The Last Colony: Beyond Dominant Narratives on the Western Sahara Roundtable

[Image from the Tindouf refugee camp in Algeria. Image from Wikimedia Commons.]

[This is one of seven pieces in Jadaliyya's electronic roundtable on the Western Sahara. Moderated by Samia Errazzouki and Allison L. McManus, it features contributions from John P. Entelis, Stephen Zunes, Aboubakr Jamaï, Ali Anouzla, Allison L. McManus, Samia Errazzouki, and Andrew McConnell.]

Western Sahara is a sparsely-populated territory about the size of Italy, located on the Atlantic coast in northwestern Africa, just south of Morocco. Traditionally inhabited by nomadic Arab tribes, collectively known as Sahrawis and famous for their long history of resistance to outside domination, the territory was occupied by Spain from the late 1800s through the mid-1970s. With Spain holding onto the territory well over a decade after most African countries had achieved their freedom from European colonialism, the nationalist Polisario Front launched an armed independence struggle against Spain in 1973. This—along with pressure from the United Nations—eventually forced Madrid to promise the people of what was then still known as the Spanish Sahara a referendum on the fate of the territory by the end of 1975. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) heard irredentist claims by Morocco and Mauritania and ruled in October of 1975 that—despite pledges of fealty to the Moroccan sultan back in the nineteenth century by some tribal leaders bordering the territory, and close ethnic ties between some Sahrawi and Mauritanian tribes—the right of self-determination was paramount. A special visiting mission from the United Nations engaged in an investigation of the situation in the territory that same year and reported that the vast majority of Sahrawis supported independence under the leadership of the Polisario, not integration with Morocco or Mauritania.

During this same period, Morocco was threatening war with Spain over the territory and assembled over  three hundred thousand Moroccans to march into Western Sahara to claim it as theirs regardless of the wishes of the indigenous population whose dialect, dress, and culture was very different than that of the Moroccan Arabs to their north. Though the Spaniards had a much stronger military during that time, they were occupied with the terminal illness of their longtime dictator, General Francisco Franco. At the same time, Spain was facing increasing pressure from the United States, which wanted to back its Moroccan ally, King Hassan II, and did not want to see the leftist Polisario come to power. As a result, Spain reneged on its promise of self-determination and instead agreed in November 1975 to allow for Moroccan administration of the northern two thirds of the Western Sahara and for Mauritanian administration of the southern third.

As Moroccan forces moved into Western Sahara, nearly half of the population fled into neighboring Algeria, where they and their descendants remain in refugee camps to this day. Morocco and Mauritania rejected a series of unanimous United Nations Security Council resolutions calling for the withdrawal of foreign forces and recognition of the Sahrawis' right of self-determination. The United States and France, meanwhile, despite voting in favor of these resolutions, blocked the United Nations from enforcing them. At the same time, the Polisario—which had been driven from the more heavily populated northern and western parts of the country—declared independence as the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR).

Thanks in part to the Algerians providing significant amounts of military equipment and economic support, Polisario guerrillas fought well against both occupying armies and defeated Mauritania by 1979, making them agree to turn their third of Western Sahara over to the Polisario. However, the Moroccans then annexed the remaining southern part of the country as well.

The Polisario then focused their armed struggle against Morocco and by 1982 had liberated nearly eighty-five percent of their country. Over the next four years, however, the tide of the war turned in Morocco's favor thanks to the United States and France dramatically increasing their support for the Moroccan war effort, with US forces providing important training for the Moroccan army in counter-insurgency tactics. In addition, the Americans and French helped Morocco construct a 1200-kilometer "wall," primarily consisting of two heavily fortified parallel sand berms, which eventually shut off more than three quarters of Western Sahara—including virtually all of the territory's major towns and natural resources—from the Polisario.

Meanwhile, the Moroccan government, through generous housing subsidies and other benefits, successfully encouraged thousands of Moroccan settlers—some of whom were from southern Morocco and of ethnic Sahrawi background—to immigrate to Western Sahara. By the early 1990s, these Moroccan settlers outnumbered the remaining indigenous Sahrawis by a ratio of more than two to one.

While rarely able to penetrate into Moroccan-controlled territory, the Polisario continued regular assaults against Moroccan occupation forces stationed along the wall until 1991, when the United Nations ordered a cease-fire to be monitored by a United Nations peacekeeping force known as MINURSO (United Nations Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara). The agreement included provisions for the return of Sahrawi refugees to Western Sahara followed by a United Nations-supervised referendum on the fate of the territory, which would allow Sahrawis native to Western Sahara to vote either for independence or for integration with Morocco. Neither the repatriation nor the referendum took place, however, due to the Moroccan insistence on stacking the voter rolls with Moroccan settlers and other Moroccan citizens whom it claimed had tribal links to the Western Sahara. Secretary General Kofi Annan enlisted former US Secretary of State James Baker as his special representative to help resolve the impasse. Morocco, however, continued to ignore repeated demands from the United Nations that it cooperate with the referendum process, and French and American threats of a veto prevented the Security Council from enforcing its mandate.

The Stalled Peace Process

In 2000, the United States, under President Bill Clinton, successfully convinced Baker and Annan to give up on efforts to proceed with the referendum as originally agreed by the United Nations ten years earlier and instead, accept Moroccan demands that settlers be allowed to vote on the fate of the territory along with the indigenous Sahrawis. Eventually, Baker came up with a proposal whereby both the Sahrawis and the Moroccan settlers would be able to vote in the referendum, but the plebiscite would take place only after Western Sahara experienced significant autonomy under Sahrawi-elected leaders for a five-year period prior to the vote. Independence would be an option on the ballot for the referendum and the United Nations would oversee the vote and guarantee that advocates of integration and independence would both have the freedom to campaign openly. The United Nations Security Council approved the Baker plan in the summer of 2003.

Under considerable pressure, Algeria and, eventually, the Polisario, reluctantly accepted the new plan, but the Moroccans—unwilling to allow the territory to enjoy even a brief period of autonomy and risk the possibility that they would lose the plebiscite—rejected it. Once again, the United States and France blocked the United Nations from pressuring Morocco to comply with its international legal obligations and Baker resigned.

In what was widely interpreted as rewarding Morocco for its intransigence, the Bush administration subsequently designated Morocco as a "major non-NATO ally," a coveted status then granted to only fifteen key nations, such as Japan, Israel, and Australia. The following month, the Senate ratified a free trade agreement with Morocco, making the kingdom one of only a half dozen countries outside of the Western hemisphere to enjoy such a close economic relationship with the United States, though—in a potentially significant precedent—Congress insisted that it not include products from the Western Sahara.

US aid to Morocco increased five-fold under the Bush administration, ostensibly as a reward for the kingdom undertaking a series of neoliberal "economic reforms" and to assist the Moroccan government in "combating terrorism." While there has been some political liberalization within Morocco in recent years under the young King Mohammed VI, who succeeded to the throne following the death of his father in 1999, gross and systematic human rights violations in the occupied Western Sahara continue unabated, with public expressions of nationalist aspirations and organized protests against the occupation and human rights abuses routinely met with severe repression.

The Significance of the Struggle for Self-Determination

The Sahrawis have fought for their national rights primarily by legal and diplomatic means, not through violence. Even during their armed struggle against the occupation, a conflict that ended over twenty years ago, Polisario forces restricted their attacks exclusively to the Moroccan armed forces, never targeting civilians.

The lack of resolution to the Western Sahara conflict has important regional implications. It has encouraged an arms race between Morocco and Algeria and, on several occasions over the past three decades, has brought the two countries close to war. Perhaps even more significantly, it has been the single biggest obstacle to a fuller implementation of the goals of the Arab Maghreb Union—consisting of Morocco, Algeria, Libya, Tunisia, and Mauritania—to pursue economic integration and other initiatives that would increase the standard of living and political stability in the region. The lack of unity and greater coordination between these nations and their struggling economies has contributed to a dramatic upsurge in illegal immigration to Europe and the rise of radical Islamist movements.

Nearly half of the Sahrawi population lives in exile in the desert of western Algeria in refugee camps under Polisario administration. The one hundred fifty thousand Sahrawis living in these desert camps are largely self-governing. Demonstrations and strikes in the late 1980s forced the Polisario to democratize the governance of the camps, where they maintain a functional, if barely subsistent, economy. Though devoutly Muslim, Sahrawi women are unveiled and enjoy equal rights with men regarding divorce, inheritance, and other legal matters. Sahrawi women also hold major leadership positions in the Polisario and the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR), including posts as cabinet ministers. Some observers note the irony that while France and the United States claim to seek the establishment of such democratic governance throughout the Arab and Islamic world, they have contributed greatly to the failure of the Sahrawis to establish such a democratic system outside these refugee camps by supporting the occupation of their country by an autocratic monarchy.

Over the past three decades, the SADR has been recognized as an independent country by more than eighty governments, though some have subsequently withdrawn their recognition, mostly under French pressure. The SADR has been a full member state of the African Union (formerly the Organization for African Unity) since 1984. By contrast, with only a few exceptions, the Arab states—despite their outspoken opposition to the Israeli occupation of Palestinian and Syrian land—have supported Morocco's occupation of Western Sahara. The United Nations still formally recognizes Western Sahara as a non-self-governing territory, making it Africa's last colony

With Morocco's rejection of the Baker Plan and threats of a French veto of any Security Council resolution that would push Morocco to compromise, a diplomatic settlement of the conflict looks highly unlikely. With Morocco's powerful armed forces protected behind the separation wall and Algeria unwilling to support a resumption of guerrilla war, the Polisario appears to lack a military option as well.

Morocco’s “Autonomy” Plan

As an alternative to a referendum, Morocco proposed an autonomy plan for Western Sahara in 2006, for which it has been vigorously working to gain international support. The Polisario and most of the international community have rejected the proposal on the grounds that it is based on the assumption that Western Sahara is part of Morocco rather than an occupied territory, and that Morocco is somehow granting part of its sovereign territory a special status. To accept Morocco's autonomy plan would mean that, for the first time since the founding of the UN and the ratification of the UN Charter, the international community would be endorsing the expansion of a country's territory by military force, thereby establishing a very dangerous and destabilizing precedent. Nevertheless, the Moroccan proposal was immediately endorsed by France, as well as the Bush administration, former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and a bipartisan majority of the US Senate.

If the people of Western Sahara accepted an autonomy agreement over independence as a result of a free and fair referendum, it would constitute a legitimate act of self-determination. However, Morocco has explicitly stated that its autonomy proposal "rules out, by definition, the possibility for the independence option to be submitted" to the people of Western Sahara, the vast majority of whom favor outright independence. 

International law aside, there are a number of practical concerns regarding the Moroccan proposal. For instance, centralized autocratic states have rarely respected the autonomy of regional jurisdictions, which has often led eventually to violent conflict, such as in Eritrea and Kosovo. Moreover, the Moroccan proposal contains no enforcement mechanisms. Morocco has often broken its promises to the international community, such as in its refusal to allow the UN-mandated referendum for Western Sahara to go forward. Indeed, a close reading of the proposal raises questions about how much autonomy Morocco is even initially offering, such as whether the Western Saharans will control the territory's natural resources or law enforcement beyond local matters. In addition, the proposal appears to indicate that all powers not specifically vested in the autonomous region would remain with the kingdom. Indeed, since the king of Morocco is ultimately vested with absolute authority under Article 42 of the Moroccan Constitution, the autonomy proposal's insistence that the Moroccan state "will keep its powers in the royal domains, especially with respect to defense, external relations, and the constitutional and religious prerogatives of His Majesty the King" appears to give the monarch considerable latitude in interpretation.

Civil Resistance in the Occupied Territory

As happened during the 1980s in both South Africa and the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories, the locus of the Western Sahara freedom struggle has shifted during the past decade from the military and diplomatic initiatives of an exiled armed movement to a largely unarmed popular resistance from within. Young activists in the occupied territory and even in Sahrawi-populated parts of southern Morocco have confronted Moroccan troops in street demonstrations and other forms of nonviolent action, despite the risk of shootings, mass arrests, and torture. Sahrawis from different sectors of society have engaged in protests, strikes, cultural celebrations, and other forms of civil resistance focused on such issues as educational policy, human rights, the release of political prisoners, and the right to self-determination. They also raised the cost of occupation for the Moroccan government and increased the visibility of the Sahrawi cause. Indeed, perhaps most significantly, civil resistance helped to build support for the Sahrawi movement among international NGOs, solidarity groups, and even sympathetic Moroccans.

Internet communication became a key element in the Saharawi movement, with public chat rooms evolving as vital centers for sending messages, as breaking news regarding the burgeoning resistance campaign reached those in the Sahrawi diaspora and international activists. Despite attempts by the Moroccans to disrupt these contacts, the diaspora has continued to provide financial and other support to the resistance. Though there have been complaints from inside the territory that support for their movement by the older generation of Polisario leaders was inadequate, the Polisario appears to have recognized that by having signed a cease-fire and then having had Morocco reject the diplomatic solution expected in return, it has essentially played all its cards. So there has been a growing recognition that the only real hope for independence has to come from within the occupied territory in combination with solidarity efforts from global civil society.

After the Moroccan authorities’ use of force to break up the large and prolonged demonstrations in 2005-2006, the resistance subsequently opted mainly for smaller protests, some of which were planned and some of which were spontaneous. A typical protest would begin on a street corner or a plaza where a Sahrawi flag would be unfurled, women would start ululating, and people would begin chanting pro-independence slogans. Within a few minutes, soldiers and police would arrive, and the crowd would quickly scatter. Other tactics have included leafleting, graffiti (including tagging the homes of collaborators), and cultural celebrations with political overtones. Such nonviolent actions, while broadly supported by the people, appear to have been less a part of coordinated resistance than a result of action by individuals. Still, the Moroccan government’s regular use of violent repression to subdue the Sahrawi-led nonviolent protests suggests that civil resistance is seen as a threat to Moroccan control. There have been some small victories, such as the successful campaign which led to Sahrawi nonviolent resistance leader Aminatou Haidar securing the 2008 Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award, as well as forcing Moroccan authorities to reverse their expulsion order in December 2009, which resulted in her near-fatal thirty-day hunger strike.

Furthermore, as inadequate as the Moroccan autonomy proposal may be, it nevertheless constitutes a reversal of Morocco’s historical insistence that Western Sahara is as much a part of Morocco as other provinces, by acknowledging that it is indeed a distinct entity. Protests in Western Sahara in recent years have begun to raise some awareness within Morocco, especially among intellectuals, human rights activists, pro-democracy groups, and some moderate Islamists - long suspicious of the government line in a number of areas - that not all Sahrawis see themselves as Moroccans, that it is not simply an Algerian plot, and that there exists a genuine indigenous opposition to Moroccan rule.

In the occupied territory, Moroccan colonists and collaborators are given preference for housing and employment and the indigenous people receive virtually no benefits from their country’s rich fisheries and phosphate deposits. In September 2010, in a precursor to the “Arab Spring,” Sahrawi activists erected a tent city about fifteen kilometers outside of Laayoune, the former colonial capital and largest city in the occupied territory. Since any protests calling for self-determination, independence, or enforcement of UN Security Council resolutions are brutally suppressed, the demonstrators pointedly avoided such provocative calls, instead simply demanding economic justice. Even this was too much for the Moroccan monarchy, which was determined to crush this nonviolent act of mass defiance. The Moroccans tightened the siege in early October, attacking vehicles bringing food, water, and medical supplies to the camp, resulting in scores of injuries and the death of a fourteen-year old boy. Finally, on 8 November, the Moroccans attacked the camp, driving protesters out with tear gas and hoses, beating those who did not flee fast enough, and killing as many as two dozen people. In response, violent anti-occupation rioting erupted, resulting in the first Moroccan fatalities at the hands of Sahrawis since the 1991 ceasefire. This then triggered the burning and pillaging of Sahrawi homes and shops and the shooting and arresting of suspected activists, some of whom were charged with treason and hauled before military courts.

One of the obstacles to the internal resistance is that Moroccan settlers outnumber the indigenous population by a ratio of more than three to one and by more in the major cities, making certain tactics used effectively in similar struggles more problematic. For example, although a general strike could be effective, the large number of Moroccan settlers, combined with the minority of indigenous Sahrawis who oppose independence, could likely fill the void resulting from the absence of much of the Sahrawi workforce. Although that might be alleviated by growing pro-independence sentiments among ethnic Sahrawi settlers from the southern part of Morocco, it still presents challenges that have not been faced by largely nonviolent struggles in other occupied lands--among them East Timor, Kosovo, and the Palestinian territories.

Earlier this month, the United States, for the first time, included renewing the mandate of MINURSO, a provision giving the UN peacekeepers the authority to monitor the human rights situation in both the Moroccan-occupied Western Sahara and the Polisario-administered refugee camps, in its draft of the biannual UN Security Council resolution. Currently, MINURSO is the only UN peacekeeping operation in the world without a human rights mandate. Under pressure from Morocco, France, and some pro-Moroccan sectors of the Obama administration and Congress, the United States dropped the human rights provisions in the resolution renewing MINURSO.

In response, recent weeks have witnessed some of the largest demonstrations in the history of the occupation, despite ongoing repression by Moroccan occupation forces.

Morocco has been able to persist in flouting its international legal obligations toward Western Sahara largely because France and the United States have continued to arm Moroccan occupation forces and block the enforcement of resolutions in the UN Security Council demanding that Morocco allow for self-determination or even simply allow human rights monitoring in the occupied country. So now, at least as important as nonviolent resistance by Sahrawis, is the potential of nonviolent action by the citizens of France, the United States, and other countries that enable Morocco to maintain its occupation. Such campaigns played a major role in forcing Australia, Great Britain, and the United States to end their support for Indonesia’s occupation of East Timor, finally enabling the former Portuguese colony to become free. The only realistic hope to end the occupation of Western Sahara, resolve the conflict, and save the vitally important post-World War II principles enshrined in the United Nations Charter, which forbid any country from expanding its territory through military force, may be a similar campaign by global civil society.  

Western Sahara: Why Africa’s last colony can’t break free - Ideas - The Boston Globe

y Jenn Abelson 

 |  Globe Staff

  June 16, 2013

Bruno Barbey/Magnum

Western Sahara, near the Mauritanian border.

LAAYOUNE, WESTERN SAHARA — On a recent Saturday in May, as dusk shaded into night in this desert city, more than a thousand women, men, and children poured into the streets. They chanted slogans for independence; flashed the peace sign to show their support for the Polisario Front; and waved the illegal red, green, and black flag of a nation that may never exist.

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For anyone who isn’t a geography buff, it’s likely that the Polisario Front, and perhaps even Western Sahara, are unfamiliar names. A former Spanish colony now annexed and ruled by neighboring Morocco, this territory has been waiting four decades for a shot at independence it was promised but never received.After a half-century of global decolonization that has produced about 80 new nations throughout the world, Western Sahara is now by far the largest piece of land remaining on the United Nations’ list of “non-self-governing territories,” places it considers to have an unfulfilled right to decide their own futures.

This year marks the 40th anniversary of the push for independence in Western Sahara, a movement that for the last two decades has been largely peaceful. The Polisario Front—the formerly armed nationalist group that officially represents Western Saharans in their negotiations—signed a cease-fire with Morocco in 1991, and since that time protests have unfolded much like this recent one.Members of the indigenous Sahrawi ethnic group raised their fists in the air and honked car horns to show their displeasure with Moroccan rule; some brandished Polisario flags, which are banned by the government 800 miles away in Rabat. The evening ended with some rock-throwing and accusations of injury by both sides. No shots were fired.

In part because their campaign has been a civil one, it has unfolded almost totally outside the world’s sphere of attention. Elsewhere on the continent, civil war has split Sudan into two countries; self-immolation and riots have brought regime change across North Africa. Here, meanwhile, even though the UN, the United States, and most other powerful nations have never recognized Morocco’s sovereignty over the area, the independence movement has been unable to make headway.

Today, the Sahrawis are becoming increasingly frustrated, and politics are making the prospects of independence more distant, if anything. The Moroccan government has shown no sign of loosening its grip. Officials worry about Islamic militants fomenting violence, given Polisario’s backing by rival Algeria; furthermore, Morocco relies on the territory’s fisheries and phosphate mines, and has begun exploring for oil. Its allies in the West, including the United States, prize Morocco as a stable ally in a volatile region, and aren’t moving to force its hand.

The stalemate here in Africa’s last remaining colony, and the willingness to let it simmer as the world focuses on deadlier conflicts in nearby Mali and Syria, raise the uncomfortable question of whether a peaceful breakup of nations is really possible—even when the process, officially speaking, enjoys the full support of the UN. Western Sahara is emerging as a case study on the limits of the international community’s power to help a people win self-determination when they choose not to be violent, but to follow the rules.

Bruno Barbey/Magnum

Moroccans participating in “The Green March” in 1975, when the king of Morocco called on 300,000 civilians to stake Western Sahara as their own.

“It doesn’t make sense. Why are just the Sahrawis left behind? Why are we not being helped by the international community?” Lahbib Salhi, 63, a Sahrawi activist, said in a recent interview in Laayoune. “Most other countries got independence. Look at Namibia, Mozambique...look at Bosnia and Kosovo even South Sudan. But why are the Sahrawis left behind?”

***

Western Sahara is the last chapter of a story that began in the wake of World War II, when the world’s colonial empires started to break apart. In the decades after the war, France spun off about two dozen countries, including Morocco in 1956. The United Kingdom let go of roughly 40 territories. The sweep of decolonization, formalized in the UN’s 1960 “Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples,” rapidly redrew the map of the world.

Spain and Portugal were slower to unwind their dominions, but by 1975, in the face of growing international pressure and fierce fighting by the newly formed Polisario, Spain was ready to relinquish what was then called Spanish Sahara.

The colony was a 103,000-square-mile tract of Western Africa with roughly 75,000 Sahrawi inhabitants, people who trace their roots to nomadic tribes.Their right to self-determination was upheld by the International Court of Justice that year. But any chance at a quick, smooth transition to independence was derailed when neighbors Morocco and Mauritania each claimed the area.

That put Western Sahara into a small, unhappy group of territories where decolonization was botched in part because of attempted annexation by a neighboring state, says Jacob Mundy, a professor at Colgate University and the author of a 2010 book, “Western Sahara: War, Nationalism, and Conflict Irresolution.”

The most notable of those, East Timor, suffered near genocidal violence when Indonesian forces took control from Portugal in 1975. After a bloody referendum in 1999, East Timor finally got its independence, but it remains impoverished and corrupt, largely because of this damaging process.

Western Sahara has seen violence, too. The Polisario, organized in 1973, at first waged a guerilla war against Spain. Then, in November 1975, the king of Morocco orchestrated what became known as “The Green March,” calling on 300,000 civilians to descend into Western Sahara to stake it as their own. Spain quickly relented and transferred authority to Morocco and Mauritania. Now the Polisario turned on these countries. As war escalated, Mauritania renounced its right to Western Sahara in 1979, leaving Morocco with sole control, but no recognized claim.

The fighting continued for another decade, and slowly reshaped the makeup of the territory. Sahrawi refugees fled for camps in Algeria, which backed the Polisario movement. Today more than 100,000 live in the camps, governed by the Polisario, which faces its own accusations of suppressing freedom of expression, torture, and embezzling aid. Waves of Moroccans, meanwhile, moved into Western Sahara, lured by strong economic incentives.

The Polisario Front laid down arms in 1991 in a UN-brokered deal that gave Western Saharans the right to vote on their own future, choosing independence or integration into Morocco. The referendum was supposed to be in 1992. But the effort broke down in arguments over the eligibility of tens of thousands of resettled Moroccans who now called the territory home. Subsequent political talks went nowhere, and more than 20 years later, the people of Western Sahara find themselves in suspended animation.

“There is an abiding disappointment in the UN as an institution, one that sometimes borders on cynicism,” said Jeffrey Smith, a professor of international law in Ottawa who served as counsel to the UN mission in East Timor during that country’s transition to independence.

Despite that disappointment, in a region known for militant revolution and guerilla warfare, the Sahrawis’ playbook has come to look more like a Western protest effort. They stage marches and organize human rights activist groups.Aminatou Haidar, a Nobel Peace Prize nominee who was abducted and tortured in a secret prison in the 1980s, went on a hunger strike for 32 days at a Spanish airport in 2009.

Then, in 2010, activists set up a protest camp, Gdeim Izik, in an empty stretch of desert a few miles outside Laayoune. At least 10,000 people pitched tents as a way to demonstrate against occupation and get attention for their demands to end discrimination and the lack of job opportunities. It was illegal (Morocco has strong laws against freedom of assembly without permits), but not violent—familiar to anyone who saw the Occupy camps that swept across the United States a year later. There were workshops, a charity group to collect funds, and a dialogue committee responsible for running negotiations with the Moroccan government.

“The idea came in response to the oppression that’s been going on for decades.We want to come up with something new, something different, and get out of the city limits,” said El Idrissi Mohamed Lamine, 27, who was one of the protesters.

After 28 days, authorities put an end to the civil disobedience and brutally dismantled the camp, burning tents to the ground, beating protesters, and arresting others. Protesters fought back; several people were killed, including security officers, and hundreds were injured.

To activists, Gdeim Izik was a success; it broke through the media blockage and was covered by organizations that usually ignore them. The Sahrawis like to see it as the inspiration for the Arab Spring—Noam Chomsky has argued that the widespread political and economic grievances that resulted in that wave of popular uprisings started in Gdeim Izik.

***

Either way, it has not made much of a difference in Western Sahara itself.That’s in part due to two circumstances: the presence of natural resources and the region’s occupation by a nation that is a strong Western ally. The 714-mile-long coastline gives Morocco access to some of the world’s richest fisheries, while phosphate reserves are becoming only more valuable as the global demand for fertilizer grows.

Politically, Western Sahara is a unifying issue within Morocco; analysts worry that splitting it off could undermine the monarchy, and threaten a pillar of stability in a volatile region. Polisario’s socialist rhetoric and Algerian ties have not won them friends in the West, either. For the West, “the status quo is much more tolerable than the frightening futures that might result from prioritizing a solution over stability,” Mundy said.

Morocco’s own position on Western Sahara stresses this risk. It has proposed an autonomy plan that would give the Sahrawis limited self-government but not independence. Officials in Rabat insist this is for the best: An independent but weak new state, they say, would be vulnerable to extremists and jihadis.

“An independent state is not viable in Sahara. You have to be very clear for security reasons. Today what is happening in Mali is happening in the Sahara. It is threatening the security of the Sahara and everywhere,” said Youssef Armani, minister delegate of foreign affairs and cooperation of the Kingdom of Morocco, in a meeting with journalists in May. “There is no room for a failed state in the region.”

Independence-seekers respond that Morocco is inflating security threats and making false allegations about Al Qaeda infiltrating the refugee camps.

“It is propaganda,” said El Ghalia Djimi, vice president of the Sahrawi Association of Victims of Grave Human Rights Violations, who says the independence movement doesn’t have terrorist connections.

Jenn Abelson/Globe Staff

A spontaneous protest in favor of independence in Laayoune, Western Sahara.

“We are a small people with big land and big natural resources and occupied by a power that has historical relationships with Western countries,” she said. “So this is why they let this ongoing conflict not get resolved.”

***

How do successful national breakups happen? In the time Western Sahara has waited for its chance at independence, dozens of new countries have been born.Many were smooth spinoffs of islands by distant colonizers.

But others, especially with contiguous territories and at least one unwilling party, were painful and bloody. Yugoslavia dissolved into separate populations, propelled by ethnic cleansing. Kosovo is still under UN protection, its declaration of independence from Serbia still unrecognized by Serbia itself.Most recently, South Sudan’s 2011 independence came only after decades of brutal civil war and pressure from Christian groups in the United States who had worked for decades on the issue. In nearly all of these conflicts, including East Timor, independence was finally achieved once these self-determination struggles had won substantive support from the United States, the United Kingdom, or other Western allies.

America has tried to keep a neutral position on Western Sahara: It does not recognize Moroccan sovereignty and helps fund the UN mission there, but hasn’t aided the independence movement. It considers Morocco’s autonomy proposal to be “serious, realistic, and credible,” according to a recent Congressional Research Service report by Alexis Arieff, an analyst in African affairs.

In April, for the first time, the United States drafted a proposal for the UN to monitor human rights in Western Sahara—an effort defeated after heavy lobbying from Morocco, which set off the protests here last month.

America’s premium on stability essentially boils down to support for Morocco—for now. President Obama, in a call to King Mohammed VI in May, discussed the “importance of continuing to deepen our bilateral cooperation, especially on regional security matters of mutual concern.”

In Western Sahara, activists still say they want to break up the “right” way.Even after a recent attack on Aminatou Haidar left her black Toyota Corolla smashed by rocks, the woman nicknamed “the Sahrawi Gandhi” says she is committed to peace as the path to independence.

But she added that there is growing frustration among younger Sahrawis, who have not seen progress in this protracted, seemingly forgotten struggle. Haidar acknowledged that they could be at risk of being radicalized on the issue, and of returning to a violent struggle.

She and other Sahrawis blame the international community for not pressing forward on what they see as a long-promised vote. Last week, the UN’s Special Committee on Decolonization began its periodic discussions on the case of Western Sahara and other territories. On Tuesday in New York, Polisario Front Secretary-General Mohamed Abdelaziz expressed frustration at the impasse and pressed UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to give more attention to the dispute.

Despite his plea, it is hard to see the door opening anytime soon. Charles Dunbar, a Boston University lecturer who spent fom 1997 to 1999 living in Laayoune as a UN diplomat and trying to move the referendum forward, said that if a vote had been held back then, the Sahrawis would have won their independence. He blames the long deadlock on UN inaction.

“The true blame lies with the UN Security Council. It is the unwillingness of the council to take decisive action that has caused this mission to be seemingly, permanently stalemated,” Dunbar said.

About the prospects for the Sahrawis to gain their own country today, he considers himself a pessimist. “The world,” he said, “just has other priorities.”

Jenn Abelson is an investigative reporter with the Globe’s Spotlight team. She traveled to Western Sahara and Morocco with the support of the International Women’s Media Foundation. E-mail abelson@globe.com .