Morocco and its supporters face a particularly torrid time when the United Nations  General Assembly to his week turns to the 17 colonies  before the world organisation waiting to shake off occupiers and gain self-rule.

The absolute monarchy in Rabat goes into the fourth committee of  UNGA, which deals with decolonization issues, days after the  highest European court ruled that it has for years been selling stolen goods from the Western Sahara it has been illegally occupying for  49 years.

The European Court of Justice, Europe’s apex judicial body, has ruled that:

§ Morocco and Western Sahara are two separate and distinct countries;

§ Morocco has no legal claim to Western Sahara, the Spanish colony abandoned by Spain after the death of dictator Francisco Franco;

§ Polisario Front,  the Saharawi liberation movement, is the authentic representative of the Saharawi people; and 

§All agreements Morocco has entered into with other clients buying Western Sahara property and the products from its land and sea resources are null and void.

The ECJ ruling is the climax of eight years of litigation and cannot be appealed.

Morocco has taken the place of its erstwhile ally apartheid South Africa as the bad guy at the UN, by using the undercover backing it has from a permanent member of the Security Council to flagrantly disregard the rulings of the world organisation ordering it to stop exploiting the resources and end its cruel occupation of Western Sahara.

It is not expected to change tack.

However the European members that have of late shown overt support for Morocco’s attempt to legitimize its illegal occupation will not be able to ignore the ruling of the ECJ.

These are France, Spain and Denmark that are all on the record at the UN as condemning Morocco’s illegal occupation.

Morocco cannot avoid the economic implications of the ECJ ruling.

It’s attempt to sell prime beachfront properties along the 1400 kms of Western Sahara coast, phosphates and agricultural property from the Saharawi land it illegally occupies and lucrative fishing rights to Saharawi waters have now been finally and indubitably declared  illegal.

Morocco might rail against this at the UNGA decolonisation committee hearings that run this week.

An unprecedented 250 petitioners have been approved for these hearings, 150 of these to speak on Western Sahara

However the ruling of the European apex court is final.

The road to a settlement in Western Sahara once again runs along plans for a referendum of the country’s people on self determination.

Morocco agreed to such a plebiscite in 1991 when it sought to end the exhausting 11-year war with Polisario following the occupation.

Once the treaty was signed, it quickly reneged on this undertaking.  

Its  proposal to maintain overall autonomy of the country with certain rights being granted to the Saharawi people has also been buried in the desert sand by the ECJ ruling that its actions are  “breaching the right of the people of Western Sahara to self determination.”

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So I was not surprised when the envoy from Rabat Youssef Amrani  walked up to the podium where I was speaking from at the Pretoria Country Club and yelled “Liar, liar” when I compared the regime of King Mohammed VI to those of John Vorster and P.W.Botha.

I likened Morocco’s illegal occupation of the Western Sahara in 1975 to South Africa’s futile attempt to hold onto South West Africa – now Namibia – that I

was reporting on at the United Nations in New York at the time.

So strong is Morocco’s wish to obliterate this truth, now that it is trying to forge better relations with African nations, that it forces its servile media to comply.

I have had personal experience of this having once attended an editorial conference of the newspaper Le Matin du Sahara.

When I asked whether they would ever publish a piece criticizing Morocco’s occupation of the Western Sahara, the editor sidestepped furiously.

When I followed this up with a question on whether they could ever, under any circumstances criticize the king, he literally left the room.

Since I was an official guest of the Moroccan government my visit was reported.

The next day the newspaper carried my picture taken with the editor in the pressroom.

The caption said the South African visitor had expressed amazement about the technology available to the newspaper.

Absolute balderdash.

Honest journalism has no place in a country where the leaders display a capacity to lie repeatedly to please the king.

Over the years I have noted the similarity in the ability of the Moroccans and the apartheid regime to shoot themselves in the foot.

When they reach a crossroad with an option between ethical behavior and ignominy, they can be relied up to take the latter path every time.

This week Morocco fumed as Spain taking in the President of the Saharawi Democratic Republic, Brahim Ghali, for COVID treatment.

Relations between Ranat and the former colonial power are shaky at best.

It was when the dictator General Franco died and Spain quit the Western Sahara that Morocco sent its troops in.

When Spain decolonized in Morocco, it retained two enclaves, Ceuta and Melila, on the African mainland to protect shipping on the Mediterranean and it has refused persistent Moroccan calls for their return.

Moroccan desperate to flee the poverty and parlous human rights in their own country frequently risk personal injury by trying to scale the two-meter-high, barbed-wire-topped fences around these enclaves which means effectively they have reached European territory

Not surprisingly, Spain has not apologized for its humanitarian gesture in treating President Ghali.

One has to ask what occurred to the Moroccan authorities to protest?

The Moroccan media have been dragooned into a rearguard action bombarding social media with reports of Spanish courts seeking to drag the president into court, based on complaints from a Saharawi dissident.

The mainstream media and the Spanish authorities put paid to this with discounting any idea of Brahim Ghali being summonsed.

One might say this has dented Moroccan credibility. However it is impossible to damage a quality that has not existed in decades.

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Donald Trump’s claim to have brokered the deal is made all the more ridiculous by the well-know reality that Tel Aviv and Rabat have secretive military relations dating back decades – to the time they were both in league with the apartheid regime.

In those Cold War days Morocco was being armed by Pretoria and Israel cooperated with apartheid South Africa in developing a nuclear weapon.

Both countries justifiably feel deep shame about this now and speak of it either with reluctance or try to deny it.

The surprise in yesterday’s announcement by President Trump is his recognizing what he calls Morocco’s sovereignty over Western Sahara.

This amounts to him flying in the face on international condemnation of Morocco’s 1995 invasion of the former Spanish territory and its illegal occupation of it since then.

Britain, America’s permanent Western partner on the United Nations Security Council, who joined in scolding Morocco 45 year ago, hastened today to stress that its position on Western Sahara has not changed.

It is holding Morocco to its promise to hold a referendum on self-governance for the territory.

That was a condition of the 1991 ceasefire ending Morocco’s 16 year war with Polisario, the Western Sahara liberation movement.

The African Union also hastened to emphasize that Western Sahara is a founder member of the continental grouping having been admitted to its predecessor the Organization of African Unity.

Morocco stormed out of the OAU when this happened and shunned Africa until it recently joined the AU as a fellow member with the Saharawi Arab Democratic Republic.

King Mohammed VI, Morocco’s absolute ruler, has clearly opted once again to turn his country’s back on Africa to take up with Israel and the lame duck Trump administration in the United States.

It remains to be seen whether President Joe Biden will persist with the maverick position on Morocco which is at odds with international opinion.

The ruling African national Congress in South Africa which currently occupies the  chair of the African Union says: “It is regrettable that outgoing President Trump in his last days in office tries to cement his legacy of reactionary foreign policies, that does not contribute to peaceful resolutions of conflict in  the world, but in fact fuels hatred and conflict.”

It “calls on all international and progressive forces on the continent and in the world to condemn this deal and continue to work for the implementation of UN and AU resolutions.”

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Social distancing was enforced as the envoys made short speeches expressing wishes of broadening and deepening bilateral relations with South Africa before presenting the president with the letters from their heads of state.

Some of the ambassadors managed to make powerful use of the two minutes allotted to them.

Sweden’s Håkan Joholt recalled how he’d become an anti-apartheid activist at age 25 before serving 23 years as a member of parliament.

“I have come here to build bridges and to forge people-to-people ties between Swedes and South Africans,” he said. “What we can do together is fight for democracy, human rights, peace and a sustainable environment,” he said.

Entering his second term as ambassador of the Saharawi Arab Democratic Republic, Mohammed Beissat said Polisario and the ANC forged ties as liberation movements at the most difficult times for their countries.

He recalled how Oliver Tambo visited the Western Sahara and returned to South Africa with apartheid-built tanks captured by the Saharawi from the Moroccan.

“Now Mr President the Western Sahara faces fresh aggression from Morocco,” he said referring to the kingdom breaking the 30 year old truce signed under UN auspices that ended the war that followed Morocco’s 1975 invasion of the former Spanish colony.

“We are confident we can overcome yet another challenge from the illegal occupier, especially since we are assured of your support and the solidarity of your government and people,” said the ambassador.

Braving a heatwave that took the mercury into the thirties, the ambassadors were greeted by a guard-of-honour before entering the guest house to have their exchange with the President.

In addition to the Western Sahara and Sweden, Ramaphosa received credentials from the ambassadors of 

Vietnam, North Korea, Iran, Botswana, Cote’Ivoire, Bangladesh, Ukraine, Egypt, China, Sweden, Mauritius, Pakistan, Sudan and South Sudan, Slovenia, Finland.

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President Cyril Ramaphosa had his work cut out when he took on the chairmanship of the African Union this year.

He is committed to steering the continental body along its final bumpy stretch of road to the ambitious goal of silencing the Guns in 2020.

More importantly, the bean counters argue, he  has to oversee  the final implementation of the African Free Trade Agreement.

Both of these face an existential threat from COVID 19.

Silencing the guns means ending all wars, civil conflict, violence conflict, and gender-based violence on the continent.

Herculean does not being to describe this task.

Since their inception, African conflicts have gobbled up the lion’s share of United Nations peacekeeping operations.

Deploying the blue helmets currently takes up an amount approaching $8 billion a year. That is $1 billion more than the overall budget of the world organisation.

Of the 13 active UN peacekeeping operations around the planet, no fewer than seven – Western Sahara, Darfur, Central African Republic, Abyei, South Sudan, Mali and the Democratic Republic of Congo – are in Africa.

The latter is the largest and most expensive blue helmet operation, taking up 20 000 of the 100 000 UN peacekeepers deployed worldwide.

To put some perspective on this, the number of UN troops deployed in the DRC is half the number of US troops stationed in Germany.

The United States currently picks up 28% of the UN peacekeeping tab which is less than one percent of total US defense spending – about as much as Washington spends in a month on its military operation in Afghanistan.

African leaders have for a time sought to pay more for peacekeeping in their determination to give credibility to the principle of African solutions for African problems. 

The best they can manage is a 25:75 split in costs with  the UN and this has yet to be inked.

As the battle with the COVID 19 pandemic turns the G7 economies on their heads, African countries know that they will feel the cost even  more keenly.

They are having to go to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund for money simply to feed their people.

The Bretton Woods institutions are obliged to make their assistance conditional on the recipients adhering to strict austerity policies.

Silencing the Guns and implementing an African Free Trade Agreement are undeniably desirable.

Silencing the Nevertheless AU chairman Cyril Ramaphosa will be hard pressed to convince the lenders that these projects take priority over fiscal discipline and  financing the bare necessities.  

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They are all small, relatively remote and have tests rates either extremely low or not all.

South Africa continues to top the continental table of COVID 19 infections.

Its1462 cases recorded this morning are far and away ahead of second place Algeria which has 986 cases.

Egypt, Morocco and Tunisia follow that.

The African countries that have not recorded COVID19 cases are Comoros, Lesotho, Sao Tome and Principe, South Sudan  and Western Sahara.

All of these fall into the World Health Organisation’s remote category mentioned when it confirmed that the global infections exceed one million.

The total number of African deaths from COVID 19 is currently 290.

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He did not do this either Morocco or Egypt – two of his four previous African visit – that arguably have more deplorable human rights records than the Pope’s current hosts.

Amnesty International has asked the Pope to express concern about the prolonged detention of pretrial prisoners in Mozambique and the beating of journalists and human rights defenders.

It was Pope Benedict, the incumbent’s predecessor, who angered Egypt during his visit with the vehemence of his denunciation of attacks on Christians.

And in Morocco earlier this year, Pope Francis said nothing about that country’s protracted illegal occupation of the Western Sahara in defiance of the international community.

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Recent events at the International Court of Justice in the Hague and the United Nations General Assembly remind us there is another: Britain’s continued administration of the Indian Ocean Chagos Archipelago.

Holding sway over the empire upon which the sun never set, Britain began calling the shots on  developments in the Indian Oceans around Mauritius from 1814.

Before giving that country independence in 1968, Britain paid four million pounds for the Chagos Archipelago and called it the British Indian Ocean Territory

In the mid sixties it leased one of the islands, Diego Garcia to the United States.

The Pentagon build a strategically importnat military base there, secure in the knowledge that it has tenure until 2035.

At Washington’s behest, Britain moved the  1800-odd islanders  off their home. They have never been allowed to return.

This type of behaviour might have been generally accepted in a bygone era of colonial administration..

It does not wash today – certainly not from a  country that has long passed the twilight of its global power.

Britain has set aside 40 million pounds to assist the displaced Chagoans who are mostly in Britain, the Seychelles and Mauritius.

Still not good enough.

The matter was brought to the United Nations’ top court that found in February that Britain had acted illegally by hiving off the archipelago to continue its occupation. The ICJ ruled this should end as soon as possible.

In the General Assembly this week, an African-sponsored motion was passed by 116 votes to six giving Britain six month to get off Chagos.

Britain’s ambassador to the world organization Dame Karen Pierce said candidly that this would not happen.

Britain is determined to continue its control of Chagos at least until 2036.

Not surprisingly the United States was one of the half-dozen opponents of the resolution.

It reminded the international community that operations from Diego Garcia protect the region from terrorists and pirates. The base is also used for humanitarian purposes like reducing tsunami victims.

Diego Garcia is not used to house terror suspects  but it is used as a refueling stop in transitioning them from points of capture to places of incarceration.

It was also used for US bombing raids on Iraq and Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington 18 years ago.

Neither the ICJ ruling nor the UNGA resolution is binding.

General Assembly resolutions cannot be enforced.

However the strongly reflects international opinion.

Flying in the face of it brings into question Britain’s commitment to the multilateral system of  governance.

With its military power having waned, Britain, like most other countries, has to rely on moral clout.

Mauritian Prime Minister Pravind Jugnauth urged countries to support the General Assembly resolution, saying failure to do so would be endorsing colonialism.

He maintains the United States can lease its military base from his government, adding that Mauritius would find it deeply offensive if Washington did not regard it as a trusted security partner.

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South Africa’s decision to accept a new ambassador  is carefully timed to coincide with its hosting an international conference in supporting an end to that occupation and self-determination  of the Saharawi people.

If, as expected, Rabat’s new envoy arrives in Pretoria shortly, his first job will be to report on the host government’s strong condemnation of Morocco’s theft of resources from Western Sahara and its defiance of the international community by persisting with its occupation.

Morocco is evidently prepared to swallow its pride in order to normalize relations with the primary African political player.

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South Africa has twice proved the veracity of this.

In its first rotating term on the UN powerhouse between 2007 and 2008, the South African government – still in its heady days of President Nelson Mandela – appeared insensitive to human rights violations in Myanmar and Zimbabwe.

Eager to avoid a similar accusation in its second term between 2011 and 2012 South Africa voted for a resolution supporting “all necessary measures to protect civilians on the ground” from aerial against attacks by the forces of dictator Muammar Gadaffi. 

This led to military action that contributed to Gadaffi’s overthrow and killing which set off violence and insecurity from which the country still has not recovered.

South African protests that it never actually supported military action against Gadaffi drew chortles from observers who said it was dangerously naive of the South Africans not to realize their vote for a no-fly zone over Libya could possibly lead to anything else.

South Africa’s newly-acquired BRICS partners Brazil, Russia, India and China abstained in that vote.

Barak Obama’s U.S. Government reiterated that South Africa had merely done the right thing.

This was cold comfort for the African nations who insisted that Libya should have been left for the AU to sort out.

The Africans saw fit to put South Africa up for a third term in the diplomatic engine room.

Will South Africa be able to parlay this into eventually becoming the permanent African member on a reformed UN Security Council?

This will be the call not so much of fellow Africans but of the heavy hitters who would have to agree to the reforms.

The signs so far are rather ominous.

South Africa has sat so firmly on the fence on the fraught Ukraine issue that it has iron its soul.

In the year ahead, the Western powers on the Security Council are bound to take a tougher line against Russian aggression aimed at its western neighbour and its annexation of Crimea.

They will be looking for consistency from South Africa that has steadfastly cited moral grounds for standing against Moroccan aggression in north Africa and its invasion of Western Sahara.

European diplomats say South Africa’s decision to abstain in the UN General Assembly vote on human rights violations in Myanmar is disappointing.

There has been stronger language from Asian countries.

They are comparing South Africa’s refusal to vote in favor of human rights protection for Rohingya refugees with what they call discredited Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi’s abetting of genocide.

Minister of International Relations and Cooperation Lindiwe Sisulu has signaled there will be change in this stance and they are all eagerly awaiting the new position.

They will also look to South Africa to alter it abstention and actually support UN disarmament chief Izumi Nakamitsu’s call for an end to the use of chemical weapons by Syria.

Doing this would put South Africa at odds with Russia as it shows an increasing tendency to stay on-side with its BRICS partner.

In the vote for the new Interpol chief, for example, South Africa withdrew it’d candidate for the post and threw its support behind Russian Alexander Prokapchuk who eventually lost to South Korean Kim Yong Yan.

At stake over the next two years is more than merely irritating Western friends.

South Africa’s contributions and votes on the 15-nation Security Council will bring it directly into the cross-hairs of Donald Trump whose vengeful  petulance easily exceeds his short attention span.

If he doesn’t like something South Africa does it is easily within the realms of possibility that it might be made to pay by losing its favorable access to US markets via the American Growth and Opportunity Act or AGOA.

The Saharawi people, living under Moroccan occupation for 43 years,  will be grateful for having South Africa on the Security Council.Sisulu has promised South Africa will use its position to press for self-determination for the Western Sahara. By implication this means getting Morocco to quit the territory.

So, however we look at it, for the next two years South Africa will be playing high-stakes poker at the biggest game in town.

EndsIsumi

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