Morocco: Awakening Protests in Morocco And Western Sahara

Konstantina Isidoros

17 March 2011

analysis

Since the current wave of Arab revolutions first ignited in Western Sahara in November 2010, February and March have seen a new upsurge in protests across Morocco and its illegal Occupied Territory of Western Sahara, writes Konstantina Isidoros.

As the extraordinary events sweeping the Arab world bring down republic government figureheads, a new question is whether these social reset buttons will have the tenacity to tackle Arab monarchies.

For international analysts closely observing Morocco’s awakening uprisings, the absolute monarchy’s financially draining, vice-like grip on the Western Sahara might prove to be its Achilles heel. Unlike its fellow Gulf monarchs or the respected North African power of Algeria, Morocco has no oil wealth to lavishly soothe grievances.

The former French president Charles de Gaulle once described Morocco as a country whose revolution was still to come. The escalating discord and protests may yet see Morocco’s own population giving voice to what the full detrimental magnitude of the monarchy’s colossal expenditure in its 35-year war and occupation of the Western Sahara means for their desperate socio-economic woes.

Meanwhile, cities across the occupied Western Sahara such as El Aaiun, Boujdour and Dakhla have seen continuous non-violent protest rallies by the indigenous Western Saharans and the now systematic pattern of violent counter-attacks by Moroccan military forces.

MOROCCO’S ACHILLES HEEL

The Western Sahara conflict is in all actuality a hot geopolitical potato, with potent economic and political security-stability implications as the superpower dynamics between US and France engage in fierce rivalry over coveted natural resources, strategic supremacy and regional economic alliances.

At the ground level, Morocco’s invasion and 35-year occupation of the Western Sahara threatens the fundamental tenets of our Western modern political system, which espouses the inviolable sanctity of a nation-state’s own sovereignty, the basic rights of human beings and regional socio-economic stability.

As Zunes and Mundy (2010) emphasise, ‘The on-going Moroccan occupation of Western Sahara is one of the most egregious … affronts to the international system in existence today… The [United Nations] Security Council has turned a blind eye to Morocco’s blatant contravention of the UN Charter (1945).’ Morocco has not only flouted the International Court of Justice’s original legal opinion in 1975 – and thereafter over 100 United Nations Resolutions – but its Israeli-like policy of moving settlers into the Western Sahara and thereby changing the demographics to three Moroccans for one Sahrawi constitutes a violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention prohibition of moving civilians into a militarily occupied territory. So too has its exploitation and plunder of Western Sahara’s natural resources brought it disgrace.

Yet although much attention goes to Morocco’s international legal contraventions, it is ultimately the US and France who are violating the very legal and moral principles that they so publicly avow. For over 35 years, the US and France have been complicit in financing and morally permitting Morocco’s aggressive territorial expansion, as well as tactically blocking the conflict’s solutions at the UN Security Council. Without this US-French support, Morocco would never have been able to get away with, let alone sustain, such blatant violations of international law.

Western Sahara is not just the ‘last colony of Africa’, it is a country that has undergone uncompleted decolonisation and then been re-colonised – a subtle new order of modern economic colonisation by Western powers, primarily US and France vying for regional hegemony and economic self-interest. Playing out like re-coloured footage from the colonial past, Algeria fiercely defends its independence from France’s modern economic courting, while Morocco appears, as ever, eager to be the beloved child of France. If Algeria, the slumbering lion of North Africa, were to summon the strength for a mighty roar in warning, would the US and France take note? If Algeria harnessed its regionally respected courage and power to take skilful control of France’s unrequited desire of its beloved jewel in North Africa, would France drop Morocco like a hot protectorate brick again?

THE CONFLICT’S SOCIO-ECONOMIC IMPACTS ON MOROCCO

Morocco’s war and occupation of Western Sahara has done nothing for the country or its people other than drain vast amounts of wealth from ordinary Moroccan people. Will Morocco’s population now find the courage to voice dissent on the impacts on their own socio-economic woes from the relentless economic burden of their regime’s colossal expenditures on Western Sahara? How did they end up so cheated and what are the costs of war?

Morocco’s national-ideological obsession for the Western Sahara began during King Hassan II’s reign when the monarchy faced a volatile political landscape. The concept of a ‘Greater Morocco’ (originally including Mauritania and parts of Algeria and Mali) was formed by nationalist elites threatening the monarchy’s survival. Adopting this powerful idea enabled Hassan II to reassert royal legitimacy by portraying it as a national emergency to successfully distract public attention and political dissenters away from domestic problems. To this day, the illegal occupation of Western Sahara remains a central orthodoxy in Moroccan politics, with the monarchy’s legitimacy said to still be dependent upon it.

Morocco’s invasion and war for Western Sahara between 1975 and 1991 corroded the existing domestic economic-political deterioration and social inequities. Since the 1991 ceasefire, the costs of occupation have continued to undermine Morocco’s socio-economic potential. Cited as a weak state since independence in 1956, the regime has been heavily dependent on income to sustain the hierarchical clientelist authoritarian ‘Makhzen’ which governs the country under the absolute control of its ‘Alawi monarchy.

Although the occupation of Western Sahara brought opportunities to plunder natural resources such as phosphate mining and Atlantic fishing, Morocco’s colossal expenditures to prop up its war and occupation brings a bigger and economically devastating picture into focus.

Its biannual military expenditure rose rapidly from $270 million in 1972 to $367 million (1974), $755 million (1976) and $770 million in 1978 (Stork and Paul 1983 p. 6). By the mid-1980s, the average cost of war and occupation was estimated at $1.5 million per day (Africa Report, May-June 1986). In 1990, the estimated annual military expenditure – including infrastructure investment – reached $430 million (Damis 1990). Damis’s study in 2000 using Moroccan-published data estimated the cost of war at $1.17 million a day between 1976-86. While this figure accounts for only 3 per cent of government spending and 9 per cent of GDP, Morocco received lavish financial war grants and arms sales from the US, France and Saudi Arabia, such as, for example, $1 billion a year between 1979-81.

Despite this extensive foreign financial support, the statistics show that it has actually been phenomenally expensive for Morocco, and financially devastating even with the foreign war grants. The sheer focus of the monarchy’s obsession to sustain its war effectively drained what should have been full attention on socio-economic development for the Moroccan population itself.

Seddon’s 1989 analyses calculated Morocco’s cost of war as much higher, even with foreign war grants: for example, in 1979, the war cost between $2 million and $5 million a day, and that Moroccan defence spending was ‘no less than 40 per cent of the … national budget’. Tessler calculated Morocco’s total defence spending had risen from 13 per cent in 1975 to 23 per cent by 1977 (1985). Although in 1991 Saudi Arabia wrote off Morocco’s debt for Moroccan participation in the first US-led war against Iraq (Economist Intelligence Unit 2003), Zoubir has shown how Morocco had to resort to additional domestic ‘national solidarity taxes’ (1990).

Even after the 1991 ceasefire, Morocco’s illegal occupation and military defence costs remained an expensive redirection of funds that could otherwise have benefitted the Moroccan population itself. US Department of State figures show that between 1975-99, Morocco’s daily military expenditure averaged $4.1 million per day. And the costs were even higher due to arms purchases – Morocco bought $529 million in arms every year between 1975-91, dropping to $145 million each year between 1992-99.

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