.
The MintPress podcast “The Watchdog,” hosted by British-Iraqi hip hop artist Lowkey, closely examines organizations about which it is in the public interest to know – including intelligence, lobby, and special interest groups influencing policies that infringe on free speech and target dissent. The Watchdog goes against the grain by casting a light on stories largely ignored by the mainstream, corporate media.
On May 24, an 18-year-old gunman fatally shot 22 people at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. Police reportedly refused to confront the killer, locked him in a room full of children, physically prevented parents from getting involved, and even allegedly rescued their own children first.
The massacre has once again brought the United States’ unique obsession with firearms to the fore, with renewed calls to ban assault rifles. But even among gun-control advocates, few realize the connections between the Second Amendment and white supremacy.
Today’s guest is Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. Originally from Oklahoma, Dunbar-Ortiz is a writer, historian and activist, possibly best known for her 2014 classic book, “An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States.” She argues that the context behind the Second Amendment is that the newly-independent United States needed “well-regulated militias” of white men to “kill Indians and take their land,” or to form slave patrols that would hunt down Black people fleeing their captivity. It was out of these slave patrols that the first police departments were formed.
Ultimately, she argues, the need for such armed militias arose from the fact that the white colonists were on recently stolen land, surrounded by hostile groups who were trying to get their land back. As she notes, it was a crime to give or sell a gun to a Native American.
An activist for over 50 years, Dunbar-Ortiz has argued that for any progress to be made, Americans must stop worshiping a 234-year-old document written by slaveholders. Today with Lowkey, she also discussed how it was that the National Rifle Association was taken over by reactionary political actors and how it came to be that the United States is a country with 4% of the world’s population but half of the world’s guns.
“The Constitution is so embedded in white supremacy that there is no way to amend it to change that. It is everywhere…This is so obvious if you just face what U.S. history is and not leave so much out,” she told Lowkey.
A revolutionary and a feminist, Dunbar-Ortiz’s life’s work has taken her across the world, including to Mexico, Cuba and Nicaragua, where she documented the U.S.-sponsored Contra War against indigenous groups. She is Professor Emerita of Ethnic Studies at California State University, East Bay. Among her other notable books include, “Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment”; “The Great Sioux Nation: Sitting in Judgment on America”; and “Not ‘a Nation of Immigrants’: Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, and a History of Erasure and Exclusion.”
Lowkey is a British-Iraqi hip-hop artist, academic and political campaigner. As a musician, he has collaborated with the Arctic Monkeys, Wretch 32, Immortal Technique and Akala. He is a patron of Stop The War Coalition, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, the Racial Justice Network and The Peace and Justice Project, founded by Jeremy Corbyn. He has spoken and performed on platforms from the Oxford Union to the Royal Albert Hall and Glastonbury. His latest album, Soundtrack To The Struggle 2, featured Noam Chomsky and Frankie Boyle and has been streamed millions of times.
Israeli artillery firing into Gaza on May 18 / credit: IDF Spokesperson’s Unit
Editor’s Note: This analysis was produced by Globetrotter.
On January 27, 2022, the Hebrew-language news site Walla published part of the text from a telegram sent by Amir Weissbrod—who is part of the Israeli Foreign Ministry—to Israeli embassies around the world. The telegram warned the Israeli diplomats that in the upcoming 49th regular session of the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC), which is expected to begin on February 28, a report will be tabled regarding Israel’s 2021 bombing of Gaza. This report will apparently use the word “apartheid” to refer to Israel’s occupation of the Palestinians, according to the telegram.
Weissbrod relayed Tel Aviv’s instructions regarding the report prepared by a UNHRC-appointed committee to the Israeli diplomats through this telegram: “The main goal [for Israel] is to delegitimize the committee, its members and products” and “To prevent or delay further decisions.”
After a four year investigation, on February 1, 2022, Amnesty International released a 280-page report with a sharp headline, “Israel’s Apartheid Against Palestinians.” Amnesty “concluded that Israel has perpetrated the international wrong of apartheid, as a human rights violation and a violation of public international law wherever it imposes this system. It has assessed that almost all of Israel’s civilian administration and military authorities, as well as governmental and quasigovernmental institutions, are involved in the enforcement of the system of apartheid against Palestinians across Israel and the OPT [Occupied Palestinian Territory] and against Palestinian refugees and their descendants outside the territory.” Amnesty further said that these acts “amount to the crime against humanity of apartheid under both the Apartheid Convention and the Rome Statute.” Israel’s Foreign Minister Yair Lapid retaliated by accusing Amnesty of quoting “lies shared by terrorist organizations.” As if on cue, Israel’s government accused Amnesty of anti-Semitism. The Amnesty report will provide key material for the UNHRC investigation.
One of the immediate issues that will be the focus of attention for the UNHRC session is Israel’s Operation Guardian of the Walls against the Palestinians in Gaza in May 2021. According to a July 2021 report by Human Rights Watch (HRW), which looked at three Israeli strikes that were part of the operation “that killed 62 Palestinians,” there were “no evident military targets in the vicinity.” In its report, HRW used the term “war crimes” to describe attacks by “Israeli forces and Palestinian armed groups.” When the firing stopped after 11 days, the UNHRC passed a resolution in late May 2021 to establish an “ongoing independent, international commission of inquiry” to investigate various crimes in the OPT, including East Jerusalem, and in Israel. Navi Pillay, the former UN high commissioner for human rights and a former South African judge, was appointed to chair the three-person commission, which also included Miloon Kothari, an Indian architect; and Chris Sidoti, an Australian human rights lawyer. The commission is expected to present its first report to the UNHRC in June.
The commission chaired by Pillay is the ninth commission established by the UNHRC to investigate Israeli actions against the Palestinians. It has a very broad mandate that includes to study violations of international humanitarian law, according to the “four Geneva Conventions of 1949,” which both Israel and Palestine are party to, and to continue to investigate these crimes into the future. It is widely expected that Pillay’s report will use the word “apartheid” to define Israeli policy in the OPT. This would not be the first time that a United Nations report has used this term to define Israeli actions against the Palestinians. In 2017, the UN Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA) released a report prepared by Richard Falk, “a former United Nations special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967,” and Virginia Tilley, “a researcher and professor of political science at Southern Illinois University.” The report defined Israeli policy against the Palestinians as “apartheid” as understood under international law (in his 2014 report, Falk had already used the term “apartheid”). The release of that 2017 report led to the resignation of ESCWA head Rima Khalaf, a distinguished Jordanian diplomat, after she faced “pressure from the [UN] secretary-general to withdraw the report.”
Hasbara 2.0
In 2006, the Israeli government set up a Ministry of Strategic Affairs to essentially run two campaigns, one against Iran and the other against the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. This hasbara (explaining or, more specifically, propaganda) ministry operated an information war that sought to delegitimize BDS activists and to paint anyone who supported the movement as an anti-Semite. Largely due to criticisms of its heavy-handedness, the Ministry of Strategic Affairs was shut down in July 2021 and some of its functions were shifted to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Amir Weissbrod’s telegram from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs is essentially Hasbara 2.0.
On January 23, 2022, the Israeli government set up a new project—Concert—inside the Foreign Ministry. This well-funded project will carry forward the mission of Solomon’s Sling—“a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC) but controlled by government representatives,”—to burnish Israel’s image around the world, particularly in the West. Concert will be the means through which the Israeli government plans to transfer millions of dollars to nongovernment organizations and media houses to ensure that the reporting about Israel is positive. “Delegitimization” of any critics of Israel is part of the agenda this project aims to achieve.
The telegram sent by Weissbrod is part and parcel of Hasbara 2.0. Weissbrod is an experienced hand, having served Israel at the United Nations in New York and as an ambassador in Jordan, besides working in various ministries in Tel Aviv. In 2011, he told Haaretz that the diplomats from most countries understand Israel’s position relating to the “Palestinian Authority” “behind closed doors” but they “are not willing to state publicly what they readily say in a private meeting with Israeli representatives, which is often infuriating.” What such duplicity reveals is that these foreign representatives, who agree with Israel “behind closed doors,” recognize that public opinion in their countries is against Israeli policy, but these representatives know that they must not annoy the Israelis or the U.S. diplomats, who would otherwise make life difficult for their countries. (A senior Indian diplomat told me plainly that India normalized relations with Israel in 1992 because the United States told New Delhi that the “road to Washington had to go through Tel Aviv.”)
Israel recognizes that few of the countries in the UNHRC will vote against the report that is expected to brand it as an “apartheid state.” It will try to do two things to prevent the report from coming out: delegitimize the commissioners, notably Pillay, and ask the United States to use its membership on the UNHRC to delay the release of the report.
War Crimes
In March 2021, Fatou Bensouda, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), confirmed that her office had opened an investigation relating to “Rome Statute crimes” by Israel against the Palestinians. There are effectively four Rome Statute crimes: crime of genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and the crime of aggression. Each of these crimes is horrendous.
What Israel fears is that a negative report in the UNHRC might provide evidence for the ICC investigation. On January 3, 2022, Israel’s Foreign Minister Yair Lapid told Israeli journalists that his government fears that this year a set of international institutions will try to portray Israel as an “apartheid state.” These institutions include the UNHRC, the ICC, the International Court of Justice, and the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.
In the press conference, Lapid called the characterization of Israel as an apartheid state “a despicable lie.” Two years ago, in June 2020, however, one of Israel’s most respected human rights organizations—Yesh Din—published a report with a startling conclusion: “It is a difficult statement to make, but the conclusion of this opinion is that the crime against humanity of apartheid is being committed in the West Bank. The perpetrators are Israelis, and the victims are Palestinians.” Such statements are anathema to Lapid and Weissbrod, but—according to Israeli human rights groups (including B’Tselem) and Palestinian human rights groups (including Al-Haq and Addameer) as well as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch—are a reflection of the facts witnessed on the ground, and no amount of Hasbara 2.0 can erase these facts.
Editor’s Note: The following was originally published in Peoples Dispatch.
Amid the ongoing war for the liberation of Western Sahara from Morocco, which is illegally occupying 80% of its territory, the UN Security Council (UNSC) is reportedly scheduled to discuss the conflict for the second time this month on Monday, October 10. Two more sessions are scheduled for October 17 and 27.
The “Council is expected to renew the mandate of the UN Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara (MINURSO), which expires on 31 October,” states the UNSC’s monthly forecast for October.
Known officially as the Sahrawi Democratic Republic (SADR), Western Sahara—a founding and full member-state of the African Union (AU)—is Africa’s last colony. It is listed by the UN among the last countries awaiting complete decolonization.
Its former colonizer, Spain, ceded the country to Morocco at the persuasion of the Unite in 1976, despite the fact that the International Court of Justice (ICJ) had dismissed Morocco’s territorial claims. The position supporting the Sahrawi peoples’ right to self-determination has since been upheld by the UN, the AU, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), and the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights (AfCHPR).
MINURSO was established by the UNSC in April 1991 to facilitate the realization of this right by organizing a referendum. In August that year, a ceasefire was secured between the Polisario Front (PF), recognized by the UN as the international representative of the people of Sahrawi, and Morocco.
However, with the backing of the United States and France, Morocco has been able to subvert the organization of this referendum till date. On November 13, 2020, the ceasefire fell apart after 29 years. That day, Moroccan troops crossed the occupied territory into the UN-patrolled buffer zone in the southeastern town of Guerguerat to remove unarmed Sahrawi demonstrators blockading an illegal road that Morocco had built through the territory to Mauritania
“Morocco’s armed incursion was a flagrant violation of the terms of the ceasefire that was declared under UN auspices in 1991,” Kamal Fadel, SADR’s representative to Australia and the Pacific, told Peoples Dispatch. “The Sahrawi army had to react in self-defense and to protect the Sahrawi civilians that were attacked by the Moroccan army.”
Hugh Lovatt and Jacob Mundy, in their policy brief to the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) published in May 2021, observed that “Self-determination for the Sahrawi people appears more remote than when MINURSO was first launched in 1991.” ” With its mandate renewed well over 40 times, the UN “has little to show” for three decades of MINURSO, they said.
“With no power and no support from the UNSC,” MINURSO became “hostage to the Moroccan authorities,” unable even “to report on the human rights situation in the territory, unlike any other UN peace-keeping mission,” Fadel noted.
“We wasted 30 years waiting for MINURSO to deliver the promised referendum. MINURSO’s failure seriously damages the UN’s credibility and encourages authoritarian regimes to defy the international community,” he argued.
While reiterating that “we still believe in a peaceful, just and durable solution under the auspices of the UN,” Fadel maintained that “the UN has to work hard to repair its badly damaged reputation in Western Sahara.”
The position of the UN Secretary General’s former Personal Envoy for Western Sahara was left vacant for more than two years after the resignation of Horst Köhler in May 2019. It was only in October 2021 that Staffan de Mistura was appointed to the post. Mistura, who will be briefing the UNSC member states in the sessions scheduled this month to discuss Western Sahara, is yet to pay a visit to the territory in question. His plan to visit Western Sahara earlier this year was canceled without any reasons stated.
“We hope Mr. Mistura will be able to visit the occupied areas of Western Sahara soon and meet with the Saharawi people freely. It is odd that he has not yet set foot in the territory he is supposed to deal with,” remarked Fadel. Mistura has already met with Foreign Ministers of Morocco and Spain, European officials, and U.S. State Secretary Antony Blinken.
U.S. and European Powers Facilitated Moroccan Occupation of Western Sahara
Western Sahara was colonized by Spain in the early 1880s. Faced with an armed rebellion by the Polisario Front (PF) from 1973, the Spanish government of fascist dictator Francisco Franco agreed in 1974 to hold a referendum. It was an obligation on Spain to fulfill the Sahrawi right to self-determination, in line with the UN’s 1960 Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries.
The neighboring former French colonies of Morocco and Mauritania, eyeing Sahrawi’s mineral wealth and a vast coastline, had already laid claim over the territory since their independence. With about $20 million-worth of weapons supplied by the United States, Morocco began preparation for an armed invasion. Informing the then Spanish Foreign Minister Pedro Cortina about this impending attack in a meeting on October 4, 1975, U.S. State Secretary Henry Kissinger had nudged him to negotiate an agreement with Morocco.
“We are ready to do so.. However, it is important to maintain the form of a referendum on self-determination… Self-determination does not mean independence, although that is one of the options included to give it credibility, but what the people of the area will be called on to do is to show their preference either for Morocco or for Mauritania,” Cortina had responded.
“The problem is the people won’t know what Morocco is, or what Mauritania is,” said Kissinger, with his characteristic cynicism. Cortina corrected him, saying, “Unfortunately, they have learned well from experience what those countries are and they know what all the possibilities are.”
In a subsequent meeting on October 9, Cortina confronted Kissinger about U.S. support for an imminent Moroccan invasion of Sahrawi, then known as Spanish Sahara. He was told that if Spain failed to reach an agreement with Morocco, “it’s not an American concern.” In effect, Kissinger had told Cortina that if Moroccan forces invaded Spanish Sahara using American weapons, the United States would not intervene to stop it.
“We have no particular view about the future of the Spanish Sahara,” Kissinger elaborated on the U.S. position. “I told you privately that… the future of Spanish Sahara doesn’t seem particularly great. I feel the same way about Guinea-Bissau, or Upper Volta. The world can survive without a Spanish Sahara; it won’t be among the countries making a great contribution. There was a period in my life when I didn’t know where the Spanish Sahara was, and I was as happy as I am today.”
“Before phosphates were discovered,” Cortina exclaimed. He was referring to the large deposits found in the territory. Phosphates are the main mineral needed to make fertilizers, of which Morocco went on to become one of the world’s largest producers.
On securing guarantees on access to phosphate and fishing rights, the Spanish government – which had by then also realized that it would not be able to install a puppet Sahrawi elite under Spanish control in power after independence – signed the Madrid Accords. With this treaty, signed on November 14, 1975, only days before the death of Franco who had already slipped into coma, Spain ceded its colony to Morocco and Mauritania.
‘No Tie of Territorial Sovereignty’: ICJ
The UN does not recognize this treaty, which had disregarded the advisory opinion given by the International Court of Justice (ICJ). The advisory opinion was given on the request of the UN General Assembly only a month before, on October 16, 1975. The ICJ, which had also been approached by Morocco, stated that “the materials and information presented.. do not establish any tie of territorial sovereignty between the territory of Western Sahara and the Kingdom of Morocco or the Mauritanian entity.”
However, the United States and its Western allies calculated that an independent Western Sahara under the rule of PF, supported by Algeria which was perceived as inclined toward the Soviet Union, would be against their Cold War interests. And so, the aspirations of the Sahrawi people to realize their internationally recognized right to self-determination, which was pitied as ‘unfortunate’ by the Spanish foreign minister at the time, was trampled over for imperial interests.
By the start of 1976, Moroccan forces occupied the western coastal region of Sahrawi, while Mauritanian forces took over the eastern interior region, forcing 40% of the Sahrawi population to flee to Algeria, where they continue to reside in refugee camps in the border town of Tindouf.
Guerrillas of the PF fought back, quickly regaining the eastern territory from Mauritania, which made peace with SADR and withdrew all its claims by 1979. However, “[b]acked by France and the United States, and financed by Saudi Arabia, Morocco’s armed forces eventually countered Polisario by building a heavily mined and patrolled 2,700-kilometer berm,” Lovatt and Mundy recount in their policy brief to ECFR.
Constructed with the help of U.S. companies Northrop and Westinghouse, the berm is the second longest wall in the world, reinforced with the world’s longest minefield consisting of about seven million landmines. It is among the largest military infrastructures on earth.
Although the Moroccan forces managed to bring about a stalemate by the 1980s with the completion of the construction of the berm, PF’s forces continued to antagonize their positions along the wall. By the time the ceasefire was agreed upon in 1991 following the establishment of MINURSO with a mandate to conduct a referendum, over a thousand enforced disappearances had been reported from the territory under Moroccan occupation. Yet, the protests were unrelenting.
In the meantime, SADR’s cause was gaining increasing support. In 1980, the UN General Assembly (UNGA) recognized the PF as the international representative of Western Sahara. In 1984, after SADR was welcomed as a member of the Organization of African Unity (OAU), the precursor to the African Union (AU), Morocco quit the organization in protest.
Three years later, Morocco applied for membership of the European Communities, which later evolved into the European Union (EU). However, not considered a European country, Morocco’s application was turned down. It was only in 2017 that Morocco joined the AU, to which it was admitted without recognition of any territorial rights over SADR, which is a founding and full member-state of the AU.
In this context of the increasing isolation it faced in the 1990s over its occupation of SADR – except for the backing of the United States, France and Spain – Morocco agreed to hold a referendum, and eventually signed the Houston Agreement with the PF in 1997. This remains till date the only agreement signed between the two. Voter lists were then prepared by MINURSO, and SADR seemed to be on the verge of holding the long-due referendum to realize its decolonization in accordance with the UN Declaration of 1960.
However, more concerned about the stability of the Moroccan monarchy—whose throne had passed from King Hassan II after his death in 1999 to his son Mohammed VI—the United States and France nudged the new King to renege on the Houston agreement, Lovatt and Mundy recount.
The United States’ facade of neutrality on the Sahrawi issue and support for the UN Declaration on decolonization—even while antagonizing the Sahrawi liberation struggle all these decades—was officially removed on December 10, 2020.
The White House, under Donald Trump’s presidency, announced that day that “the United States recognizes Moroccan sovereignty over the entire Western Sahara territory.” Arguing that “an independent Sahrawi State is not a realistic option for resolving the conflict” the United States declared that autonomy under Moroccan sovereignty is “the only basis for a just and lasting solution to the dispute.”
EU and UK Are Invested in Morocco’s Occupation of Western Sahara
This decision of Spain was quickly welcomed by the EU. Its Foreign Policy Chief Josep Borrell’s spokesperson remarked that stronger bilateral relations between any of its member-states and Morocco “can only be beneficial for the implementation of the Euro-Moroccan partnership.”
94% of the fisheries caught by the European fleets from 2014-18 under this “partnership” with Morocco was from Sahrawi waters. When the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) ruled in 2018 that the fisheries agreement with Morocco cannot extend to Sahrawi waters over which Morocco had no sovereignty, the EU simply renegotiated the agreement specifying the inclusion of Sahrawi territory.
A total of 124,000 tonnes of fishery, worth EUR 447 million, was extracted by Europe from Sahrawi waters in 2019, and another 140,500 tonnes, valued EUR 412 million, in 2020. Ruling on Polisario’s challenge to this continuation of European fishing under a new agreement, the General Court of the European Union annulled the same in September 2021.
The European Commission appealed this decision of the court in December 2021. In March 2022, the European Commissioner for the Environment, Oceans, and Fisheries, Virginijus Sinkervicius reiterated in a response to a question in the EU parliament that “the Commission confirms its commitment to the EU-Morocco Fisheries Partnership Agreement.”
Fadel said that the “EU fishing fleets are still finding ways to continue the illegal fishing in the Sahrawi waters with the complicity of the occupying power.”
The United Kingdom High Court of Justice (UKHCJ) had also upheld CJEU’s reasoning in 2019 while ruling in favor of the Western Sahara Campaign UK (WSCUK). The court ruled that the WSCUK “has been completely successful in its litigation” that the preferential treatment given by UK’s Revenue and Customs Service to goods coming from Western Sahara under the EU’s agreement with Morocco went against the international law. The court also concluded the same about the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs’ granting quotas to British vessels fishing in Sahrawi waters.
On October 5, 2022, the High Court held the first hearing of the WSCUK’s case against the Department for International Trade and the Treasury over the UK-Morocco Association Agreement (UKMAA), which was signed in October 2019 post-Brexit.
Three of the five permanent seats with veto power in the UNSC are held by the United States, UK and France, all of which have worked against the Sahrawi liberation struggle. Under the watch of the UNSC, “self-determination and decolonization were replaced with a peace process that has given Morocco veto power over how the Sahrawi people fulfill their internationally recognized rights,” observed Lovatt and Mundy.
“We can only ask the UNSC to stop its pretense about human rights and democracy; to stop its hypocrisy,” Hamza Lakhal, a dissident Arabic poet from Laayoune, the largest city in occupied territory, told Peoples Dispatch. “They will move NATO for Ukraine because they hate Russia, but occupation of Western Sahara against all international laws and resolutions is okay because the occupying power here is a friend.”
‘A Collective Shame’
Morocco’s ‘friendship’ with the West has not necessarily won support for its occupation from fellow African countries. Its attempt to get Kenya’s new President William Ruto to withdraw the country’s decade-long support to the Sahrawi cause and endorse Moroccan claims of sovereignty over the occupied territory back-fired last month, embarrassing both Ruto and Morocco’s foreign ministry.
In a judgment on the same day, the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights reiterated that “both the UN and the AU recognize the situation of SADR as one of occupation and consider its territory as one of those territories whose decolonization process is not yet fully complete.”
Stating that “although Morocco has always laid claim on the territory it occupies, its assertion has never been accepted by the international community,” the court reiterated the ICJ’s 1975 advisory opinion.
Describing Sahrawis’ right to self determination as “inalienable, non-negotiable, and not subject to statutory limitations,” Algeria’s Foreign Minister Ramtane Lamamra, in his address to UNGA on September 27, called on the UN “to assume their legal responsibilities towards the Sahrawi people.”
The UN-promised “organization of a free and fair referendum in order to enable these courageous people… to decide on their political future cannot forever be taken hostage by the intransigence of an occupying state, which has failed several times with regards to its international obligations,” he said.
Namibian President Hage Geingob said in his address to the UNGA that the “lack of progress in implementing UN resolutions to resolve the question of Western Sahara should be something we must all have a collective shame for.”
