Western Sahara, the old "war" that reorders the Maghreb

4 min read RICARD GONZALEZ

RICARD GONZALEZ

With the outbreak of war in Ukraine, the year 2022 has shaken the status quo on the global geopolitical chessboard. A new world order looms on the horizon, although its silhouette is still blurred. However, the Maghreb seems immune to this period of change, anchored in a conflict that will soon be half a century old: Western Sahara. The struggle for control of the former Spanish colony, which hides in the background a struggle for hegemony between the two Maghreb powers, Algeria and Morocco, continues to be the central axis of regional politics. Only Libya escapes those coordinates, immersed in an internal puzzle, punctuated by cyclical outbursts of violence, to which no one has yet found a solution.

Western Sahara was one of those many frozen conflicts scattered around the world until Donald Trump became president of the United States. And it was not so because he had any interest in this dispute, or the Maghreb, in general, but he used it as a lever to intervene in another conflict that was dear to his environment or his bases: that of Palestine. Trump offered Rabat a high-voltage transaction: the normalization of relations with Israel in exchange for recognition of Moroccan sovereignty in Western Sahara, something that France, Morocco's traditional ally, had not even dared to propose.

Washington's backing emboldened Moroccan diplomacy, which saw the possibility of achieving a definitive victory in Western Sahara. Since then, its experts and analysts appear on Arab television networks to insist that Morocco is now "a great power", and all its partners must adjust their policies to this new reality. In other words, Rabat demands that they align themselves with US policy.

And to achieve this, it has not hesitated to use various types of pressure, which in the last year has meant opening diplomatic conflicts with Germany, Spain and even France, although this has been of a smaller magnitude. “This aggressive attitude is not new, but there are precedents. However, it has raised its tone after the recognition of Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara by Donald Trump at the end of 2020”, estimates Irene Fernández-Molina, professor at the University of Exeter.

The Algerian regime, which last year turned the page on the lethargy of the presidency of a sick Bouteflika and the tribulations of the hirak protest movement, understood that it could not sit idly by. Over the past decade, Morocco has been scoring diplomatic victories, notably in Africa, a continent that had traditionally been aligned with Algiers. President Abdelmajid Tebún, formally elected at the end of 2019, ordered a more energetic diplomacy, which resulted in a break in diplomatic relations with Rabat and support for the decision of the Polisario Front to break the ceasefire with Morocco in force since 1991.

Tunisia, which is going through a serious internal political crisis after President Kais Said's "constitutional coup" in the summer of 2021, has been caught between two fires, or two more powerful neighbors brandishing a "you are with me or against me" policy. Said, dependent on political and financial support from Algiers, was unable or unwilling to maintain Tunisia's traditional “positive neutrality” in the Western Sahara conflict. Last August, he received with full honors the Polisario leader, Brahim Gali, in the framework of a summit between the African Union and Japan held in Tunisia. Rabat flew into a rage and withdrew its ambassador from Tunisia, a gesture that Said paid for in kind.

"Gali's reception was a provocation and a mistake that broke Tunisia's historical neutrality that allowed it to try to mediate in the conflict," says Tunisian analyst Ayman Bougami. “President Said has chosen to align himself with Algeria not only for national interests, such as receiving gas at a discount price, but also for personal ones. He needs the support of Algiers for his project because he is quite isolated at the international level”, says Bougami.

While the Maghreb was inflamed, the precarious peace in eastern Ukraine was blown up, unleashing a shock wave that has shaken the entire world in one way or another. This conflict could have deepened the traditional alliances, that is, the anchorage of Morocco in the West, and the historical association between Algeria and Russia. But it has not been that way. Morocco, which needs to circumvent Russia's veto in the Security Council so that its victory in the Sahara is final, did not participate in the vote condemning Russia in the UN last March and has not joined the Western sanctions to Moscow. Algeria, for its part, did not want to hand over Western support to its adversary and abstained in the General Assembly.

Libya is the only country in the Maghreb outside the tensions related to Western Sahara. In August, the country experienced the heaviest fighting of the last two years in Tripoli, which resulted in the death of 32 people, many of them civilians.. The clashes, the result of the struggle between two rival governments to gain control of the country, have raised fears of a new large-scale war conflagration. However, none of the powers with a military presence in the country, especially Turkey and Russia, seem interested in fanning the flames of confrontation, but neither are they strongly pushing their allies to make the necessary resignations that a peace agreement would require. lay the foundations for a solid and viable State.