Out with the Old, in with the New: Western Sahara back to Square One?

Abstract

The closing months of 2008 saw the end of a chapter and the opening of a new one in the Western Sahara conflict. Over the past three years, the peace process in Western Sahara, what the United Nations considers Africa’s last colony, was under the guidance of former Dutch diplomat Peter Van Walsum, who lost his position as UN Secretary General Personal Envoy at the end of August. Taking up where Van Walsum left off, the United States put forward the nomination of Ambassador Christopher Ross – one the US’s leading Middle East diplomats – to mediate the three decades old dispute between the occupying power, Morocco, and the Sahrawi pro-independence movement, the Polisario Front. The change of leadership in the Western Sahara peace process in autumn 2008 came shortly before the election of Barak Obama to the US presidency. Since 2001, theGeorgeW.Bush administration had taken a decidedly pro-Moroccan stance on the issue of Western Sahara, one that grew more explicit approaching the end of his second term. Though Obama won the election on a pledge to revise the Bush administration’s foreign policies, especially in the Middle East, it was still unclear – at the time ofwriting – whether the new administration in theWhiteHousewould also revise the US position on Western Sahara. As one of the most important Western powers with an interest in Western Sahara, next to France and Spain, yet with the power either to leverage or augment the stances of Paris and Rabat, the United States remains the linchpin to the (ir)resolution of the Western Sahara conflict.