Morocco Is Annoyed With Annan

Mohamad Al Ashab     Al-Hayat     2003/10/26

What justifies Morocco's annoyance with Kofi Annan's latest report about the Sahara is that it contains a threat, and links the suggested plan with implementation. However, what calls to wonder is that the first draft did not follow an orientation that he imposed when it was refused by Algeria and the Polisario. The fact is that Rabat's rejection of the new plan did not push toward any reconsideration, knowing that the principle in settling such struggles imposes the approval of all concerned parties. When the plan submitted itself before the Security Council last summer, France objected to it going from the same concept, and it seemed that the Moroccans felt reassured with George W. Bush's rhetoric when he said in his meeting with the Moroccan King, Mohamad VI, that no plan would be imposed on Morocco without its consent.  

Such clear American rhetoric encouraged the French President, Jacques Chirac, to support Rabat's position in the Sahara struggle. Logically, the French who tried different ways of diplomatic confrontations with the Americans in the Security Council would do it again when this latter begins studying the Sahara's case. But meanwhile, they would make sure not to further upset Algeria, as long as the power is in the North African region, which they want to preserve at any cost, cannot accept selective relationships on the account of Algeria or Morocco. However, the big ones' games do not consider the logic of fairness. Also, Morocco and Algeria's problem might be equal to the fact that they previously yielded to the Cold War's seductions and they have not yet been able to adapt with its end. Yet this war was imprinted on the level of the Northern African region by a severe contradiction. The Algerian have made more natural relationships on both the economic and the commercial levels than Morocco did with America in opposition to what is known as the west concluding the century's commercial deals with the former Soviet Union, seeking to draw positions, but the Cold War ended and the Sahara struggle remained.

One cannot assert that France is cloning some of the Cold War's facts, but it hard for it, on the level of the balance in the northern African region, to abandon the centers of its traditional power, knowing that removing it from Africa would be the beginning of the end, as long as its influence is weak in the Middle East and the Gulf, and that Spain, its ally in the European Union is seeking to be the substitute that is acceptable by America. In the progression of events, the donor's conference in Madrid came as an expansion to the Middle East Peace Conference held on the ground of the Gulf War II.

It is the French's right to run what is left of the dominos game according to their stable interests, but the Algerians and Moroccans, equally, have no right to remain as a party in an equation that is not beneficial to them. In all the calculations, the road between Rabat and Algeria is shorter and less costly than any other space between Paris and the region, or between Washington and the Atlantic Ocean, or even between Madrid and the southern basin of the Mediterranean Sea. But New York's summit, which gathered the Moroccan King and the Algerian President, did not succeed in breaking the impregnable obstacles and rebuild trust. With the calculations of each party, Bouteflika succeeded in testing its suggestion to divide the Sahara's section that was a reason for postponing more that one appointment for he Moroccan-Algerian summit. To the same extent, the Moroccan King pictured that the way of the negotiations with Algeria is a start to implement the last recommendation of the Security Council according to Resolution 1495. But this did not prevent the crisis from reappearing.

Was it wrong to propound the desert's struggle on the African level and then on the international one, and not to solve it on the Arabic or the Moroccan level? Was it also wrong that Morocco and Algeria co-existed with the fact that the Sahara's position would always stir up discord among them? Whatever the answer was, the struggle has become one of the main points of stress that moves when it is time for the big ones' struggle in the small ones' region.