In Morocco, children are taught a song that says the country stretches from Casablanca in the North to El-Aaiun in the South.
The song is meant to impress on their young minds the extent of the geographic territory of this North African country.
But El-Aaiun, together with many neighbouring areas, is part of the Western Sahara territory that Morocco has colonised for 40 years – and the subject of a bitter liberation conflict.
Kenya, which has remained non-aligned in many territorial conflicts for decades, did a most surprising thing this week: It declared support for the right of Western Sahara to self-determination, and its membership of the African Union.
Foreign Affairs CS Amina Mohamed visited the country on Sunday and held bilateral discussions with the Prime Minister, Abdelkader Taleb Omar. She visited a museum dedicated to the struggle for independence, where she said self-determination was “ingrained in Kenya’s DNA”.
Mohamed also met a group of women involved in the struggle and opened a ‘Struggle Hall’ named after her in her honour.
“Kenya fought for its self-determination and supports the people of Saharawi, whose land is still occupied. The suffering the people of this country have undergone should come to an end,” said Mohamed.
Kenya allowed Western Sahara to open an embassy on Muthangari Road, Nairobi, in 2013.
Western Sahara is a classic example of how some colonial powers abruptly withdrew from their former colonies, leaving them unprepared to take over power.
Spain left Western Sahara in 1975. Power abhors a vacuum and Morocco, with eyes on its neighbour’s huge phosphate deposits worth billions of dollars, moved in and occupied Western Sahara. It has been a struggle since then for the people of Western Sahara.
Morocco laid claim to the territory as part of its historical patrimony, its ‘southern provinces’, and stated that the most it was willing to offer is autonomy.
The Saharawis, as the people of Western Sahara are called, would have none of this. They set up an armed resistance, the Polisario Front.
Morocco deployed its military to crush the resistance. Over the next decade, it built a 2,700-kilometre-long wall between the area it controlled and the area that the Polisario Front managed to hold, which came to be known as the Free Zone.
After 16 years of insurgency, the fighting ended with a truce brokered by the UN in 1991. Morocco promised to organise a referendum on whether the people of Western Sahara wanted to be part of Morocco or become independent. It then deployed all tactics to ensure the referendum never took place.
An international campaign has for several years brought the plight of Western Sahara to the international limelight.
Leigh Dey, the British law firm that represented Kenyan Mau Mau veterans in the case they filed against Britain in London, is among lawyers that have formed an organisation known as Western Sahara Campaign UK.
Campaigns have also been launched in Europe where big supermarket chains sell products labeled ‘Produce of Spain’ when they in fact are from farms in Western Sahara owned by Moroccans, European firms and none by the indigenous Saharawi people. This has led to legal disputes in Brussels, the EU headquarters. On September 13, an advocate general at the Court of Justice in Brussels issued an opinion that “Western Sahara is not part of Moroccan territory”.
Morocco has continued to fight off any claims to the independence of Western Sahara. In July last year, Moroccans were outraged when Uber listed Western Sahara as a country. In the same year, Morocco announced it would not allow into its territory products by Swedish company IKEA after Stockholm announced that it will support Western Sahara’s right to self-determination.
Morocco is meanwhile lobbying some African countries to allow it to rejoin the African Union, from which it withdrew in 1984 after the AU recognised Western Sahara’s independence. It hosted Cord leader Raila Odinga in September 2017.
Kenya’s lending hand to “the last colony in Africa” is a new twist in the 40-year-old story of struggle. If others join in, Morocco will be delaying the inevitable, and its children may soon no longer be able to sign songs of how Western Sahara is part of their land.