Morocco Sets Hard Line Over Ending Western Sahara Fighting

(Bloomberg) -- Morocco’s king and the armed independence movement in the disputed region of Western Sahara appeared unwilling to make significant concessions to end the worst fighting in 30 years, staking out stridently opposing positions as clashes continued.

King Mohammed VI said a military operation on Friday by Morocco’s army had enabled trade to resume through the strategic border post at El Guergarat that had been blockaded by supporters of the pro-independence Polisario Front.

Morocco “has redressed the situation, settled the problem definitively and restored the flow of trade,” the monarch told United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres late on Monday, according to a royal statement.

While authorities would continue to support UN efforts to reach “a realistic and achievable solution” for the conflict, those efforts must ensure the territory stays under Moroccan sovereignty, the king said.

Morocco opposes holding a referendum in Western Sahara that offers the option of independence, a choice envisaged by the UN when it brokered a 1991 cease-fire pact that largely held until last week.

‘No Feasible Way’

Polisario, which accuses Morocco of reneging on the three-decade-old agreement and is backed by neighboring Algeria, vowed to intensify its attacks.

“There is just no feasible way to prevent a full return to war,” the group’s envoy to Europe, Oubi Bouchraya Bachir, said in a phone interview. “The cease-fire is over once and for all.”

Stretching along the Atlantic coast and rich in minerals, Western Sahara is larger than the U.K. and has been bitterly contested since its 1975 annexation by Morocco after the withdrawal of ex-colonial power Spain. Sporadic fighting between Morocco and Polisario claimed about 9,000 lives over 16 years.

Polisario’s Sahrawi Popular Liberation Army said it attacked army positions on Monday along a sand berm separating Moroccan-held territory from areas it controls, the third such announcement in as many days.

The fighting couldn’t be independently verified and Polisario didn’t give casualty figures.

In his first public remarks after the king spoke with Guterres, Polisario leader Brahim Ghali raised the stakes, saying that while his organization didn’t want bloodshed, “the resistance of the Sahrawis will be in the language that the Moroccan colonizers understand” and will only stop when “victory is attained.”

Heavy Investment

Morocco’s government, which strictly limits media access to the area, has invested heavily in parts of the Western Sahara it controls to try to create jobs for both the indigenous Sahrawi population and Moroccans who live there.

The Collective of Sahrawi Human Rights Defenders, which monitors Moroccan-controlled areas of the disputed territory and isn’t recognized by Rabat, said protests supporting Polisario’s push for self-determination have been staged daily since Friday in important towns such as Laayoune and Smara.

Some of those demonstrations led to clashes with Moroccan security forces, it said in an email. Boubker Sabik, a spokesman for Morocco’s security agency DGSN, didn’t return calls seeking comment.

Algeria hosts Polisario’s headquarters, while about 100,000 Sahrawis who back its push for independence live in camps in the country’s south.

The Algerian parliament this week slammed Morocco’s intervention as violating commitments to solve the dispute under a UN framework. It urged the UN to move ahead with a referendum.

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