Western Sahara : The Roots of a Desert War

On foreign policy, Ochieng calls on African leaders to unite. It is because of this lack of unity that Russians and Americans have exploited Africa. This situation occurs because the majority of our leaders are agents of imperialism. They are "selfish and cruel" and quite a number are "gangsters and murderers," Professor Ochieng asserts. The Third Word can be seen as a valuable contribution in terms of enriching and developing a critical perspective to the contemporary problems facing Africa today.


AFRICAN STUDIES REVIEW
Western Sahara should not be viewed surprisingly in light of her territorial claims against virtually every one of her neighbors (p. 88): The claim to parts of Mali, for example, was dropped after a visit to Rabat by Mali's president, Modibo Keita, in September 1960 and Mali's participation in the conference that founded the Casablanca Group, one of the forerunners of the Organization of African Unity, in January 1961. The claim to Saint-Louis in Senegal was also quietly shelved. But the Moroccan government continued throughout the sixties to lay claim to Western Sahara, Mauritania and much of the Algerian Sahara, as well as Ifni and the Spanish presidios on the Mediterranean coast. When Mauritania became independent in 1960, Morocco tried to bar its admisison to the UN and withheld diplomatic recognition for nine years; and when Algeria finally achieved independence in 1962 after eight years of bloody war with France, it too found itself confronted by Moroccan territorial demands and had to fight a brief war in 1963 to fend off an attempt by Morocco to seize Tindouf by force.
Washington is quite concerned that the Western Sahara may prove to be Morocco's Vietnam and lead to the overthrow of Hassan. Officials are not unmindful of how governments in nearby Mauritania have been dislodged because of intransigence on this question. The failed attempts to overthrow the King may lead some to believe that he had more than a vacation in mind when he recently purchased a palatial estate in Bronxville, New York. This perception did not bar the King from his ill-fated "Green March," when he tried to create "facts on the ground" by marching thousands of Moroccans into the Western Sahara in the aftermath of the Spanish departure. This was a massive invasion of at least 524,000 mostly non-military personnel that led to the occupation of foreign territory and seriously disrupted the Moroccan economy. Inevitably, this chauvinistic orgy could not have been completed but for the use of C-130 transport planes from the US.
An interesting aspect of this complex scenario is the attempt to foment a so-called "Black-Arab" split. Then President Leopold Senghor maintained stoutly that Polisario was a racist Arab movement that backed Mauritanian Arabs against Blacks (p. 251). Undoubtedly tensions between different ethnic groups in Mauritania had impact on the political scene there. Those who spoke Pulaar, Soninke, and Wolof bitterly protested Arabization measures in the schools (p. 272). This led to bloody riots in 1965 and 1979 and to a demand for official transcription of the previously unwritten African languages and their use on a par with Arabic, along with defense of the use of French. Washington, according to some analysts, played upon such real and putative divisions whenit joined with Morocco in using the Western Sahara question to prevent the Organization of African Unity (OAU) from meeting in 1981; this controversy also threatened the continued existence of this critically important organization (p. 314). By this point the State Department was making no secret of its antipathy toward Polisario despite their doubt about the war's impact on Hassan's reign. As one old hand in Foggy Bottom put it (p. 366), "Morocco occupies an important geographical position, controlling the lower half of the Straits of Gibraltar. It has permitted port visits by U.S. naval vessels and transit by U.S. military aircraft to destinations such as Saudi Arabia." Despite a massive commitment of soldiers and resources~not to mention an updated version of the Maginot Line, a great Saharan "wall"--Hassan has been unable to drive out Polisario; indeed, the Polisario forces control five-sixths of the territory, through the "useful" one-sixth comprising the main towns and the phosphate deposits remain in Hassan's hands. Washington is displeased with Polisario's open championing of other liberation struggles, their vocal policy of non-alignment and, as was stated (p. 342) in their General National Program adopted by the fourth congress in 1978, "opposition to imperialism, colonialism and exploitation . . . (and support for) national construction and the achievement of socialism." Hodges performs an admirable job in weaving this tale. He tends to have a bias against the left, despite his sympathy for the decidedly left-leaning Polisario. For example, he chides the Spanish Republican forces of the 1930s for their alleged dearth of anti-colonial fervor and continually reproaches the Moroccan Communists for the same sin, although he acknowledges their clear and overt influence on Polisario (p. 159). And, as mentioned, his sources are limited. Nevertheless, given the paucity of information on this crucial question and the overall perspective, this volume is a worthy addition to the bookshelf. This book examines how colonial rule affected the economic development of Malawi, Zambia, and Zaire by using a spatial analysis of three key factors: transportation media, administrative centers, and elite schools. This approach allows the author to eschew the economic primacy inherent in dependency and development theory, and to concentrate instead on how "political decisions altered the direction of economic development" (p. 26). Fetter argues that these political decisions were of equal, if not greater, importance in the reorganization of colonial economies than the economic considerations of specific capitalist enterprises. He continues his discussion to demonstrate that these political decisions had different impacts on various regions in each colony, thus creating the regional imbalance mentioned in the title.
The first two chapters provide a useful outline of dependency and development theory as well as a description of the author's methodology. The latter consists of a combination of the aforementioned spatial analysis with Kenneth Boulding's schema for the "distinction between the economic role of a state and that of capitalism [sic] markets" (p. 27). This amalgamation creates an innovative and exciting alternative approach to the study of colonial states. In essence, this paradigm promises to show the relationship between colonial decrees and subsequent economic development in each colony.
The next three chapters delineate the actual economic and political development of the three territories. Each chapter includes a wealth of valuable statistical and