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Monday, November 10, 2014
Morocco has insinuated that the reason no progress has been made in finding a solution to the Western Sahara conflict is because neighboring Algeria is hindering the process. Morocco’s King Mohammed VI in a speech delivered on the 39th anniversary of the Green March said, “Unless Algeria – the main party in this conflict – is held accountable, there will be no solution. Moreover, without a responsible approach to the tense security situation in the region, there will be no stability.”
In his speech King Mohammed VI said that his comments were “not intended to offend Algeria, its leadership, or the Algerian people, whom we deeply respect. My words are carefully measured and unambiguous. I am talking about facts and a reality everyone knows about.”
The King added that while Algeria tends to use its own special ‘tactics’ in order to abort any attempt to find a permanent solution to the “made-up conflict,” Moroccans have only the justness of their cause.
“Morocco has neither oil nor gas, whereas the other party has the ‘greenback’ which it believes can open the way for it to challenge legitimacy and what is right. What we have are our principles and the justness of our cause. In fact, we have more than that: the love of Moroccans for their homeland and their attachment to it,” the King emphasized.
Western Sahara is the subject of a decades-long dispute between Morocco and the Algerian-backed Polisario Front. In 1884 Western Sahara fell under Spanish rule, becoming a Spanish province in 1934. A guerrilla insurgency by the Spanish Sahara’s indigenous inhabitants, the nomadic Saharawis, began in the early 1970s; eventually leading up to the creation of the Polisario Front in 1973 as the sole representative of the Saharan people. In 1975 the International Court of Justice rejected territorial claims by Morocco and Mauritania and recognized the Saharawis’ right to self-determination. But in November 1975, Moroccan King Hassan II ordered a “Green March” of over 300,000 Moroccans into the territory, firmly entrenching itself in the territory. Since then the Polisario Front and Morocco have been at odds and the conflict has grown as Morocco hands out licenses for exploration off the coast of the disputed territory, despite a UN ruling that prohibits Morocco from doing just that.
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