General Assembly of United Nation
Committee of special political affairs and decolonization
(4th Commission)
73rd session – 3 October – 15 November 2019
(Mariana Martins Almeida)1
Mr President, Ladies and Gentlemen
My name is Mariana and I have the honour of speaking in front of you on behalf of the EUCOCO. EUCOCO is the European Coordination supporting the Sahrawi people that bring together innumerable associations of Humans Rights, unions, universities, and Committees in solidarity with Sahrawi people, operating in 40 different European countries.
I am aware of the privileges and the responsibilities that brought me here. I understand that I do not speak on behalf of the Sahrawi people. The Sahrawi people have voice, as we heard. They have agency, as we saw. But besides the Sahrawi people that we heard today, there are many of them that are locked out of this discussion, confined in a place and in a situation that denies them the right to speak and, to almost all of us, the right to listen to them. This is an opportunity to voice and echo the injustice that these people have been facing for the past almost 45 years.
My solidarity, and so the solidarity of movements, members of Parliaments, artists, lawyers and civil societies all over the world, takes as a starting point the Sahrawi people inalienable right to self-determination, expressed in the resolution 15/14 (XV) of the UN Security Council, the declaration that grants independence to colonial countries and peoples, approved in 19602. And yet, here we are, within this very same institution, discussing the ongoing process of colonization that Western Sahara faces due to the Moroccan invasion and occupation of their territory.
The UN, where we speak at this moment, aims, ultimately, to stablish, operate and manage a system of values. The UN is the guardian and the world guarantor of the international law. So, we are here to remind the UN of its obligations facing the colonization of Western Sahara and facing Morocco, who performs a colonial role and in total violation of the Resolution 15/14, colonizes, occupies, builds a wall, plunders the natural resources, catches arbitrarily its opponents, tortures them, and not only not comply to, but also violates the international human rights regime – a regime that this institution aims to protect and implement.
Human rights violations, illegal natural resources exploitation, torture, political prisoners, and the denial of the right to self-determination, denotes the complexity of the Western Sahara political, social and economic agenda. Among this complexity, I will use my remaining minutes to shed light on the economic dimension of this occupation and to highlight how, currently, our institutions have been working to maintain the status quo, not to challenge nor to change it. Most specifically, the economic plundering of Western Sahara’s natural resources and how the EU fisheries agreement contributes to reinforce the ongoing colonization of WS.
Benefiting of a status of total political blockage, Morocco has been continuing, during the past decades, the economic plundering of Western Sahara. This has been done by, for example, the extraction of phosphate-rich basements for its own benefit, or by fishing massively in the territorial waters of Western Sahara – placed among the fishiest in the world.
This economic plundering is supported by the European Union that signed, in 2012, an association agreement with Morocco, planning a progressive liberalisation of trade relationships among EU and Morocco about agricultural goods, transformed agricultural goods, fish and other fisheries goods.
In July 2018, the European Union Court of Justice stated that “it follows from the foregoing considerations that the Association Agreement and the 2013 Protocol must be interpreted in accordance with the rules of international law binding on the Union and applicable in the relations between the Union and the Kingdom of Morocco. In this sense, the territory of Western Sahara, and the waters adjacent to the territory, do not fall within the respective territorial scope of this Agreement and Protocol”.3
The European Commission, to be conformed to the EU Court of Justice judgement, started to negotiate with Morocco to amend the bilateral agreements in question. The European Commission, to justify the inclusion of the Western Sahara territories in the association agreements among EU and Morocco, organised a consultative survey, with “civil society” and authorities of occupied territories (near the Moroccan Government)4. Both the negotiations and the survey excluded the Polisario Front, recognised as “the representative of the Western Sahara” by the UN since 1979.
We are here to reinforce that, by extending these association agreements without the consent of Sahrawi people, the EU supports Western Sahara’s occupation, puts an obstacle in the resolution of the conflict and maintains the status quo of human rights violations. The Western Sahara ongoing colonization by Morocco materializes not only the failure of our institutions, but also the gap between theory and practice.
Once again in 2018, the European Union Court of Justice reminded that Western Sahara has a different and separated status from the Kingdom of Morocco. This is a decision that also the European Parliament did not respect, following the European External Action Service survey that did not consider the common will of Sahrawi people. We see institutional failure. We see non-compliance to the human rights regime. The Western Sahara ongoing colonization materializes not only the failure of our institutions, but the gap between theory and practice.
When we recognize that statements and resolutions from decades ago have still not been assimilated, we reinforce the failure to decolonize Western Sahara. Recent resolutions also materialize this failure. A few days ago, in Geneva, the Human Rights Council discussed the use of force against national liberation movements5. This same forum, under the same agenda, also discussed the right to development, as well as ruled on arbitrary detention. These are items that also belong and touch directly the Western Sahara repertoire of violated rights.
Here, today, we highlight that the efforts on recognizing and granting the Sahrawi’s right to self-determination are counterbalanced by strong, powerful, and systemic forces, such as the extensive lobby carried out by the French and the Moroccan Government, the lack of assumption of responsibility by Spain, Western Sahara’s former colonial power and the economic agenda that, in a brutal way, overlaps the social one. In this sense, our critique goes to the European Union, a powerful institution, with an influence that goes beyond its borders, that exports morals, values and a robust human rights regime while signing treaties with occupying powers.
During the past almost three decades years, the UN General Secretary and the UN Security Council, through the United Nations Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara (MINURSO), has been promising to the Sahrawi People the organization of a self-determination referendum. Today the patience and the peaceful behavior of the Sahrawi People are put under severe strain, so it is extremely urgent that us, making justice for being speaking here in a committee for decolonization, answer their legitimate claims and act upon the decolonization of Western Sahara. Morocco is, today, the colonial power.
On behalf of the EUCOCO, and echoing the hundreds of voices in Tindouf, in the occupied zone, in the buffer zone, and out there, we urge for action. We urge for a change in the current status quo. We urge for decolonization.
For that, we will remain vigilant for the application of international law, humanitarian law and United Nations resolutions, and we will maintain active our solidarity with the Sahrawi people.
1 Operations Coordinator at Greenpeace International. Email: almeida.marianamartins@gmail.com
3 EUCJ, on the 19th July 2018, “Recours en annulation – Accord de partenariat entre l’Union et le Royaume du Maroc dans le secteur de la pêche – Protocole fixant les possibilités de pêche prévues par cet accord –Applicabilité desdits accord et protocole au territoire du Sahara occidental et aux eaux y adjacentes – Absence de qualité pour agir – Irrecevabilité », affaire T-180/14, Front Polisario c/ Conseil de l’Union européenne soutenu par Commission européenne http://curia.europa.eu/juris/document/document_print.jsf?doclang=FR&text=&pageIndex=0&part=1&mode=lst&docid=204281&occ=first&dir=&cid=670789
Comité belge de soutien au peuple sahraoui 