An Exercise in Amity

By William E. Smith

Landing rights and help with an unwinnable war

They swapped cavalry stories in the Oval Office and reviewed the international scene while riding Lipizzaners along the banks of Virginia's Rappahannock River. But casual as it may have seemed, Moroccan King Hassan IFs visit with President Ronald Reagan last week was productive for both sides.

Washington's aim was to complete an agreement, reached in principle by Secretary of State Alexander Haig during a trip to Marrakesh last February, that would allow the U.S. to use Moroccan military facilities if troops ever have to be ferried to the Persian Gulf in an emergency. The plan was part of Haig's continuing attempt to forge a "strategic consensus" to contain Communist influence in the Middle East. Hassan was amenable to the idea on the basis of an unwritten agreement, though the U.S. was still hoping to talk him into signing a formal statement to that effect.

From the King's point of view, the best news was a reaffirmation of the Reagan Administration's pledge to press for a big increase in U.S. arms aid to Morocco. The President had already asked Congress for $100 million in military sales credits for Morocco for next year, compared with this year's $30 million.

The additional aid, if approved by Congress, would enable the King to buy armaments he needs to pursue a six-year-old desert war that neither the Moroccans nor their enemies appear to be capable of winning. The war, centered in the former Spanish Sahara to the south of Morocco, pits Hassan's armed forces against the guerrillas of the Polisario Front. The rebels, who are supported by Algeria and Libya, hope to create an independent state in the barren, 103,000-sq.-mi. territory.

The Moroccans have claimed the disputed region since precolonial times. In 1975, when Spanish Dictator Francisco Franco lay on his deathbed, Hassan led 300,000 of his unarmed subjects on a March across the border into the Spanish Sahara. The ploy worked. Spain withdrew from the colony immediately, I leaving the northern two-thirds to Morocco and the southern third to Mauritania. Nobody asked the inhabitants, believed to number about 100,000, what they wanted for their country. As it turned out, many of them wanted independence and, toward that end, banded together in a guerrilla fighting force.

By 1979, as warfare continued, Mauritania renounced its claim to any part of the former Spanish colony. Hassan held on, but understood that he was in a bind: he could not defeat the Polisario, even though he was spending about $ 1 million a day in trying; and he could not withdraw because his countrymen of every political persuasion, whatever they might think of his other policies, were wildly enthusiastic about the war in the Sahara.

Then Hassan conceived a brilliant scheme for changing the very nature of the war. He had long since realized that he did not really want most of the Western Sahara, a moonscape that only a nomad could love. What he wanted was the northwestern 20% of the territory, which contained the main towns of El Aaiun and Smara as well as the phosphate mines at Bu Craa. Hassan decided to protect his claim to this area, which he began to refer to as the "useful Sahara," by literally building a wall around it.

Hassan's wall of earth and sand does not amount to much compared with France's Maginot Line or Germany's Siegfried Line of World War II. It is roughly 7 ft. tall, 10 ft. thick, and extends for some 350 miles along an irregular arc from east to west. The wall is dotted, at intervals of every mile or so, by bunkers protected by land mines and equipped with French-built radar sensors capable of detecting enemy movements up to 40 miles away. Behind the wall, at greater intervals, are small forts or strongpoints that provide back-up support. Fully half of Morocco's 140,000-man army is on duty at the wall.

In the beginning, the whole effort was dismissed by critics as "Hassan's folly." In fact, it has proved remarkably successful at protecting the enclosed area to the north and freeing the Moroccans from the constant threat of encirclement and sniper attack. It has also restricted the movement of the estimated 10,000 guerrillas.

The wall has not brought an end to the war, however. Nor has it convinced either the Moroccans or the Polisario that they are losing. On the Moroccan side, at a site alongside the wall where the Polisario had staged an unsuccessful raid the previous night, a Moroccan colonel explains: "By building the wall and manning it with troops and radar, we have forced the Polisario to adapt to classical battle techniques, for which they are unprepared and unequipped." But in Tindouf, in southwestern Algeria, a Polisario leader in a sprawling refugee camp of 8,000 people counters: "We already control 95% of our land, and we will fight until we control all of it. We are waging a struggle for national liberation, so how can we lose?"

Much of Morocco's support has come from the U.S., which remains uncommitted on the question of Hassan's desert war but nonetheless regards the King as one of Washington's best friends in the Arab world. Hassan has been helpful to the West on a number of occasions, as when he helped make the arrangements for Egyptian President Anwar Sadat's 1977 trip to Jerusalem and when he twice provided peace-keeping troops during crises in other African countries.

In the meantime, Morocco and the Polisario are also jousting with each other on the diplomatic front. At a summit meeting of the Organization of African Unity last June, Libya and several other states proposed O. A.U. membership for the political arm of the Polisario Front. Hassan forestalled the move by calling for a cease-fire and a referendum in the Western Sahara--steps that the O.A.U. had been advocating for years. The issue has continued to dominate and even disrupt subsequent O.A.U. meetings, and is certain to be raised again at the next summit conference, to be held in Libya in early August.

In many ways, Hassan is in a stronger position today than he was three years ago, when some Western diplomats were saying that his country's 300-year-old monarchy was all but finished. He has survived a drought and a decline in the price of phosphate, his country's biggest export. But he is on a firmer footing in the Western Sahara, partly because of the existence of the wall. Now he must somehow find a political compromise to end the dispute. One practical possibility: limiting Morocco's claim to the "useful Sahara" enclosed by the wall.

-- By William E. Smith.

Reported by William Blaylock/Rabat and Johanna McGeary/Washington

With reporting by William Blaylock, Johanna McGeary

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