Frank Ruddy
U.S. Ambassador (ret.)
THE
UNITED NATIONS AND WESTERN SAHARA
Distinguished Members of Government and of the Diplomatic Corps,
Distinguished Members of the University, Friends of Western Sahara,
I am indebted to our hosts here today for sponsoring this Conference on
International Law and Western Sahara, and I applaud the Republic of
South Africa for its continuing support of the Sahrawi people. In
particular I thank the Department of Foreign Affairs and Ambassador Van
Tonder, Director for North Africa, and the University of Pretoria and
Professor Michelle Olivier of the Law Faculty, for providing us, and
those interested in international law, with this extraordinary forum to
exchange ideas. I note to Professor Olivier that I lectured here, in
the Law School, in 1971 or so on the Angela Davis case, a cause celebre
at that time. I thank too all our distinguished colleagues who traveled
here from all over the world and add their own luster to this program.
I admire Professor El Ouali who came here from Morocco to defend the
indefensible. I cannot agree with his position, but I have to
acknowledge his pluck. As lawyers say in my country, when you don’t
have the law, argue the facts. When you don’t have the facts, argue the
law. When you have neither, it is probably not a bad idea to storm off
which is what Professor El Ouali chose to do today.
While I am acknowledging people, let me add that I have had the honor
over my career in government to work with two formidable authorities on
the United Nations: The late Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick whom I knew
when I was at USAID’s Sub-Saharan African Bureau, and Ambassador John
Bolton with whom I worked at USAID when he was a mere lawyer. I am
indebted to them both for their many insights which I reflect in these
remarks today.
Eleven years ago, I shared a tent in Tindouf with Jose Ramos Horta who
had just won the Nobel Prize for his courage in fighting for the
independence of his people in East Timor. Until I met him, I
thought that heroes were just people I read about in books. In Ramos
Horta I had the pleasure of meeting one in flesh and blood.
Today is déjà vu all over again. I have the honor
to be on the same program as Aminatou Haidar, a Sahrawi heroine who
comes here just after being awarded the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights
Award in Washington, D.C. It was my honor to be one of her sponsors for
that award.
Ms Haidar is a non-violent, peaceful demonstrator in her home, Western
Sahara, for the self-determination of her people and for the release
from Moroccan prisons of Sahrawi political prisoners. For her peaceful
protests the Moroccan invaders of her country have, for the last 20
years, beaten her, imprisoned and held her incommunicado for months on
end and ruined her health. The next time you hear the Moroccans talk
about the good they are going to do for the Sahrawi people, remember
what they did and are doing to the Sahrawi people. Remember this brave,
frail woman whom you see here today with your own eyes and what the
Moroccans have done to her.
The Moroccans have promised Aminatou more of the same if she doesn’t
quit her protests. If you have seen a bootlegged copy of the 2006 U.N.
Human Rights Committee’s Report on Western Sahara, I say bootlegged
copy because the U.N. will not release it officially (It’s not for
public consumption, you see), you know the Moroccans mean business.
Freedom House and similar human rights organizations give
Morocco-occupied Western Sahara and Zimbabwe the same bottom-dwelling
score, just beating out Tibet, Cuba and North Korea. Will she quit? Or
will she carry on, agreeing with Elie Wiesel: “There may be times when
we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time
we fail to protest.” I know the answer. So do you. To paraphrase
the Irish poet, William Butler Yeats: All of us here today say that our
glory is that we have such a friend as you, Aminatou.
THE REFERENDUM THAT NEVER WAS
My first experience with the U.N. was like being written into a Woodie
Allen script. I was hired by Sahabzada Yaqub Khan, a distinguished
Pakistani statesman who was then serving as Secretary General
Boutros-Ghali’s representative for Western Sahara. He reminded me of
Nigel Bruce, the fine old character actor who played Dr Watson in the
Sherlock Holmes films, a little stodgy and dotty at times as I suppose
many men of his accomplishments are. What I remember most is Erik
Jensen’s account of Yaqub Khan’s visit to Western Sahara. He asked
Jensen, who was in charge of MINURSO at the time, about a large flag
flying outside his office: “Why are you flying the Israeli flag?” Of
course, the flag was not Israeli, but Moroccan. Both flags do have a
big star in the middle, and, after all, no one’s perfect.
Erik Jensen had many stories like this and was a wonderful raconteur, a
fine mimic of Boutros-Ghali among others and generally very amusing
company. He was a real life version of Bertie Wooster,
Wodehouse’s silly Englishman with his spats and monocle. Jensen was a
gentleman but without spats and monocle and unfortunately no match for
his opposite number, Mohamed Azmi, a thug and King Hassan’s enforcer in
Western Sahara. Azmi was the incarnation of Graham Greene’s Captain
Segura, from Our Man in Havana, charming during the daylight hours, but
vicious when night fell and the Johnnie Walker Black flowed. He was a
scrupulously religious fellow, however, never partying before 9 p.m.
during Ramadan. The brooding omnipresence over the dramatis personae
was U.N. Secretary General, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, a close friend of
King Hassan and someone who should have, for that very reason, recused
himself from participating in the Western Sahara issue. Boutros-Ghali’s
egregious ego and blunders got him ousted as Secretary General,
something unheard of in U.N. history where almost everything from
embezzlement of funds to demanding sexual favors from subordinates is
regarded as a peccadillo. He was also guilty of what Winston Churchill
called “terminological inexactitude,” or what you and I would call tall
tales. I remember reading in a Washington paper his account of his
visit to Western Sahara. He said it took him 4 or 5 days to fathom the
complexities of the competing Moroccan-POLISARIO positions. In fact,
and I know this because I was there, he spent one day in Western
Sahara, and half that time he was eating couscous with the Moroccans.
These would have been stories to dine out on if things had turned out
differently. My job in MINURSO was to run that referendum on the future
of Western Sahara, one of the reasons for which MINURSO was created,
but these same laughable characters turned that referendum into a
tragedy, an enormously expensive tragedy for the Sahrawi people.
I documented my experience with MINURSO in testimony before the U.S.
Congress. I was able to do so thanks to the late Chuck Lichenstein, a
former U.S. ambassador to the U.N. and deputy to Ambassador
Kirkpatrick. Despite, or because of, his proximity to the United
Nations, he was not a great admirer of that body. It was he who said
after the Soviets, with impunity, shot down a Korean passenger plane in
1983: “If, in the judicious determination of the members of the United
Nations, they feel they are not welcome and treated with the hostly
consideration that is their due, the United States strongly encourages
member states to consider seriously removing themselves and this
organization from the soil of the United States. We will put no
impediment in your way, and we will be at the dockside bidding you
farewell as you set off into the sunset.” It was Chuck who felt
the United Nations’ actions in Western Sahara were so outrageous, even
by U.N. standards, that my story had to be told. He gave up his place
on that congressional panel in order that I could do so.
My testimony was hastily put together and brief. In a nutshell, I said
that the referendum had serious problems from the start. Inexplicably,
Erik Jensen had decided to allow the opposing parties themselves to
process applications to vote in the referendum. As a result, the
Moroccans were able to and did disenfranchise vast numbers of Sahrawi
voters. The same problem did not exist in the POLISARIO centers in
Algeria where the only applicants were POLISARIO supporters. There was
nobody to disenfranchise.
The referendum continued to slide downhill once the application process
began. In Western Sahara, terrified Sahrawis asked us to keep an eye on
them, but discreetly, because any overt contact with the U.N. could get
them “disappeared.” I said at the time that it reminded me of this
country, South Africa, during apartheid, when I could meet and talk
freely with black people in the safety of the U.S. Embassy but would be
ignored by those same black people when I encountered them publicly
because they quite reasonably feared repercussions if seen talking to a
foreign official. Oh yes. Did I forget to mention? Under Moroccan
occupation, Western Sahara was and is a police state.
There were delays and more delays. On one occasion, like something out
of a French farce, the referendum was delayed for two weeks, at a cost
of $100,000 a day, over Morocco’s demand for an exchange of letters to
discuss the interpretation of an adverb used in a referendum notice.
In addition to the delays, which were interminable, there was
infiltration by the Moroccan Security Forces photographing every
Sahrawi in the identification process, Moroccan taps on all
international phone lines in and out of MINURSO and, in a word,
Moroccan control of what was supposed to be a United Nations operation.
For all his amusing skills, Erik Jensen did not have the gravitas, let
us say, in place of a harsher word, to deal with a thug like Azmi. To
complete the picture, at the end of my stay in MINURSO, I was making my
reports to both Erik Jensen and Mohamed Azmi simultaneously. Even the
veneer of an independent U.N. mission was gone by that time.
It turned out that what I thought I had been discovering on my own was
common knowledge. As NY Timesman Chris Hedges reported in that
newspaper, foreign diplomats in Rabat were amused at Morocco’s
brazenness, but no Morocco-watchers were actually surprised. The
American Embassy political officer knew what was going on in MINURSO,
and another MINURSO officer, like U.N. Ambassador Albright, a Wellesley
grad, personally briefed the ambassador’s staff that Morocco was
turning the referendum into a sham. An intelligence official asked me
on July 4th of that summer: “What accounts for that [bleeping] weakness
in MINURSO that lets Morocco dominate of the referendum?” Even Human
Rights watch was able to prepare a 44-page document on Morocco’s
violations of Sahrawi rights because it seemed everyone knew what was
going on in MINURSO.
THE UNITED NATIONS IN ACTION IN THE
INTERIM, OR RATHER UNITED NATIONS’ INACTION
But first as they say on television, a word from our sponsors: A brief
look at the United Nations: the history, rhetoric and the reality.
In 1693 William Penn published his “Essay toward the Present and Future
Peace of Europe.” It called for the creation of a “parliament of
princes,...to adjudicate territorial controversies and uphold the rule
of law.” This parliament would have jurisdiction over such
controversies and impose judgments, enforceable by arms, against
unwilling states. This, an early version of what we would now call jus
cogens, Penn reasoned, would ensure peace in Europe and restore the
reputation of Christianity.
Fast forward to the League of Nation: The failure of the League of
Nations, as Harold Nicolson noted, was due to the fallacy that one
could apply to external affairs the institutions and practices of
legislative processes in liberal democracy. “Among peace-loving
peoples,…violence could or would be superseded by reason,” as defined
by majority vote, one state, one vote. A fine utopian concept. It just
didn’t work.
One world war after the failure of the League of Nations, former United
States Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, returning from the 1943 Moscow
conference where Britain, the Soviet Union and the United States had
agreed to create a postwar international organization to keep the
peace, announced: “There will no longer be need for spheres of
influence, for alliances, for balances of power…by which, in the
unhappy past, the nations strove to safeguard their security or to
promote their interests.” This kind of dreaming still persists as you
can see if you read the handouts from groups like the United Nations
Association. Just a few years ago, Lewis Henkin of Columbia University
Law School made an equally bizarre statement; “Almost all nations
observe almost all principles of international law and almost all of
their obligations almost all of the time.”
There has been no shortage over the past 60 years of bloviation about
what the U.N. promises, such as Bernard Baruch’s “We must elect world
peace and world destruction”, and it goes on and on. Even presidents
have been gullible. As Dr Johnson said, “Lapidaries are not under
oath.” What the U.N. actually delivers as opposed to promises is a
different story, as former U.N. diplomat Conor Cruise O”Brien’s
observed: “You can safely appeal to the U.N. in the comfortable
security that it will let you down.”
Dean Acheson, who was there when the United Nations was created,
described the Charter as being sold to the American people as “almost
Holy Writ”, raising hopes that could only lead to bitter
disappointment. Former U.N. Undersecretary General Brian Urquhart
described it thus: The U.N. Charter sets out “a system of
maintaining international peace and security which “assumes that all
governments will play the roles assigned to them. Those involved in
disputes will avail themselves of the means available in the Charter to
settle those disputes peacefully. If they fail to do this, the
membership of the United Nations, under the guidance of the Security
Council, will take a series of steps designed to persuade them to do
so. The governments concerned will heed and obey the injunctions of the
Council. And if in the end, the threat to peace persists, the Council,
led by its permanent members, will apply enforcement measures, ranging
from economic sanctions to military sanctions, to restore peace and
security.”
The Charter had made these assumptions about the behavior of nations,
and these same assumptions were proved wrong, almost immediately, by
the actual behavior of countries involved. It was the difference
between rhetoric and reality, between a letter to Santa Claus and the
real world.
In Ambassador Kirkpatrick’s words, …”the Charter of the United Nations
reflected our national optimism and our predilection for faith in good
works. It was idealistic to the point of utopianism. …And it was doomed
from the start.” The United Nations has had successes in keeping the
peace, but, she added, “few could be found today who would seek to
justify the United Nations solely or even mainly on grounds of a
successful record of conflict resolution. “The simple reality, as
General Marshall reminded Ernest Bevin in1947, is that “the transfer of
a vexatious problems to the United Nations does not render them any
less complicated or difficult.”
Ambassador Kirkpatrick added, “I am more bothered by far by the
tendency of the United Nations to make conflict resolution more
difficult than it would otherwise be, at least in a good many cases.”
Someone once asked Chuck Lichenstein what would have happened if there
had been a U.N. during our own Civil War. “It would probably still be
going on,” he responded.
The paradox of bringing problems to the U.N. as Ambassador Kirkpatrick
noted is that the number of parties involved is dramatically extended,
bringing into conflicts nations who would not be otherwise involved and
requiring them to choose sides, thus polarizing instead of resolving
conflicts. As noted by Yeselson and Gaglione in their book on the U.N.,
bringing an issue to the U.N. is frequently viewed as a hostile act,
given the United Nations’ reputation for partisanship and conflict
exacerbation.
As he stated in his recent book, Surrender is not an Option, John
Bolton had hoped, when he was United States ambassador to the U.N., to
do something to resolve the Western Sahara question, the longest, most
protracted conflict in the history of the United Nations, but the U.N.
Peacekeeping system didn’t permit it. Morocco had agreed to a
referendum but “consistently blocked taking the steps necessary to
conduct it, such as voter identification and registration. That was a
clear example of the limitations of UN Peacekeeping…there simply was no
chance of success if any of the parties to a dispute dug in his heels
and refused to cooperate. In that sense, at least, with respect to UN
operations directly affecting them, almost every U.N. member has a kind
of veto, not just the Security Council’s Five Permanent members. This
is undoubtedly why the UN so often resembles the League of Nations in
its achievements.”
Some distinguished commentators, such as Pedro Pinte Leite who is here
today, and Ambassador Salka Embarek, who are extraordinarily capable of
defending their positions, have criticized the former Special
Representative Peter Van Walsum for stating, in so many words, that
while international law was on the side of the Sahrawis, the Security
Council would have to find a solution between legality and realpolitik.
What was amazing about this statement was, as John Bolton pointed out,
that Van Walsum “had, at last, spoken the unspeakable.” Until then,
serious statesmen would not dare to admit publicly that the UN would
consider compromising between “international legality” and “political
reality.” Van Walsum was willing to say it: The emperor has no clothes.
The conclusion Bolton draws from Van Walsum’s blunder or candor,
depending on your point of view, is sobering: Morocco will never permit
a referendum, and so there is no reason for the UN to try to stage one.
However, since no one will be able to figure out what to do with
MINURSO, it is on its way to acquiring a “near-perpetual existence.” In
such a capacity, while it could not promote a resolution to the
conflict, it is capable of prolonging or complicating it. Thus,
terminating MINURSO is appealing because it would either force Morocco
to get serious about a referendum, or, if not, it would, at least,
remove the obstacle to Morocco’s getting together with Algeria, the
proctector of Sahrawi sovereignty, to deal with the problem directly.
Opposing Bolton’s plan was the State Department via Eliot Abrams,
hawking what we now call the autonomy plan.
CURRENT OBSTACLES TO RESOLVING THE
CONFLICT: THE AUTONOMY PLAN
As George Orwell said, there is always room for one more custard pie.
Even in serious discussions like these, it is important to be able to
stand back and note the absurdities. It has been reported that 168
members of Congress have come out to sign a letter in support of the
Moroccan autonomy plan. This has to be put into perspective, and Ian
Williams of Britain’s Guardian has done just that. He points to a 1992
poll by Spy Magazine of 24 Republican Members of Congress asking them
what they proposed to do about the situation in Freedonia. Freedonia,
of course, doesn’t exist. It is the fictional country in the Marx
Brothers’ movie Duck Soup. Nonetheless, all the members polled “waffled
in a statesmanlike way about the efforts they would take to ensure
stability there.” Williams concludes that 160 of the 168 signatories of
the autonomy letter had never heard of Western Sahara a month before
they sent the letter. “When the learned members of congress rush to
sign a fact-free letter on foreign policy, you can be sure there is a
lobby at work.” As someone who has spent a great deal of time in the
halls of Congress, I say Amen.
More interesting, though, is that most of the 50 members of the House
of Representatives African Sub-committee, that is, members who really
do deal with African issues daily, signed an opposing letter demanding
that the United States support Sahrawi self-determination. But,
Williams points out, without Moroccan money behind it, not many heard
that story.
When James Baker took over as the Secretary General’s Personal
Representative for Western Sahara, Baker met with King Hassan and the
POLISARIO leadership about what they wanted, and both said: “We want a
free and fair referendum. We don’t want to talk about autonomy. We want
to talk about a referendum.” And Baker began the series of European
meetings that resulted in the Houston Accords signed by both sides.
Baker failed because even though Morocco signed and sealed its
agreement to hold a referendum, (twice!) it simply refused to take the
necessary steps to do so. Pace Andre Malraux, kicking over the
chessboard is indeed an effective, if not a legitimate, move in chess.
The law in the Moroccan-Sahrawi dispute is clear. It just doesn’t
matter:
The World Court found that Morocco’s historical ties to Western Sahara
were insufficient to establish sovereignty, but Morocco has ignored
that decision.
The World Court also found no legal reason why General Assembly
Resolution 1514 (XV) on the decolonization of Western Sahara should not
be carried out and, in particular, that the principle of
self-determination, in the form of a referendum reflecting the free and
genuine expression of the will of the peoples of the territory, should
proceed. Morocco has not permitted these things to happen.
Morocco has twice broken its treaty obligations to hold a referendum
and now quite simply says “No Way, Jose.”
Morocco illegally invaded Western Sahara in 1975 and has occupied it
illegally since that date. The Economist called Morocco’s action an
Anschluss. Morocco has ignored Security Council Resolutions condemning
its actions and has not budged. As John Bolton has observed, Morocco
has de facto control of Western Sahara. It is now trying to stretch
that into de jure control through its autonomy plan, which, on the face
of it, is, as Emhamed Khadad pointed out in the Wall Street Journal,
completely circular reasoning. Morocco’s offering an autonomy plan, in
a place it has no legal right to be, to the people of a region it is
illegally occupying, is the stuff of Alice in Wonderland.
Instead of provoking cries of shame from the international community,
the autonomy plan is actually receiving support. Imagine that, even
though Morocco’s plan does not allow for Sahrawis to become
independent, ever, a right that is theirs under law. The plan is
receiving support even though it is based on the assumption that
Western Sahara belongs to Morocco, something the World Court
specifically said it does not. It is receiving support even though it
would endorse the long discredited and disreputable concept of
lebensraum, the expansion of a country’s territory by military force.
In fact, as Dr. Zunes has pointed out, it would be the first time since
the founding of the U.N. and the ratification of the Charter, that the
international community endorsed such a concept, unthinkable to the
founders of the United Nations who had just fought a war to end those
very kinds of abuses.
Some of my colleagues, former United States ambassadors to Morocco,
have come out with a letter endorsing Morocco’s autonomy plan. I am
sure that they meant well, but their facts and reasoning generate what
the Spanish call verguenza ajena, the embarrassment you feel at someone
else’s blunder. For example, they characterize the POLISARIO as an
“Algerian-backed rebel group” that “challenges Morocco’s historical
sovereignty” over the area, “sometimes referred to as Western Sahara.”
Ambassador Breica made a forceful response to these statements, to what
is really propaganda. All of us here know better, and it would be
tedious to repeat the obvious refutations here. The letter does show
the kinds of low tactics, and let us call a spade a spade, the lies,
Morocco is not above using to influence public opinion.
The POLISARIO as rebels? Really? I prefer to think this couplet
characterizes the POLISARIO:
Cet animal est très méchant,
Quand on l’attaque, il se défend.
In his recent presentation to the United Nations’ 4th Committee on
Decolonization, Dr Pedro Pinto Leite noted that the second decade for
the Eradication of Colonization is coming to an end, but that Morocco’s
colonization of Western Sahara continues unabated and with impunity.
Let me suggest that if Morocco’s autonomy plan is accepted by the
international community, we can forget about decolonization. The day
Morocco’s autonomy plan is accepted, we will be seeing the beginning
the first decade of the New Colonialism.
I said earlier that the law on the matter was clear and on the side of
the Sahrawis, but it doesn’t matter. Recent developments seem to
support this conclusion. Cynics always thought the law didn’t matter:
“An international law for nations?” Voltaire queried. “Next they’ll be
talking about a code of conduct for highway robbers and gangsters.”
PROSPECTS FOR RESOLUTION
Possible Solutions:
A direct referendum permitting Sahrawi independence as an option or a
referendum permitting Sahrawi independence as part of a Morocco
autonomy plan. Realistically, neither is going to happen, unless
Morocco can be manipulated into taking the referendum seriously. Pope
John Paul II once spoke of two possible solutions for Central Europe,
one practical and one supernatural: “In one, Our Lord, the Blessed
Mother and saints come down and lead the governments to righteousness.
The supernatural one is that the governments agree to cooperate with
each other.” What we need here is a supernatural solution.
The much-maligned Peter Van Walsum was on to something, although some
want to kill the messenger. He was wrong, of course, to suggest that
the Security Council decide this issue by off-setting the rights and
wrongs of the situation, in a word, the law, with the political
realities, but he was reflecting what many people, unfortunately many
in my own State Department, are thinking. Machiavelli may have died
nearly five centuries ago, but his political philosophy is alive and
well, and we have to deal with it and its acolytes like Herr Van
Walsum.
There is no future for the Sahrawi people in MINURSO as it now exists
and no reason for them to support its continued existence.
In my judgment, John Bolton is right is supporting the elimination of
MINURSO because, even if it is not eliminated, the very threat of doing
so is likely to force Morocco to take the referendum seriously or face
the reality of having to deal with the Sahrawis’ protector, Algeria, a
win-win situation. It is, it seems to me, the best option: the one with
the highest likelihood of success and the fewest risks. Replacing
MINURSO offers hope of a solution, something in very short supply these
days.
But, critics will say, what will replace MINURSO if it is gone. Going
back to my old friend Voltaire, if you have a bear in your living room,
you don’t ask what will replace it. You simply get rid of it.
Thank you.
FRANK RUDDY
U.S. Ambassador (ret.)
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