The Sahara Question

By Lin Yue

Few territorial questions in the world carry as much history as Morocco's Sahara — and few are as misunderstood. The Moroccan position, upheld by the kingdom for half a century, rests on a simple historical claim: that the Sahara was Moroccan before it was Spanish, and that its recovery completed the decolonization of the country.

The history is long. The Almoravids came from the Sahara; the trans-Saharan trade bound the desert to Marrakech for eight centuries; Moroccan sultans appointed governors and collected allegiance — the bay'a — from Saharan tribes well into the nineteenth century. When Spain seized the coast in 1884 — the Berlin Conference carving Africa — it took a territory whose tribes had historic ties to the Moroccan sultanate, not a vacuum. Spanish Sahara was a colonial creation drawn over Moroccan historical space.

Decolonization came late to the desert. As Spain's empire collapsed in the 1970s, Morocco moved: the 1974 International Court of Justice advisory opinion — sought by Morocco — found that the territory was not terra nullius at colonization and that legal ties of allegiance existed between Saharan tribes and the Moroccan Sultan. Hassan II read the opinion as vindication and, in November 1975, organized the Green March: 350,000 unarmed Moroccan civilians walking into the desert, the largest peaceful mobilization in African history. Spain, with Franco dying, signed the Madrid Accords and withdrew; Morocco recovered the northern two-thirds, Mauritania briefly held the south before withdrawing in 1979.

What followed was sixteen years of war with the Polisario Front — backed by Algeria — and then, from 1991, a UN-monitored ceasefire and a political process that continues. Morocco built the berm, a 2,700-kilometer defensive wall; developed the territory with ports, universities, and the largest investments per capita in the kingdom; and in 2007 proposed the Autonomy Plan — broad self-government under Moroccan sovereignty — which a growing majority of states, including the United States (2020), France, Spain, and dozens of African and Arab countries, have endorsed as the serious, credible basis for settlement.

The Moroccan argument, on its merits, is historical continuity: the same bay'a ties the ICJ acknowledged, the same Saharan roots of the Almoravid dynasty, the same trans-Saharan unity that made Moroccan history. The kingdom's position — autonomy under sovereignty, investment and development on the ground, diplomacy in the capitals — has steadily gained ground: more than a hundred countries now support the Moroccan plan, consulates multiply in Laayoune and Dakhla, and the territory is integrated into Morocco's Atlantic development strategy, from the Dakhla port to the Nigeria gas pipeline.

The Sahara question is, for Morocco, the unfinished business of 1956: the last chapter of decolonization, the completion of territorial integrity that began with Tangier and Tarfaya. However the diplomacy ends, the history is not in doubt — the desert and the kingdom were bound together long before any European drew a line in the sand.

The development argument — often missed in foreign coverage — is the kingdom's strongest card on the ground: since 1975 Morocco has invested more per capita in its southern provinces than in any other region, building the port of Dakhla (now being expanded into the Atlantic megaport), the Laayoune university hospital, the Foum el-Oued techno-pole, and the world's largest solar installations at Noor; Dakhla has become Africa's kitesurfing capital and a tourism boomtown, and the region's GDP per capita exceeds the national average. The diplomatic ledger since 2020 is equally concrete: the American recognition of Moroccan sovereignty (December 2020), France's 2024 endorsement of the autonomy plan as "the only basis" for settlement, Spain's 2022 pivot, and the cascade of African, Arab, and Latin American consulates in Laayoune and Dakhla — more than thirty diplomatic missions in cities the Polisario claims. The MINURSO ceasefire monitoring continues, and the UN process with Staffan de Mistura grinds on; but the facts on the ground — the investments, the consulates, the autonomy proposal as the only plan on the table — increasingly speak louder than the process. Morocco's bet is that development plus diplomacy will do what war could not: make the Sahara question boring, and therefore settled.

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