Struggles in the Sahara
Geoffrey Furlonge
One May morning some fifty years ago I stood on the summit of Jebel Toubkal, which at nearly 14,000 feet is the highest point of the Atlas range of Morocco. The view was remarkable. To the north, where cultivation and wild flowers covered rolling plains, all was green; to the south, where beyond the Atlas foothills steppe country stretched away towards the distant Sahara, all was brown. This brown country was long known amongst the Arabs as 'Shanqit'. It covers a huge area of mainly arid and inhospitable terrain and has a population little exceeding a million, mostly nomad stockraisers; but it has important mineral resources, and it has of late given rise to a serious international conflict.
Its history is one of successive invasions. Originally populated by West African negroes, it was in the fourth century AD overrun by Berbers from further north whose mobility had been increased by the Roman introduction of the camel into North Africa, and the negroes had to choose between retreating beyond the Senegal River to the south, or becoming serfs. In the eleventh century two tribes of these Berbers, who were already Muslims, were inspired by a divine brought in by their paramount Sheikh to form themselves into a formidable proselytising force known as the Almoravids, who conquered Morocco and the Muslim kingdoms of Spain, and inculcated in the other tribes of Shanqit an Islamic fervour which they have never lost. They incidentally founded at Shanqiti, a site some 250 miles in from the coast, a religious centre which acquired a notable theological library and came to rank, after Mecca, Medina, Cairo, Damascus, Baghdad and Tunis, as the seventh most holy place of Islam.
The Almoravids eventually faded out, and in the fourteenth century Shanqit was again overrun, this time by the Beni Ma'aqil, an offshoot of an Arab tribe, the Beni Hillal, already established in the north; and these Arabs fused with the Berbers to form the present-day population, and gave it the Arabic language which is its lingua franca.
Three centuries later came another invasion when Ahmad al Mansur, the greatest of the Moroccan Sultans, sent an expedition through the country in an effort to capture the sources of the gold which he was already obtaining from farther south, and occupied it for several years before his successors withdrew.
Shanqit was then left alone for another three centuries, but in the late nineteenth became a prey, this time both to Spanish and French colonialism. The Spaniards, who had long fished profitably off its coast in 1884 laid claim to a large piece of its hinterland and gradually extended their hold until, by the turn of the century, they had established a full-scale colony in two provinces, governed from the Canaries. Meanwhile the French, irked by Berber raids from Shanqit into their colony of Senegal, began in the late 1880s to thrust northwards and by 1946 had made the area south and east of the Spanish enclave a 'Territory of the French Republic' under the name of 'Mauritania' (from the `Moors' who mainly inhabited it). After the second world war, however, world-wide anticolonial sentiment threw up a local independence movement, and by 1962 the French had decided to grant Mauritania independence and to sponsor its entry into the United Nations. Independent Mauritania enacted a simple constitution and settled down to an unsophisticated existence, most of its people remaining nomads but the Government's main revenues coming from immense deposits of iron-ore at Zouerate, in the north of the country, which are being exploited by an international consortium and the ore exported in immensely long trains on the only railway to the main port Nouadhibou. Within a few years its whole territory was claimed by King Hassan of Morocco, on 'historic' grounds dating back to al Mansur's seventeenth-century rule, but the King found no Arab or other support, withdrew his claim, and exchanged diplomatic missions with Mauritania.
Spanish Sahara, however, was a different story. It is as barren as Mauritania and is inhabited by similar nomadic tribes, who range freely across its borders into Mauritania and Algeria; but in 1963 the Spaniards had found and had begun to exploit large deposits of phosphates, which not only made the territory a desirable acquisition but threatened, if freely exported, to compete damagingly with Morocco's own main export. In 1970 Morocco, supported by Algeria and Mauritania, sponsored a Resolution in the Fourth Committee of the United Nations calling on Spain to hold a plebiscite amongst her colonial subjects on their future status. This came to nothing, as did a reference to the International Court by Morocco and Mauritania, so King Hassan, forced to change tactics, resorted to the imaginative device of a 'green march' into the territory by 350,000 unarmed peasants in fleets of vehicles, with whom the Spaniards, already in disarray through Franco's last illness, found themselves unable to cope. By late 1975, they had decided that their colony was causing them too much international trouble to be worth keeping, and they therefore came to an agreement with the two claimants to hand it over to them jointly by 29 February, 1976 but to retain a 35 per cent interest in its phosphates. The two recipients had already agreed on a division of the territory and of its phosphates, and the handover duly took place. This accretion of territory and of material potential proved extremely popular in Morocco and buttressed the King's formerly somewhat shaky regime.
But meanwhile Algeria had renewed its interest in the territory, partly owing to ideological dislike of King Hassan's rightwing regime but mainly in the hopes of gaining access to its phosphates and to its transit and port facilities, for the export of iron ore from its own deposits at Tindouf, which lie much nearer to the Atlantic coast than to Oran, the Mediterranean port hitherto used. The Algerians therefore espoused an embryo independence movement amongst the mainly nomadic Spanish Saharans, the 'Polisario', arming its members, providing them with bases near Tindouf, and encouraging them to announce the foundation of a 'Saharan People's Democratic Republic.' This, however, was recognised by only a handful of African States, and the Polisario have been so far confined to executing nuisance raids on both Moroccan and Mauritanian installations — and, most recently, on fishing boats from the Canaries.
These raids, have, however, had wider repercussions. Morocco, which in 1963 lost a brief war with Algeria over possession of the Tindouf iron-mines, has been making threatening noises against Algeria, which II holds responsible for Polisario activities: while France, a number of whose nationals. employed in the Mauritanian iron-works at Zouerate, have been kidnapped and vanished from sight in Algeria, has even threatened the latter with military action to secure their release. French pride, however. seems inadequate as a casus belli against Algeria, and Morocco is even less anxious to assault its richer and more powerful neighbour. The most likely outcome of the affair would seem, therefore, to be an appeal by one or more of the protagonists to the Organisation of African Unity, which Is already seized of the affair but has hitherto had too many problems on its plate (notably the Ethiopian — Somali war) to intervene effectively.
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