Morocco v Algeria

DURING the sweltering day, an oddly subdued mood hangs over the sleepy city of Laayoune. Only at night, after the sun has set below the desert horizon and the smell of grilled camel drifts out of the sandwich shops that dot the broad boulevards, does the city come to life. For Morocco Laayoune is a hub for fishing and phosphate mining. For the separatist Polisario movement it is the occupied capital of what should be the independent Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR). The rebel movement has never come close to running the place—and, as things stand, probably never will. Yet the impasse still blocks the resumption of proper relations between Morocco and Algeria, which has long backed Polisario.

For a good three decades, the UN has been trying to arrange a deal. Sometimes it has seemed close to giving up. But on November 8th-9th representatives of Morocco's government and Polisario are to meet under the world body's aegis in Manhasset, New York, along with officials from Algeria and Mauritania, to try to find a solution. If they fail as usual, the bad blood could get worse. The UN's latest envoy, Christopher Ross, says the status quo is “unsustainable”.

The row has been going on since November 1975, when Morocco's then king, Hassan II, got 350,000 of his people to mass on its southern border, in order to bully Spain, which controlled Spanish Sahara, as it was then called, into ceding the territory. Spain duly did so. The following month, the Moroccan army marched in, prompting a 16-year war with Polisario fighters backed by neighbouring Algeria.

By Moroccan standards, Laayoune is prosperous. The government in Rabat has invested a lot of cash in an effort to win hearts and minds. And yet, despite a ceasefire since 1991, a nervy atmosphere permeates the city. At its eight checkpoints, zealous secret police and UN peacekeepers' white jeeps stand by. The indigenous people are far from happy.

Since early October thousands of Sahrawis have gathered at Gadaym Izik, ten minutes' drive outside the city, where they have pitched some 8,000 tents. Campaigners say it is the biggest demonstration since Morocco took control of Western Sahara. But the demands of the tent people are not overtly political. Instead, they are calling for economic equality and a proper say on the exploitation of the territory's resources. Morocco is renegotiating a fishing agreement with Europe which includes the seas off Western Sahara.

The protests are fraying nerves. After a 14-year-old boy was killed, the authorities said he had been bringing guns to the tented camp, which foreign journalists have been prevented from visiting. Al-Jazeera's offices in Rabat have been closed because of the satellite channel's alleged “prejudice against Morocco”.

Native Sahrawis now account for only a fifth of the city's 200,000-odd people, most of whom are Moroccans lured by subsidies and government jobs. In the mainly Sahrawi district of Maatala, where SADR flags and pro-Polisario graffiti can occasionally be seen, doors are reinforced with steel against police raids.

“Continuing human-rights abuses and the lack of a solution risk radicalising our young people,” says Aminatou Haidar, a human-rights campaigner and former political prisoner sometimes called “the Saharan Gandhi” for preaching non-violence. In 1999 and again in 2005, riots shook the city. Smaller clashes between separatists and the Moroccan authorities flare up intermittently.

A year ago Ms Haidar was turned back at Laayoune's airport, apparently for writing “Western Sahara” as her country on her landing card. She spent the next month on hunger strike at an airport in the nearby Canary Islands, which belong to Spain, before the Moroccans were persuaded (apparently by Hillary Clinton, the American secretary of state, among others) to let her back in.

Her expulsion came a week after King Muhammad VI, who succeeded his father, King Hassan, in 1999, had hardened his line against the separatists. “One is either a patriot or a traitor,” he said. “One cannot enjoy the rights of citizenship and at the same time plot with the nation's enemies.”

Such comments make diplomacy go backwards, says Ms Haidar, who echoes the Polisario view that, as Morocco initially agreed, the territory's future should be determined by a referendum. But in 2000, after Morocco and Polisario had failed to agree on a range of issues, the UN had to abandon a census that would have enabled a voters' roll to be drawn up. Since then, Morocco, with a French and American nod, has proposed autonomy as the only solution. Morocco is now proceeding with a plan for a regional authority to be set up as a step towards autonomy.

“The parties…do not yet possess the political will to enter into genuine negotiations on the future of the Western Sahara,” wrote Mr Ross in June. Since then he has been calling on the Group of Friends of Western Sahara, consisting of Britain, France, Russia, Spain and the United States, to stop the stumbling talks between Morocco and Polisario from breaking down altogether. The upcoming meetings are at least partially the result of his efforts.

But it is an uphill task. Earlier this year flights between Laayoune and Tindouf, the nearest big town in Algeria, close to Polisario's main camps in exile, were hailed as a confidence-building measure. But the flights have since been cancelled. Ms Haidar's treatment and the arrest in Tindouf of Mustafa Salma, a senior Polisario man, after he had declared his support for Morocco's autonomy proposal, worsened the mood. Mr Ross wants Algeria's government, Polisario's main backer, to become a fully-fledged party to the talks, but it has refused so far to join in, saying that only Polisario can speak for the Western Saharans. Along with Mauritania, it will only observe the talks.

“Sahrawis are pawns in the rivalry between Algeria and Morocco,” concludes Eddah Laghdaf, who directs a state-run television station in Laayoune and backs Morocco's autonomy idea. “We Sahrawis are obliged to choose between Algeria and Morocco, since an independent state would be an Algerian satellite,” he adds. “I choose Morocco as it offers at least a glimmer of hope for democratisation.” Algeria, he implies, is a deadlier dictatorship. But that hardly means Saharans are itching to stay under Moroccan control.

Polisario's SADR is recognised by at least 50 countries today, though the movement says more than 80 governments at one time did so. But African countries, especially, have blown hot and cold, sometimes granting recognition and then withdrawing it, often depending on their relations with Morocco and Algeria. Uncertainty, it seems, is pervasive.