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Western Sahara - Baker steps down
From Toby Shelley in London
June 25th, 2004 -- The resignation of James Baker as Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s personal envoy for Western Sahara earlier this month was scarcely a surprise. He was said to have threatened to go two years ago if the Security Council failed to give him a clear mandate.
His appointment in 1997 gave heart to Polisario, the Western Sahara independence movement. A former US secretary of state proposed by Washington surely indicated American resolve to settle the conflict. His departure signifies and contributes to what Kofi Annan has called the “zero sum” nature of the conflict between Morocco and Polisario, something he was unable to overcome.
Baker spent some seven years trying to break the impasse. In the end his frustration — largely with Morocco, it must be assumed — combined with the call to other duties. Bush Jr. had already called on the family retainer to help sort out the Iraq debt mess, and he is likely to require his assistance in the presidential election. Until a new appointment is made, the portfolio will be held by the Peruvian, Alvaro de Soto. His experience of Western Sahara and the region is limited, as he willingly admits. He was appointed UN special representative for the territory in August, having been special adviser on Cyprus, a task to which he was recalled for the referendum earlier this year.
Baker’s departure was a victory for Morocco and was greeted as such in the press. He presided over the erosion of the notion of a Sahrawi people alone entitled to determine its future. Indeed, Polisario diplomats have said that his first attempt to find an alternative to the 1991 Settlement Plan was based on drafts written in Rabat. (The content of the second iteration, the extant peace plan, was known in detail by Morocco before Baker formally presented it to the king but that was probably because Paris had handed the text to its ally.)
Thorn in Rabat’s side
None the less, Baker was a thorn in Rabat’s side. Although he diluted the principle of self-determination for Sahrawis indigenous to the territory by introducing the notion that settlers, both northern Moroccans and ethnic Sahrawis from the south, should also vote, he never entirely abandoned the principle that there should be an act of choice. This ran counter to Rabat’s project to convert the referendum into a rubber stamp for its hold on the territory, whether through gerrymandering on a massive scale or, remarkably, by demanding the removal of the option of independence from the ballot paper.
In 1997 he took at face value assurances from Morocco, as well as Polisario, that the parties remained determined to resolve the dispute through a referendum of voters based on the 1974 Spanish census. At a series of proximity and direct meetings of the parties he banged heads together, appearing to resolve disputes over voter eligibility and coming up with the Houston Accord, which defined the principles and practicalities of the future referendum. It really looked as if a vote would go ahead. In the refugee camps in Algeria, Sahrawis packed their possessions and prepared to go home. They are still waiting.
Now the gerrymandering began in earnest and Baker watched the results of his work unravel. By February 2000, some 130,000 appeals were launched at Moroccan government instigation against the list of voters — numbering just 86,000 — drawn up by the UN on the basis of the last Spanish census of the territory. Rabat’s policy was plain. It would abort any referendum in which it did not control a solid majority of participants. After a wave of nationalist unrest in Laayoune in autumn 1999, in which ethnic Sahrawis shipped into the territory from Morocco as voting fodder for Rabat participated, Morocco’s position became even more entrenched as its doubts grew over the reliability of even its own chosen voters.
Settlement Plan in crisis
By early 2000, Baker and Annan appear to have decided that the Settlement Plan was in terminal crisis. Baker embarked on a project to find a negotiated deal that lay between integration with Morocco and independence. Polisario refused, but Morocco said it would discuss a plan that maintained its sovereignty but allowed autonomy within the very prescribed limits that the kingdom was discussing for its regions.
In May 2001 Baker presented his “framework agreement”, saying he was already confident Morocco would accept it. This confidence was well founded. The startlingly vague and very brief document proposed a period of several years of autonomy under Moroccan sovereignty followed by a vote by the “population” of the territory, including the settlers, who outnumber the indigenes. Algeria’s formal response was excoriating. Baker’s meeting with Polisario leader Mohamed Abdelaziz lasted just 20 minutes. But with the US, France and the UK lobbying in the Security Council for Baker’s proposal, Rabat was confident that victory was within its grasp.
In the event, the framework agreement was just too much of a capitulation to Morocco. Russia made clear it would not accept it and a collection of non-permanent members opposed it, some of them vigorously. A resolution sent Baker away to redraft his proposals in a way “which will provide for the self-determination of the people of the Western Sahara consistent with the principles and purposes of the Charter of the United Nations”.
Early in 2003 he came back with his second iteration, subsequently known as the “peace plan”. The principles were the same — autonomy followed by a vote that would include the participation of settlers. But there was much more detail and for Rabat that was where the devil lay. The criteria for voting were tightened somewhat, reducing Morocco’s ability to flood the territory with more loyalists, and the powers of the autonomous government were strengthened considerably. Morocco rejected the plan, believing itself safe in the knowledge that Polisario would do the same, and therefore opprobrium in the Security Council would be shared.
For several months that was indeed the situation, with both parties rejecting the peace plan. But something had changed — the position of Algeria, which now accepted the principles of the plan as long as safeguards were put in place, principally UN supervision of the process and its outcome. The reasons for the change are probably several: wrong-footing its western rival would have been one; not wishing to anger Washington in the context of the invasion of Iraq another; and furtherance of the project of repositioning Algeria as a friend and partner of the US a third. Polisario bowed to realpolitik and last summer accepted the previously unacceptable as a basis for a settlement. (Senior Polisario members have since suggested that political developments in the Sahrawi communities in southern Morocco might significantly narrow Rabat’s apparent advantage in the proposed electoral arithmetic.)
Morocco, backed by France, rode out a difficult few months in which Annan’s frustration was evident and Baker’s implicit. Where Washington had signalled support for the peace plan and for Annan’s suggestion that the parties be pressed to accept it, enthusiasm faded later in 2003 with official remarks that the US would not force a deal on Rabat. Increasingly bogged down in Iraq and with the presidential election looming, Western Sahara’s brief hold on US attention slipped.
The seeds of Baker’s failure
The seeds of Baker’s failure were sown before he took the job. Ostensibly, his role was to implement the 1991 Settlement Plan, bogged down in arguments between the parties. Yet Kofi Annan was already privately suggesting Baker’s real task would be to broker a deal based on autonomy for Western Sahara. The background presence of a “third way” was fatal to the Settlement Plan, undermining commitment to it and giving Morocco a sanctioned exit from the 1991 agreement.
Baker is on record as saying that a Western Saharan state would be viable, but it seems he was sure it could only come about with Moroccan agreement. The only weapon he had at his disposal was his own prestige — Washington’s interest in the issue has proved occasional and fleeting while the backing of Annan has no more than moral weight, at best. “Western Sahara is not Kuwait,” he once told Polisario diplomats, indicating that the Security Council would not enforce Sahrawi independence by arms. In legal terms the conflict does not fall under a chapter in the UN Charter mandating use of force by the international community. More prosaically, the stability of the Maghreb has yet to be sufficiently threatened for the major powers to determine that a settlement should be imposed.
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