Over the past few months, EU diplomats have seen a disturbing trend rejecting diplomacy in the wider European neighbourhood. On the surface, Azerbaijan’s surprise offensive to retake territories occupied by arch-rival Armenia since the 1990s seems to share a number of commonalities with the Polisario Front’s resumption of hostilities against Morocco in Western Sahara this month, breaking a 29-year truce brokered by the United Nations.
Both the Caucasus and North Africa have now seen the collapse of decades-old ceasefire agreements amid frustration with stalled peace negotiations, with the failure of international intermediaries to broker permanent settlements pushing at least one protagonist to unfreeze conflicts left in limbo after the end of the Cold War.
The timing also appears less than coincidental, with Azerbaijan pushing for victory on the battlefield at the precise moment the United States was most distracted with its presidential election – and agreeing to a ceasefire just as America finalized the results. The aforementioned European diplomats scarcely had time to look away from the conflict in the Caucasus before the Polisario decided to blockade trade in Western Sahara and declare war on Morocco on 14 November, forcing Rabat to respond.
That, however, is where the similarities appear to end. As EU countries weigh whether and how to intercede in the newest round of fighting between Sahrawi separatists and Moroccan security forces in the disputed territories, they will ultimately need to view the two conflicts through very different lens.
Fundamentally different dynamics
Azerbaijan’s primary objective, above Nagorno-Karabakh itself, was to retake seven ethnically Azerbaijani raions (districts) of its own territory that had been forcibly seized by Armenian forces after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and whose residents had been forced to flee as refugees within Azerbaijan.
Diplomatic initiatives by the Minsk Group (chaired by Russia, the United States, and France) never succeeded in convincing Armenia to return those territories, primarily because the status quo allowed Yerevan and its ethnic Armenian allies in the self-declared Republic of Artsakh to maintain supply lines and defensive positions in the ‘security zone’ between Nagorno-Karabakh and Armenia proper. In abandoning diplomacy, Azerbaijan was nonetheless recapturing its own territory from foreign occupation.
The status of Western Sahara, by contrast, has posed a more complex question since the UN-brokered ceasefire first came into effect in 1991. Both the Polisario Front, which wants to see the whole of Western Sahara become the ‘Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic’, and the Kingdom of Morocco, which controls most of Western Sahara and sees the region as an integral part of its own territory, previously agreed to proposals to organise a referendum on make good on the inhabitants’ right of self-determination. That referendum, however, was never carried out, in large part because of a disagreement between the two sides over who should be allowed to vote.
The Polisario has taken an exclusionary view of the question, demanding the choice not be offered to many of the people currently living in Western Sahara, including hundreds of thousands of people who have moved there in the years since independence from Spain. Recognizing the impasse around the referendum, the Moroccan government has put forward a plan for Western Saharan autonomy within a united Morocco that has received a warm international reception. American diplomats have consistently described the Moroccan approach as “serious, credible, and realistic” phrasing first used by then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and echoed by a number of Obama and Trump administration officials since then.
The Moroccan government has also invested billions of dollars to develop the economy of the region, expanding the world-leading phosphate industry but also major municipal projects for the city of Laayoune, where a large part of the territory’s population lives. Morocco’s development policies have helped sharply drive down Western Sahara’s poverty rate, and Western Sahara enjoys higher ratings in terms of human development even than other areas of Morocco.
Some foreign backers better than others
In the case of Azerbaijan and Armenia, the regional balance of forces was firmly in Baku’s favour for perhaps the first time since the two countries regained their independence from the collapsing Soviet Union. Unlike in previous rounds of conflict, where Armenia was able to count on substantial support from both its Russian benefactors to the north and its Iranian neighbours to the south, Azerbaijan’s 2020 offensive enjoyed full-throated diplomatic and material support from Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey, as well as substantial assistance from Israel in the form of drones and other cutting-edge military hardware.
Armenia, on the other hand, was left isolated. Moscow declined to make good on its mutual defence pact with Yerevan so long as Azerbaijan’s incursions did not cross Armenia’s own borders. Tehran dared not defy its own Azeri minority’s vocal support of Baku.
In Western Sahara, the Polisario has no concrete outside backing to speak of besides Algeria, which allows the group to operate from the town of Tindouf in western Algeria and which sees the group as a useful cudgel against rival Morocco. Not that Algiers is in any position to extend active support to the Polisario’s new machinations; President Abdelmadjid Tebboune has failed to win over the ‘Hirak’, Algeria’s mass street protest movement, since replacing longtime leader Abdelaziz Bouteflika last year.
In a particularly inauspicious turn of events, Tebboune was forced to leave Algeria for Germany in late October to undergo treatment for COVID-19, just days before his government put through a controversial referendum on a new constitution.
The untenable insurgency
With the vast majority of Western Sahara already being effectively administered by Morocco, and its traditional patrons in Algeria distracted with their own political challenges, the Polisario’s move to undo the ceasefire and block movement through the territory should be perceived by the international community as an unwelcome act of desperation, at a time when instability in other parts of the Sahel has created serious security concerns for governments in Europe.
In his reaction to the recent events, for example, EU High Representative Josep Borrell insisted on compliance with the ceasefire and a commitment on both side to “uphold freedom of movement and cross-border exchanges” through the Guerguerat buffer zone, the precise area where the Polisario has disrupted traffic. The Turkish government has also insisted on free movement in Guerguerat, all while calling for a ‘just and lasting’ solution.
If it chooses to escalate the situation with further provocations, the Polisario could find itself more internationally isolated than at any point since 1991 – much as Armenia did just a couple of weeks ago.
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