LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Western Sahara Conflict: Self-Determination
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The UN attempted to settle these disputes through a visiting mission in late 1975, as well as a verdict from the International Court of Justice (ICJ), which declared that the Western Sahara possessed the right of self-determination. On November 6, 1975 the Green March into Western Sahara began when 350,000 unarmed Moroccans converged on the city of Tarfaya in southern Morocco and waited for a signal from King Hassan II of Morocco to cross into Western Sahara.
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[T]he United States government should take a two-track approach in its relations with Morocco: supporting self-determination in Western Sahara on the one hand while supporting Moroccan stability and reforms on the other. In other words, Washington should decouple support for Rabat from support for the occupation of Western Sahara. The United States Congress should reaffirm its support for American initiatives aimed at supporting Moroccan stability and internal democratization processes. But Congress should simultaneously press the White House to support self-determination in Western Sahara. None of this... will be possible without political will. International, grassroots, faith- and community-based organizations will have to create broader awareness of the problem in the United States.
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The Secretary General has proposed that the two sides sit down and discuss a possible solution to the conflict that would allow for the self-determination of the people of Western Sahara without requiring Polisario to accept Morocco's sovereignty over the region. Polisario, on the other hand, is expected to stop equating self-determination with independence, as it has done over the years, but be open to see how it can achieve the former without necessarily reaching the latter. Other than this vague formulation, it is not clear what kind of proposals the Secretary General will put to the parties for negotiations.
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VINCENT CHAPAUX, Assistant at the Centre of International Law and the Political Science Faculty of the Université Libre de Bruxelles, said Morocco's continued presence in Western Sahara was a breach of the right to self-determination. Accordingly, every State within the international community was obliged to end that act of violation of international law. Such an obligation was neither moral nor ethical, but juridical. There were those who would argue that international law did not actually require States to put an end to the violation, but that argument was fallacious. Such an obligation was "an obligation of means", not a soft obligation.
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There is always the danger in situations like the Western Sahara of concentrating so exclusively on the geopolitical, stategic, and international contexts of the conflict that the people at issue and the basic questions of international law get neglected. As a non-self-governing territory, the Western Sahara has a clearcut and unambiguous right to self-determination through a referendum on independence. This has to remain the focus.
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In recent years, the Moroccan government has championed the idea of autonomy as a solution to its territorial dispute with pro-independence advocates over Western Sahara. Rabat has said it is willing to consider an autonomous, locally elected government in Western Sahara, which would have powers independent of the central government, albeit circumscribed by Morocco's ultimate sovereignty. The movement for Western Saharan statehood, on the other hand, has rejected autonomy. It continues to claim the right of self-determination, to be exercised through a final status referendum among the territory's indigenous ethnic Sahrawis.
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Self-Determination