Letter of Solidarity with Western Sahara

Small mountain near Tifariti in liberated Western Sahara. The map of Western Sahrara painted in white on the mountain. Taken in August 2009 via Wikimedia Commons Small mountain near Tifariti in liberated Western Sahara. The map of Western Sahrara painted in white on the mountain. Taken in August 2009 via Wikimedia Commons

Letter of Solidarity with Western Sahara

By : Jadaliyya Reports

[This letter was written in response to the Trump administration's recognition of Western Sahara as Moroccan Territory. Click here to sign.]

As scholars, researchers, activists and concerned individuals, we, the undersigned, strongly condemn President Donald Trump’s proclamation recognizing Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara. 

Western Sahara is a case of unresolved decolonization. 

Decolonization is not only a legal process, but a political struggle, one which has often been waged through the global public sphere. World public opinion, transnational solidarity and global attention have historically been integral to successful decolonization struggles, from Algeria to Palestine. Anticolonial struggles in Western Sahara have lacked international visibility, which solidarity efforts can serve to rectify.

Solidarity with the Sahrawi self-determination cause requires working with existing human rights and activist groups (Equipe Media, Western Sahara Resource Watch) to provide increasing visibility of this struggle and to promote awareness of its stakes.

We stand in solidarity with the Sahrawi people’s right to self-determination and, as such, call for the following: 

1. Trump’s proclamation recognizing Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara must be rescinded. Trump recognized Moroccan claims to Western Sahara as a quid pro quo for Morocco’s normalization of diplomatic relations with Israel. Concurrently, the US negotiated to sell aerial drones to Morocco, perpetuating a longstanding pattern of US military support for destabilizing, colonizing regimes in the region. The quid pro quo makes evident the interrelated colonialism of Israel in Palestine, and Morocco in Western Sahara - and their connection to US imperialism. The decolonization of Western Sahara is not only about upholding UN norms for self-determination and against foreign rule. It is also a matter of thwarting colonial and occupying forces that have long destabilized Africa and the Middle East. 

Western Sahara, a former Spanish colony, remains a non-self-governing territory since Morocco invaded and annexed much of the territory in 1975. Moroccan invasion interrupted the UN-sanctioned right to decolonization by way of self-determination. The Sahrawi right to self-determination has been recognized by the International Court of Justice, the European Court of Justice, the African Union (AU), the UN General Assembly, and the UN Security Council. US recognition of Morocco’s annexation of Western Sahara is unprecedented and endorses colonial occupation and must thus be rescinded.   

2. The terms of a UN, or AU, mediated peace-process must be renegotiated and resumed. Western Sahara is at war as of 13 November 2020. In 2016, Morocco breached the terms of a 1991 UN-mediated ceasefire with the Polisario Front, by building a road across Guerguerat (a territory under the Polisario Front’s control) without Sahrawi consent. When, in November of 2020, Morocco forcefully removed peaceful Sahrawi protestors from blocking commercial transit across this road that infringes the terms of the ceasefire, the Sahrawi People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) announced the resumption of its armed struggle. However, this twenty-nine year long peace-process had stalled long before its recent undoing. This has been mainly due to Morocco’s obstructions of repeated efforts at organising a well-overdue referendum for the self-determination of the colony, culminating in the resignation of the last of the UN Secretary-General’s Personal Envoys for the Western Sahara, Horst Köhler, in May of 2019. 

3. UN peacekeeping in Western Sahara must be reactivated and expanded to include human rights monitoring. The UN Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara (MINURSO) is the only peacekeeping mission founded since the end of the Cold War that lacks a human rights mandate; it should therefore be provided with a human rights mandate. Trump’s unprecedented recognition of Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara included a declaration of his support for the “Autonomy Plan” that Morocco first proposed as a solution to the conflict over the Western Sahara in 2007. However, given ample evidence of Morocco’s brutal repression of Sahrawi activists and of human rights violations against Sahrawi political prisoners (reported by Sahrawi associations such as Equipe Media, CODAPSO, and ASVDH, but also by international organisations such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International) Morocco’s Autonomy Plan is neither realistic nor credible. 

4. Multinational corporations must disinvest from commercializing Western Sahara’s resources before a political solution to the conflict, agreed to by both parties, is realized. Throughout the duration of the recently terminated cease-fire between Morocco and the Polisario Front, multinational corporate ventures have collaborated with Morocco to explore unlawfully Western Sahara’s oil reserves, invest in economic development projects and exploit Western Sahara’s resources, including: phosphates, wind, sand, agricultural produce and fisheries. As the UN Under Secretary General for Legal Affairs, Hans Corell, concluded in 2002, exploiting Western Sahara’s natural resources without Sahrawi consent is a direct breach of international law. Rulings by the Court of Justice of the European Union in 2015, 2016 and 2018, as well as hearings in the UK High Court in 2015, regarding EU-Morocco trade agreements that have included resources from occupied Western Sahara, imply the same conclusion as does a 2018 ruling by South Africa’s High Court on phosphates exports from occupied Western Sahara. 

Click here to sign this letter


Alice Wilson (University of Sussex), Mark Drury (Princeton University), Vivian Solana (Carleton University) and Meriem Naïli (University of Exeter) Contact the author of the petition

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Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 


[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412