Emmanuel Macron had been addressing the Moroccan parliament for around 30 minutes on Tuesday when its members, emerging from their torpor, stood up to applaud his just uttered words: “The present and the future” of Western Sahara, said the French president, belong under “Moroccan sovereignty”.
The moment was a symbolic one, however much expected. Macron had written to Morocco’s King Mohammed VI on July 30th announcing France’s change of stance on the disputed territory. A former Spanish colony, Western Sahara, which lies south-west of Morocco, is now largely under Moroccan control, but it is also claimed by the pro-independence Polisario Front which has the backing of Morocco’s neighbour Algeria.
For the world of French business, from which around 40 company bosses have been part of the French delegation during Macron’s three-day official visit, it was what he said next that was of particular interest. “I say it very forcefully,” said Macron, “our operators and our companies will join in the development of these territories with investments.”
A few hours later, invited to an economic forum at the University of Rabat, the Moroccan capital, the French president returned to the subject. “It’s an important point and I wanted to clarify things,” he commented. For French businesses, it is a radiant future that is now unfolding. Seen from Rabat, the question of Western Sahara is one of national identity, an issue of the territorial integrity of the kingdom. On the other hand, seen from Paris, it is seen through a more pragmatic approach. The territory of around 266,000 square kilometres is in full development, with phosphate reserves that attract worldwide interest, it has great potential for the renewable energies market, alongside rich fishing reserves off its Atlantic Ocean shores, agricultural land, salt and sand.
The potential of its natural resources is behind the strong pressure employed by the around 1,000 French companies already present in Morocco (including almost all those that make up the CAC 40 benchmark stock market index) to incite Macron and his government to repair relations with Rabat after several years of tensions. “We did the job, in the shadows,” commented Patrick Martin, president of the largest French employers’ federation, the MEDEF, speaking in Rabat on Tuesday.
The tensions that had cooled relations included French investigations into Morocco's intelligence chief over allegations of torture, the scandal of Moroccan bugging of the phones of French politicians and the press, including journalists from Mediapart, France’s decision to halve the number of visas issued to Moroccans, and the rapprochement between France and Algeria.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
During Macron's visit this week, the little-known French company MGH Energy has won the top prize, a 5-billion-euro contract for the production of synthetic, carbon-free fuel in the future port of the town of Dakhla, in the south of Western Sahara. Meanwhile, French energy group ENGIE has signed a development contract with Morocco’s state-owned OCP Group (Office Chérifien des Phosphates), one of the largest phosphate producers worldwide, a deal which notably includes the production of renewable energies in Western Sahara destined to serve the north of Morocco.
The impossible “consent” of the Sahrawi people
Even before the officialization of the major contracts, several French companies (Veolia, Axa, Chancerelle, the UCPA group) were already present in Western Sahara, a land inhabited by a people called the Sahrawi (for “inhabitants of the desert”). But without, until now, official support they were, in the words of Moroccan industry and trade minister Ryad Mezzour, “relatively disadvantaged with regard to their competitors”. He told Jeune Afrique magazine that there had been “a strong demand on their part” for Franco-Moroccan ties to be mended. “The message is clear,” said one diplomatic source who requested their name be withheld, “French companies are encouraged to invest.”
The pro-business strategy however is faced with the obstacle of international law. Western Sahara is considered by the United Nations (UN) as a non-self-governing territory, a notion the UN describes as one "whose people have not yet attained a full measure of self-government", the only territory of the sort in Africa. Since the end of Spanish rule in 1975, the pro-independence Polisario Front has sought to establish a Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic, while Morocco has constantly – and militarily – affirmed its sovereignty over the land.
Since it brokered a ceasefire in fighting between Morocco and the Polisario Front in 1991, a UN mission has been trying, in the name of the right of peoples to auto-determination, to put in place a referendum on the future of Western Sahara, but the efforts have so far failed because of disagreements between the two sides on which inhabitants should have the right to vote.
Meanwhile, in a landmark ruling on October 4th, the European Union Court of Justice concluded that a fishing and agriculture trade deal agreed between the EU and Morocco was invalid because it included resources found in Western Sahara, and as such required “the consent of the people of Western Sahara” which had not been given. Importantly, the court made the important distinction of detailing that the consent should by given by the Sahrawi “people”, and not the “population” of the Sahrawi territory.
This, it underlined, was because a “significant” section of the Sahrawi people live in exile. According to the UN refugee agency, the UNHCR, about 170,000 Sahrawi people currently live in refugee camps in Algeria that were first opened 40 years ago. Over recent decades, several hundred thousand Moroccans have been successfully encouraged by Rabat to move to Western Sahara, and according to some estimations Moroccan nationals now make up around two-thirds of the territory’s population.
In the [Western] Sahara, Morocco carries out policies of occupation, colonisation and confiscation, but France encourages investments there.
Which raises the question of how a consent of the Sahrawi people could be measured. “That consent need not always be explicit,” said the EUCJ in its ruling. “It may be presumed where the agreement does not create obligations for the people who is a third party to that agreement, and where the agreement confers on that people a specific, tangible, substantial and verifiable benefit which derives from the exploitation of that territory’s natural resources and is proportional to the degree of that exploitation.” The court added: “The agreements at issue manifestly do not provide for such a benefit.”
The legal complications place in question the green light enthusiastically given by the French government for the country’s businesses to move into Western Sahara. “In the [Western] Sahara, Morocco carries out policies of occupation, colonisation and confiscation, but France encourages investments there,” complained Mahjoub Maliha, a spokesman for the Collective of Sahrawi Defenders of Human Rights (CODESA).
“The [Court of Justice of the European Union] has established criteria that companies must respect,” said one person from among the French president’s entourage. Another, an advisor who also spoke on condition his name was withheld, said the “terms and conditions” established by the court “don’t appear at all unattainable”. While dodging the specific case of the Sahrawi people, he added: “We already have this practice of consulting local populations. In general, our companies develop local employment, training programmes. I know of few development projects that are set up against the populations concerned. The French development agency is already attentive to the consent of local populations. The ruling by the [Court of Justice of the European Union] has detailed the framework of action, but that absolutely does not turn the strategy upside down.”
But France "will quickly find itself up against international law,” according to political scientist Khadija Mohsen-Finan, a lecturer at Paris-1 university and a specialist on geopolitical issues in the Maghreb region of North Africa. “One could have expected a different position on the part of a country that is not unfamiliar with the Sahara question. France designed the borders, contributed to raids against the Sahrawis in 1977 at the request made by [then Moroccan king] Hassan II to [then French president] Valéry Giscard d’Estaing. It strongly supported the 2007 plan for autonomy. With regard to that history, one could have hoped for a position that takes into consideration the United Nations and international resolutions.”
Fouad Abdelmoumni (see the 'Black box' section at the end of this report) is general secretary of the Casablanca-based anti-corruption NGO Transparency Maroc. “Each defines where their interests lie and the strategy that results from it,” he said. “Here, one can say that France has made its choice by telling Morocco that ‘we can invest where you want, on condition that we take our share of the cake’.” CODESA spokesman Mahjoub Maliha summed up the situation more bluntly: “In Western Sahara, France has never replied ‘present’. It’s only interest there is economic.”
Paris apparently has no intention of pacing its reconciliation with Rabat. On Tuesday evening, French foreign affairs minister Jean-Noël Barrot announced that maps of Morocco on French government websites are to be modified to include Western Sahara. Also announced was a future visit to the territory by France’s ambassador to Morocco, in order to officially inaugurate the enlargement of the embassy’s brief to include what Morocco calls its “Southern Provinces”.
Standing alongside his French counterpart, Moroccan foreign minister Nasser Bourita welcomed decisions he said were “very appreciated”. He summed up how Rabat regards Macron’s state visit: “The evolution of the French position is not only a diplomatic expression, it translates into operational acts”.
-------------------------
- The original French version of this report can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse