Fifty years ago, Morocco threatened to start a war with Spain in order to seize Madrid’s colony in Western Sahara. Hassan II, Morocco’s embattled monarch, rolled out this exercise in brinkmanship on October 16, 1975, just hours after the International Court of Justice (ICJ) issued a landmark opinion calling for the territory’s independence.
While Morocco’s stated aim was to “recover” Western Sahara, the ICJ indicated that the territory had never belonged to Morocco in the first place, even according to the tortured, self-serving definitions of sovereignty that Moroccan jurists presented in the summer of 1975. Indeed, the court made a notable determination about the actual sovereign power in Western Sahara before the Berlin Conference of 1885 that carved up Africa between the states of Europe.
According to the ICJ, Western Sahara had not been terra nullius — a no-man’s land and thus a zone of free occupation — when Spanish colonization began in 1884. The people of Western Sahara, now commonly referred to as the Sahrawis, had already been sovereign. Brushing aside all historical claims to the territory, the judges in The Hague unequivocally called for Western Sahara’s self-determination.
The prospect of independence for Western Sahara was exactly what Hassan’s threat of war aimed to prevent. He succeeded in large part because the Ford administration, under Henry Kissinger’s influence, sabotaged any effective response by the UN Security Council.
Commemorations will likely focus exclusively on the role played by the so-called Green March in Morocco’s illegal conquest of Western Sahara. This involved 350,000 Moroccan civilians who volunteered to march into Spanish Sahara during the first week of November 1975. Yet only a few of them actually managed to make a symbolic crossing into the Spanish colony, and they soon turned back.
This was the result of an agreement between Rabat and Madrid. The latter had already determined that the only way…
Auteur: Jacob Mundy
