Human Rights Action Center supported actions to be taken after we learned that a compound populated exclusively by women in Western Sahara was under regular assault, including sexual assaults of the occupants. A team of courageous volunteers went in, and the assaults were stopped. Now, Moroccan authorities are blocking the team’s access for a follow up assessment and to extend more protection. Meanwhile, we are seeing influential powers surrendering their responsibility to protect by acting as though Africa were still in the colonial era and simply deeming that it should be okay for this massive disputed territory (which includes extensive coastline) to be annexed by Morocco. All these things that are transpiring are totally unacceptable. We offer some personal experience, some background, and a plea for President Biden to take things in hand and exercise one of his greatest skills to resolve this.
As a Peace Corps director in Africa/Lesotho for four and a half years in the late 1970s, I got some working knowledge of its southern region. Botswana, Swaziland and Lesotho were “given” their independence by Great Britain in 1948, the same year apartheid was made the law of the land in South Africa. Zimbabwe and Namibia were not yet so blessed. The Frelimo movement brought on Mozambique’s independence from Portugal, and Frelimo installed an anti-western government with a slow-moving communism.
The entire region was full of fighters of one ilk or another, but hope was alive for real. Eventually all eyes were on Nelson Mandela and the apartheid regime. It would be another dozen years until Mandela took office in South Africa. At long last, it appeared the colonial powers were gone from Africa.
France, Belgium, Portugal, Great Britain and Germany were all gone. I thought that was the end of colonialism in Africa. I thought the storage tanks that had held the laughing gas that had been apartheid had fed their last gasp and were completely emptied.
Recently, I learned that is not the case. There is still one section of land called Western Sahara that is being treated as up for grabs. For a territory designated by the UN as “Non-Self-Governing” it is massive – the area of all the other such territories combined, times seven. It has 600,000 people, half of whom live nomadically. It has its own infrastructure (yes, including some colonial and some Moroccan), people and customs. So, the United Nations is aiming for a referendum much like the one promised for Kashmir by Gandhi.
Recently under Trump, however, the USA surprisingly (or perhaps not surprisingly) took a position to have this section of Africa “given away” to Morocco, which had invaded in 1975 in a move that, until present, was given no legitimacy by any world actors.
The same territory had been under Spanish supervision. With the US poking its nose in, Spain had acceded and now also says that Morocco should “inherit” this land, taking a position alongside the US. Having these decisions made by a colonial superpower and a 500 year colonizer makes it clear to me that colonialism in Africa is not dead yet.
By tradition, Presidents make fast changes domestically and slow changes internationally. We strive to show consistency on the world stage. But the world sees that many of the decisions made in recent memory to be a kind of sideshow in the history of our country. We have the imperative to change this conversation and we should act quickly before the damage is done. President Biden is actively doing that in other parts of the world where American and/or humanitarian interests appear to be at stake.
There should be a very serious dialogue aiming for a win win both for those folks that live there (and are, decidedly, not Moroccan – most notably the Sahrawi) as well as for addressing the ambition of Morocco to enlarge their map. We couldn’t expect such an approach under President Trump. Under Biden, the USA should re-open this discussion at the United Nations. The UN want referenda.
My non-profit Human Rights Action Center does not take positions on borders and territorial disputes. Typically, the only flags we wave are those that bear artistic images of individuals who have been wrongfully detained. We don’t like to get involved in these things. But I am troubled by these new misadventures in Africa, having seen not so long ago how American might, behind a vanguard of southern evangelical power, helped create South Sudan, a separate entity from Sudan. The results have been messy at best. Since South Sudan’s first day as an independent nation just over a decade ago, the two Sudans have remained at war. There are few Americans roaming around South Sudan these days offering help in the midst of the warfare. In short, the “example” of South Sudan (referenced politically to make a case for a separate Rohingya nation from Myanmar, for example) totally fails the litmus test.
Any European doing aid work in Africa comes home lamenting their nation’s colonial role in the misery they have just encountered. Colonialism was brutal, dishonest and blind to any regard for the local folks. It is a universal sentiment: the time to walk away from colonialism, forever, has long since passed.
In the post-colonial era, Western powers have still failed miserably at setting up governments elsewhere, whether to rule our neighbors or in faraway lands. This track record leaves little room to justify powerful nations giving any other nation carte blanche rule over a territory others claim as sovereign.
But I don’t mean to lecture. President Biden is himself a student of history. He’s well qualified as commander in chief to see a “win win” to fruition - something Americans appreciate from time to time.
