Western Sahara: The Roots of a Desert War

By Tony Hodges. Westport: Lawrence Hill and Co., 1983. 388 pp. $14.95 (paper).

Reviewed by David Wemple

Those who keep track say that some 25 wars were being fought in 1988 throughout the so called Third World. Some remain, for all of their destructiveness, relatively confined in their consequences. Among such conflicts we might count the Shining Path's war in the Peruvian Andes or that of the Burmese separatist forces. Other wars, however, carry the very real potential for spreading into wider geographic regions and infusing already fragile environments with troublesome political and religious elements. The war in the Western Sahara was certainly in this category until the recent agreement between Algeria and Morocco which led to a cease-fire that may presage an end to that stubborn conflict.

Tony Hodges, a seasoned journalist and expert in North African affairs, has written a study of the Western Sahara that still stands as the best primer on the subject some five years after it was published. It is the story of a war that had dragged on for as long as Israel has occupied the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and that had claimed more than 10,000 lives by the time the shooting ended in mid-1988. During 20 years of intermittent warfare the indigenous Saharawi people took on an array of foes, and drained Morocco's treasury of more than $1 billion every year. With its troops strung out along a nearly 1,300-mile-long sand wall, Morocco found itself bogged down in a war of attrition closely identified with the king's personal mystique and, therefore, important to the political course of all of North Africa.

At first glance the Western Sahara has about as much appeal as Chad (where another protracted war came to a halt in 1988). An extremely and expanse hugging the Atlantic shoreline south of Morocco, the region was formally called Spanish Sahara until Madrid abruptly withdrew its forces in early 1976, effectively ceding control of the northern portion of the territory to Morocco and the southern portion to Mauritania. It appeared, however, that both states only inherited the same awakening nationalism that had prompted the Saharawis to fight Spanish troops a decade earlier.

The day after the Spanish administration lowered its flag for the last time the Saharan Arab Democratic Republic was proclaimed. The SADR, together with its military arm, the Polisario Front, seized the military and diplomatic initiative in an attempt to carve out a niche in the international community. Nearly 70 nations had recognized the SADR as a separate state. When problems arose, however, over the seating of the SADR as a member of the Organization of African Unity, the OAU nearly disintegrated in the process. It was a clear warning of how the "confined" war could easily spill over into other regional issues with unforseen consequences.

Read on one level, Western Sahara: The Roots of a Desert War is a military history of the conflict. Indeed, Hodge's accounts of military strategy and operations are exhaustive. But what makes his study timeless and invaluable is the compelling social history of the region he has woven. In a richly detailed and easily readable format, he builds an appreciation for the many currents that brought the Saharawf people to this place and time. Without a basic understanding of the territory's social, religious, political, and economic life, there is really no understanding of the conflict itself. Hodges rejects any simplistic notions of who is hero and villain, though he is clearly sympathetic to the Saharawi cause and largely approves of Sahrawi political development. It is not, however, knee-jerk support without qualifications. In the end, he seems less concerned with assigning blame than in demonstrating how Moroccans, Mauritanians, Saharawis, and Algerians (among others) have been motivated, even entrapped, by deeper historical forces and subtle attitudes.

Any final solution to the Western Sahara war from uneasy cease-fire to actual crossborder cooperation will require diplomatic intiatives as bold and imaginative as those so desperately needed in the Arab-Israeli conflict. To allow the war to return to its previous state of "out of sight, out of mind" only increases the chances that fuel will be added to the fire to satisfy US domestic needs, widening the dispute in unpredictable ways with potentially disastrous effects. Short of such intervention, however, we would do well to learn something about the conflict and its background. Tony Hodge's book is unmistakably an excellent place to begin that search.

David Wemple is a free-lance writer on Middle East Affairs.