By Hassan Alaoui
A fool’s bargain? Deliberate concealment of the Madrid Agreement on the decolonization of the Sahara; international support for Morocco’s Autonomy Plan; evading the 18 UN Security Council resolutions since 2007; heavy responsibility of colonial France in the sharing and drawing of borders with Algeria at the expense of and in defiance of the territorial integrity of the Kingdom, such are, among other things, the essential points that the text published by the Collective of Universities in ” The world has explicitly rejected with a desire to mislead us. An international conference for a settlement in the Moroccan Sahara? What good is it, why face Algerian hegemonism and blackmail that the text in question does not even mention?
The publication in the columns of the ” Monde ” of Thursday, February 16 of a ” appel “for the settlement of the” Sahara conflict », signed by a collective, challenges us in more ways than one. First, by the content of the text, the essential characteristic of which is a formidable ambivalence; then by the nature of the signatories, of whom the least that can be said, whatever their motivations, is a desire to hide the historical, political and current reality, when it is not to misunderstand it and falsify it merely. For those who have always followed the evolution of the case, the article in the ” Monde is an insult, no more, no less. An insult to our country, to our people, to the efforts made by the United Nations, to the African Union and also a clear desire to create unacceptable confusion in people’s minds.
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We will indeed begin with this unavoidable question: the signatories of this text, what do they represent? Of what moral magisterium are they the name? Who are they to come from the top of their alleged condescension to tell us things with this ostentation, at most inspired once by ignorance, another by perfidy? Handpicked, it is said, they only represent themselves after all, some of them being caparisoned in their culture of intrigue and systematic opposition, some ignorant of the history of Morocco, despising it, fighting it for others. One would be tempted to say, without any scruples, that they feed the sinister 5th column and mainly fall under this self-righteouse from the former left bank of Paris, who died of her own death a long time ago.
There is then an injunction launched from the title of the article and which misleads us: The settlement of the conflict must now be considered within the framework of an international conference “. The term ” must tells us a lot about this moralizing dimension specific to those who resign themselves badly and can hardly answer the real question: why has the Algerian government persisted in fighting the territorial integrity of Morocco for almost fifty years now? ? Why and how did he create the problem of the Sahara? From this double questioning, of course, arises a bundle of other questions.
Are the signatories of this text, which of course exudes a certain and convoluted ambiguity – with feigned objectivity – so unaware that the decolonization of the territory was carried out on a certain November 14, 1975, following the Tripartite Agreement signed in Madrid by Spain, Morocco and Mauritania? The signatories shamelessly invoke a ” old conflict of decolonization » and therefore sin by the worst bad faith. They become lawyers pro domo of the Algerian thesis which, speaking of the Sahara, never ceases to constantly evoke ” the last colony ” Of the history. And in doing so blithely tramples the Tripartite Agreement, yet endorsed by the UN General Assembly on December 27, 1975, only one month after its signature.
However, one could legitimately wonder why the decolonization of Algeria in 1962 did not require a ” international conference »? After a war of liberation that lasted eight years (1954-1962) a direct negotiation engaged for months between the FLN (National Liberation Front) and the French government had led to the Evian Accords and thus decolonized the country. Direct negotiation between a colonial power and a country administered “, we say modestly, is a sacrosanct principle of the Charter of the United Nations, it is all the more encouraged that it constitutes the ideal and irenic example of settlement of territorial and border disputes. We are forced to stress that the settlement of the conflict in Algeria in 1962 obeyed the principle of direct negotiation between the occupying power and the occupied country and that Morocco and Spain – together with Mauritania – had joined in November 1975 in the same spirit, the Algerian precedent serving us as inescapable jurisprudence.
The signatories of the appeal published by ” The world cannot but refer to it, at the very least think about it. The question is the following: why shouldn’t what had to be tolerated for Algeria – namely the direct negotiation of peace with France – be tolerated for France? Incidentally and implicitly, why did the proponents of this international conference fleetingly touch on the question of the Moroccan-Algerian borders, drawn arbitrarily by the French power at the time, tearing entire territories from the Kingdom, conceding them no less arbitrarily to Algeria which, from an insane perspective, saw its territory expand from 2 million square meters at the time of French colonization in 1830 to almost… 4 million in 1962?
The annexation to Algeria by the French State of Moroccan territories such as Tindouf, Bechar, Touat, Saoura, Tidikelt has made it a country without ” Limits geographical, the largest in the continent. Until 1963, the people of Tindouf, 100% Moroccan, claimed their Moroccanness and their attachment to our country, they were then violently repressed by the ANP (National People’s Army) led by Houari Boumediene. Until further notice, this issue of borders is on the agenda, even though the famous Summit bringing together in January 1969 in Ifrane the late Hassan II and Houari Boumediene would have ratified a tacit agreement – let’s say a consensus – on this issue, the committing to avoid all the casualty of war…
Could the French government of Emmanuel Macron therefore ignore the misuse of the rule of law and recognize the legitimacy of Morocco’s claim? Namely, as Spain did in 1975, the historical, geographical, political, economic and anthropological belonging of the Sahara to the Kingdom of Morocco? Clearly defender of the Algerian thesis, shouldn’t he, and the signatory Committee of the appeal of the ” Monde », French military archives of Vincennes in hand, to look into the problem of the borders of Morocco and Algeria to release once and for all the truth and get it out of its limbo?
Finally, why take the United Nations away from the case when they have been striving for decades to find a fair and lasting solution, at the very least consensual? We repeat: what could an international conference settle that the UN failed to settle? It seems to us that this is neither more nor less than a fool’s bargain, a cookie-cutter formula that does not take into account any parameter and sacrifices more to the fantastical intoxication of intellectuals in lounge chair “, without taking on the reality and the irreversibility of the concrete and lasting commitment of Morocco and the expansionist tropism of an Algeria taken in its vertigo of imperial grandeur.