Western Sahara: Bolton Continues to Lead Anti-Morocco Crusade
Rabat – John Bolton, who Trump fired from his position as national security adviser in 2019, is keeping up his Morocco-bashing campaign in favor of Algerian-backed claims challenging Moroccan sovereignty over its southern provinces in Western Sahara.
In a new opinion piece published in the Washington Times, Bolton urged the US to support the outdated referendum claims promoted by the Algerian regime.
Bolton’s latest plea is bound to fall on unreceptive ears
For decades, Algeria’s regime has been using the Polisario Front – a separatist group harbored in the Tindouf camps on Algerian soil – to advance its interests against Morocco by supporting referendum and self-determination claims.
Ignoring Algeria’s involvement in interference in the domestic affairs of other countries in the Sahel region, Bolton blamed Morocco’s strong ties with the West as the reason that “worked to the Sahrawis’ detriment.”
But he claimed that the situation is changing, suggesting that Algeria is seeking new alliances and the first-ever US-Algeria military cooperation agreement that the North African country signed at the start of the second Trump administration.
This “signals a new direction,” he claimed.
To the dismay of Polisario supporters, however, recent developments suggest that their continued agitation for separatism in southern Morocco are bound to fall on unreceptive ears.
In the past few weeks, many comments and moves by various US officials have given renewed vigor to Washington’s support for Morocco’s sovereignty over its southern provinces.
Indeed, with the first Trump administration being the instigator of Washington’s unambiguous embrace of Morocco’s territorial integrity in December 2020, the incumbent Trump administration has in recent statements signaled its unwavering commitment to upholding Western Sahara and that came months after Trump assumed his office as the US President of the United States for the second time in the country’s history.
In April, the US sent a direct setback to Algeria’s regime, stressing that its decision of December 2020 remains unchanged and recognizing Morocco’s full sovereignty over its southern provinces.
The State Department issued a similar statement following a meeting between Marco Rubio and his Moroccan counterpart. In it, the seat of American diplomacy made sure to remind Algeria and its advocates that Washington supports Morocco’s Autonomy Plan as the only feasible political solution to end the Western Sahara dispute.
All of this comes as the Moroccan autonomy initiative continues to gather steam and build unprecedented momentum.
Over 113 countries, including once staunch supporters of the Polisario, have over the past decade joined the growing list of nations that see the autonomy plan as the only viable path to a lasting and realistic political solution to the Sahara dispute.
Reality does not matter
Yet this blindingly obvious reality does not appear to discourage Bolton from continuing his support for the lost, sidelined cause of Sahrawi separatism in southern Morocco. His latest anti-Moroccan tirade dismissed Morocco’s growing momentum and turned a deaf ear on Polisario’s alarming use of terrorist threats to give renewed urgency and relevance to its waning cause.
Many observers have decried Polisario’s recent terrorist attacks in southern Morocco, yet Bolton dismissed these condemnations as a “new line of propaganda” against Sahrawi emancipation.
“The Polisario’s opponents are trying a new line of propaganda, alleging without evidence that the Polisario has come under Iran’s influence. This misinformation may well be intended to divert U.S. attention from Morocco’s decades-long stonewalling against a referendum,” he claimed.
Bolton’s dismissive claims come in defiance of many reports, including some that have quoted high-level US and regional officials as confirming that there has been collusion between Polisario (in support of the Algerian regime’s agenda in the Maghreb) and Hezbollah, the notorious Iranian proxy.
In April, the Washington Post quoted sources as confirming that Hezbollah had been trainingPolisario operatives on Syrian soil, with the blessing of Iran and the fallen al-Assad regime in Syria.
“Over the years, Iran has fostered a wide array of proxy groups to advance its interests,” the report said, quoting a regional official and a third European official who said Iran trained fighters from the “Algeria-based Polisario Front” that are now detained by Syria’s new security forces.
Such reports have resurfaced on many occasions in recent weeks and months, alerting the international community about Algeria’s interference in the domestic affairs of several countries.
“Over the years, Iran has fostered a wide array of proxy groups to advance its interests,” the Post report went on to stress, quoting a regional official and a third European official as indicating that Iran had trained fighters from the “Algeria-based Polisario Front” that are now detained by Syria’s new security forces.
Read also: US Senator James Inhofe, Western Sahara, and ‘Alternative Facts’
Meanwhile, Algeria’s interference in its neighbors’ internal affairs is now known to have not been limited to Morocco. Mali and its Sahel allies, Niger and Burkina Faso, have recently slammed Algeria’s hegemonic ambitions in the Sahel. They accused the Algerian army of shooting down a surveillance drone near the border with Mali, lamenting that this was not an isolated incident as Algeria had long interfered in Malian internal affairs.
Yet none of this was enough to convince Bolton of the veracity of Morocco’s warnings against the security threats that Polisario and its Algerian sponsors represent not only for Morocco, but for the entire Sahelo-Saharan corridor.
Like most hardened ideologues, Bolton prefers his tainted vision to the reality under his nose. Despite mounting evidence of Polisario’s cancerous impact on regional security and stability, he remains convinced that the terror-linked militia is a peace-loving group seeking decolonization.
The mountain of reports about Polisario’s atrocities; the well-documented links between Polisario and terrorist groups in the Sahel; the tortured voices of oppressed locals denouncing Polisario and calling for a political solution to end their families’ decades-spanning tragedy, the pile of UN reports acknowledging the impossibility of a referendum-based solution — none of this seems to matter to Bolton. And what’s more, arguing that Western Sahara “should return to its 1991 origins,” Bolton is implicitly suggesting that his truth is what matters to him, not the tragic reality on the ground.
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