[News] Morocco Drives a War in Western Sahara for Its Phosphates
Anti-Imperialist News
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Fri Jan 21 11:51:57 EST 2022
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*Morocco Drives a War in Western Sahara for Its Phosphates*
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*By Vijay Prashad*
In November 2020, the Moroccan government sent
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its military to the Guerguerat area, a buffer zone between the territory
claimed by the Kingdom of Morocco and the Sahrawi Arab Democratic
Republic (SADR). The Guerguerat border post is at the very southern edge
of Western Sahara along the road that goes to Mauritania. The presence
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of Moroccan troops “in the Buffer Strip in the Guerguerat area” violated
the 1991 ceasefire agreed upon by the Moroccan monarchy and the
Polisario Front of the Sahrawi. That ceasefire deal was crafted with the
assumption that the United Nations would hold a referendum in Western
Sahara to decide on its fate; no such referendum has been held, and the
region has existed in stasis for three decades now.
In mid-January 2022, the United Nations sent
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its Personal Envoy for Western Sahara Staffan de Mistura to Morocco,
Algeria, and Mauritania to begin
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a new dialogue “toward a constructive resumption of the political
process on Western Sahara.” De Mistura was previously deputed
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to solve the crises of U.S. wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria; none
of his missions have ended well and have mostly been lost causes. The UN
has appointed five
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personal envoys for Western Sahara so far—including Mistura—beginning
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with former U.S. Secretary of State James Baker III, who served from
1997 to 2004. De Mistura, meanwhile, succeeded
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former German President Horst Köhler, who resigned in 2019. Köhler’s
main achievement
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was to bring the four main parties—Morocco, the Polisario Front,
Algeria, and Mauritania—to a first roundtable discussion
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in Geneva in December 2018: this roundtable process resulted in a few
gains, where all participants agreed on “cooperation and regional
integration,” but no further progress seems to have been made to resolve
the issues in the region since then. When the UN initially put forward
De Mistura’s nomination to this post, Morocco had initially
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resisted his appointment, but under pressure from the West, Morocco
finally accepted his appointment in October 2021, with Moroccan Foreign
Minister Nasser Bourita welcoming
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him to Rabat on January 14. De Mistura also met
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the Polisario Front representative to the UN in New York on November 6,
2021, before meeting
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other representatives in Tindouf, Algeria, at Sahrawi refugee camps in
January. There is very little expectation that these meetings will
result in any productive solution in the region.
*Abraham Accords*
In August 2020, the United States government engineered a major
diplomatic feat called the Abraham Accords
<https://go.ind.media/e/546932/the-abraham-accords-/mfsqfy/982304580?h=PCNmF4U-D3fll-JWCvyihA8kmml-EkVMg7jgK0NGBWI>.
The U.S. secured a deal with Morocco and the United Arab Emirates to
agree to a rapprochement with Israel in return for the U.S. making arms
sales to these countries as well as for the United States legitimizing
Morocco’s annexation of Western Sahara. The arms deals were of
considerable amounts—$23 billion worth of weapons
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to the UAE and $1 billion worth of drones
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and munitions to Morocco. For Morocco, the main prize was that the
United States—breaking decades of precedent—decided to back its claim to
the vast territory of Western Sahara. The United States is now the only
Western country to recognize Morocco’s claim to sovereignty over Western
Sahara.
When President Joe Biden took office in January 2021, it was expected
that he might review parts of the Abraham Accords. However, U.S.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken made it clear
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during his meeting with Bourita in November 2021 that the U.S.
government would continue to maintain the position taken by the previous
Trump administration that Morocco has sovereignty over Western Sahara.
The U.S., meanwhile, has continued
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with its arms sales to Morocco but has suspended
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weapons sales to the United Arab Emirates.
*Phosphates*
By the end of November 2021, the government of Morocco announced
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that it had earned $6.45 billion from the export of phosphate from the
kingdom and from the occupied territory of Western Sahara. If you add up
the phosphate reserves in this entire region, it amounts
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to 72 percent of the entire phosphate reserves in the world (the
second-highest percentage
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of these reserves is in China, which has around 6 percent). Phosphate,
along with nitrogen, makes synthetic fertilizer, a key element in modern
food production. While nitrogen is recoverable from the air, phosphates,
found in the soil, are a finite reserve. This gives Morocco a tight grip
over world food production. There is no doubt that the occupation of
Western Sahara is not merely about national pride, but it is largely
about the presence of a vast number of resources—especially
phosphates—that can be found in the territory.
In 1975, a UN delegation that visited Western Sahara noted
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that “eventually the territory will be among the largest exporters of
phosphate in the world.” While Western Sahara’s phosphate reserves are
less than those of Morocco, the Moroccan state-owned firm OCP SA has
been mining the phosphate
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in Western Sahara and manufacturing phosphate fertilizer for great
profit. The most spectacular
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mine in Western Sahara is in Bou Craa, from which 10 percent
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of OCP SA’s profits come; Bou Craa, which is known
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as “the world’s longest conveyor belt system,” carries the phosphate
rock more than 60 miles to the port at El Aaiún. In 2002, the UN’s
Under-Secretary General for Legal Affairs at that time, Hans Corell,
noted
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in a letter to the president of the UN Security Council that “if further
exploration and exploitation activities were to proceed in disregard of
the interests and wishes of the people of Western Sahara, they would be
in violation of the principles of international law applicable to
mineral resource activities in Non-Self-Governing Territories.” An
international campaign to prevent
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the extraction of the “conflict phosphate from Western Sahara by Morocco
has led many firms around the world to stop buying phosphate from OCP
SA. Nutrien, the largest fertilizer manufacturer in the United States
that used Moroccan phosphates, decided
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to stop imports from Morocco in 2018. That same year, the South African
court challenged
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the right of ships carrying phosphate from the region to dock in their
ports, ruling that “the Moroccan shippers of the product had no legal
right to it.”
Only three known companies
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continue to buy conflict phosphate mined in Western Sahara: two from New
Zealand
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(Ballance Agri-Nutrients Limited and Ravensdown) and one from India
(Paradeep Phosphates Limited).
*Human Rights*
After the 1991 ceasefire, the UN set up a Mission for the Referendum in
Western Sahara (MINURSO
<https://go.ind.media/e/546932/2022-01-21/mfsqh5/982304580?h=PCNmF4U-D3fll-JWCvyihA8kmml-EkVMg7jgK0NGBWI>).
This is the only UN peacekeeping force that does not have a mandate to
report on human rights. The UN made this concession to appease the
Kingdom of Morocco. The Moroccan government has tried to intervene
several times when the UN team in Western Sahara attempted to make the
slightest noise about the human rights violations in the region. In
March 2016, the kingdom expelled
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MINURSO staff because the then UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon referred
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to the Moroccan presence in Western Sahara as an “occupation.”
Pressure from the United States is going to ensure that the only
realistic outcome of negotiations is for continued Moroccan control of
Western Sahara. All parties involved in the conflict are readying for
battle. Far from peace, the Abraham Accords are going to accelerate a
return to war in this part of Africa.
/*Vijay Prashad* is an Indian historian, editor and journalist. He is a
writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter
<https://go.ind.media/e/546932/2022-01-21/mfsqhc/982304580?h=PCNmF4U-D3fll-JWCvyihA8kmml-EkVMg7jgK0NGBWI>.
He is the chief editor of LeftWord Books
<https://go.ind.media/e/546932/2022-01-21/mfsqhf/982304580?h=PCNmF4U-D3fll-JWCvyihA8kmml-EkVMg7jgK0NGBWI>
and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research
<https://go.ind.media/e/546932/2022-01-21/mfsqhh/982304580?h=PCNmF4U-D3fll-JWCvyihA8kmml-EkVMg7jgK0NGBWI>.
He is a senior non-resident fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial
Studies
<https://go.ind.media/e/546932/y2hdjcpo/mfsqhk/982304580?h=PCNmF4U-D3fll-JWCvyihA8kmml-EkVMg7jgK0NGBWI>,
Renmin University of China. He has written more than 20 books,
including/ The Darker Nations
<https://go.ind.media/e/546932/1595583424--tag-alternorg08-20/mfsqhm/982304580?h=PCNmF4U-D3fll-JWCvyihA8kmml-EkVMg7jgK0NGBWI>
/and/ The Poorer Nations
<https://go.ind.media/e/546932/1781681589--tag-alternorg08-20/mfsqhp/982304580?h=PCNmF4U-D3fll-JWCvyihA8kmml-EkVMg7jgK0NGBWI>/.
His latest book is/ Washington Bullets
<https://go.ind.media/e/546932/catalog-product-view-id-21820/mfsqhr/982304580?h=PCNmF4U-D3fll-JWCvyihA8kmml-EkVMg7jgK0NGBWI>/,
with an introduction by Evo Morales Ayma./
*_Please join us._
<https://go.ind.media/e/546932/globetrotter-media-donate/mfsqdy/982304580?h=PCNmF4U-D3fll-JWCvyihA8kmml-EkVMg7jgK0NGBWI>*
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