Green Colonialism, Corruption, & Occupation, in Morocco
13 November 2024
Green energy is seen as the solution to many environmental issues we are facing. It can represent a shift in the energy paradigm and a way to democratize energy production and open new spaces for the autonomy of consumption by local communities, but, in our times, this is more often used as a pretext by green capitalist lobbies to overcome territorial sovereignty and implement privatization and value extraction. The case of Western Sahara is clear: two-thirds of the territory has been occupied by the Moroccan army since 1975 and now Morocco’s main discursive tool to continue occupation has become the green transition. That’s what we call green colonialism.
HISTORY OF THE OCCUPATION
The invasion of the former Spanish colonial territories of Saguia el Hamra and Rio de Oro started in November 1975, a few weeks before the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco died. In the months that followed, the Moroccan army used napalm and a devastating amount of violence to gain those territories and forced thousands of Saharawii to flee and become refugees in Algeria and then Europe. The Saharawi liberation movement known as Frente Polisario, active since 1973, proclaimed the independent Saharawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR) in February 1976; in the same month the King of Morocco signed a treaty with Spain and Mauritania where they both announced the annexation of the land in the Moroccan borders shared with Mauritania. By1979, Mauritania surrendered to Polisario and retired its army; the Moroccan army entered the zone and occupied it.
Since the 1980s, the Moroccan army built a huge sand wall (the Berm) to stabilize the frontline with the area in which Frente Polisario was active. Today, that wall is the longest in the world, measuring over 1,700km of barriers and including 7 square km of mined zones all around. The cost of maintaining and defending the wall is 2 million euros daily. To gather this enormous amount of money, the Kingdom of Morocco exploits and exports Saharawi resources - fish and phosphates - and it has become the largest producer of phosphates, and the second largest for fish after China. These resources are illegally sold off through Moroccan enterprises. The resources are extracted in a territory recognized by international law as pending self-determination and where the Kingdom of Morocco has no juridical sovereignty.
The Saharawi people are 500,000: around 30-40,000 live under the Moroccan military occupation and the rest live in the Tindouf refugees camp (the capital of the exiled SADR) in Algeria and some dozen thousands are refugees in Europe.
CORRUPTION
Various rulings by the European Court of Justice (ECJ) have resulted in difficulties for European corporations to enter the trade in Saharawi resources. A trade agreement for fish and sand with one European corporation was declared to be illegal by the European Court in 2015; for the UK that meant the total exit from Western Sahara of the British enterprises until 2021. To obviate this, Morocco changed its international relations strategy, resorting to more aggressive diplomacy in Europe and all other international spaces.
In November 2022 a huge scandal was disclosed in the European parliament: the Qatargate (also known as Moroccogate). This scandal was not significantly covered by the mainstream media in the past two years, so we provide a summary in the following: it has been proved that Moroccan agents have been corrupting Members of European Parliament (MEP) using an Italian politician, Antonio Panzeri, as a middleman. The Moroccan ambassador in Poland, Abderrahim Atmoun, and an accomplice of Panzeri’s, Andrea Cozzolino, are two central figures of this corrupt international system. Panzeri with Francesco Giorgi (former parliamentary assistant of Panzeri) created an NGO, with self-styled humanitarian purposes to send Moroccan money to a Belgian bank account and, therefore, launder it. The Belgian police proved that Francesco Giorgi’s wife, the Greek MEP Eva Kaili, was central in the scandal. Francesco Giorgi has the task to collect the money Atmoun was disbursing to gain MEPs’ support and lobby in favour of Morocco’s interests. Kaili acted as the connection between the intermediaries and the MEPs, one of them being Maria Arena, a corrupted Spanish MEP.
Panzeri and Giorgi received money in exchange for their lobbying activities, and to add on to the corruption, were offered free holidays in Morocco in expensive resorts, as well as all other benefits. Atmoun received special honours by the monarchy. Antonio Panzeri confessed to having received 50,000 euros per year together with Giorgi to promote Moroccan interests in the EP through their NGO and in a search of the apartment of Gorgi the police found 600.000 euro. Some results that Morocco gained from this corruption strategy were: the denial of the Sakharov Prize (an annual prize EU gives to activists who symbolize European democratic values) to two Saharawi activists; the passing of resolutions against Algeria, a country that has been hosting Saharawi refugee camps; the modification of a European report about violence and human rights to erase the Moroccan cases; and an attempt to reverse the rulings against the fishing treaty, which banned EU companies from fishing.. The corruption of MEPs in the years 2019-2024 was meant to facilitate these illegal activities and to start linking Morocco’s green colonialism with the European green transition.
Following this strategy, the Abraham Accords between the USA, Israel, Bahrain, the UAE, and Morocco were signed in 2020, consisting of recognition of the occupations of Palestine by Israel and Western Sahara by Morocco, and mediated by then-US President, Donald Trump. Israel has since increased its trade with Morocco, consisting of weapons and new drones that Morocco has used in the war against Saharawis and Front Polisario. With Israeli companies exploiting solar energy and fisheries the Saharawis now share the fate of directly experiencing Israeli oppression alongside the Palestinians. The Israeli zone of interest is the Dakhla area where they built and own a solar energy facility and use the port for the trade shipment.
The easiest resource to extract from Western Sahara is sand. Due to coastal erosion the demand for its use in beach construction is huge, moreover sand is equally vital in cement production. In the occupied territory of Western Sahara, there are two key facilities for this purpose: Ciments du Maroc, which is part of the Italcementi Group, and Lafarge Holcim Maroc, associated with the French Lafarge Holcim Ltd. Lafarge Holcim is the biggest producer of cement worldwide, and the French corporation has collaborated with Isis in Syria for years, paying taxes to the Islamic State.
The Moroccan army and its colonial administration of Western Sahara’s occupied territories are actively hiding information about the exploitation of these natural resources. We do not know the size of resources that are been extracted and seized by the Moroccan Kingdom and sold off in the global market because fish caught in Western Sahara’s waters is mixed in calculations with Moroccan national waters, while the phosphates are sold to international companies. The biggest phosphate mine in Western Sahara is the Phosboucraa, but Moroccan institutions do not publish the amount of phosphate extracted there. Instead, they greatly publicize the renewable energy used for extracting and processing the phosphates. The Kingdom’s priority in its green transition is to provide stable energy to its biggest asset, the phosphate mining industry. Thus, the mine receives 90% of the electricity consumption from solar and wind power plants.
GREEN ENERGOPOLITICS
This oppression has been named by scholar Dominic Boyer “Energopolitics’’: this is the oppression resulting from the privatization of land and natural resources by the energy sector. The exportation of resources deprives the locals and racialized inhabitants of electricity.
Since 2017, the Moroccan Kingdom has rapidly been investing in the green energy sector. At COP meetings, it craftily depicted itself as the most proactive country in renewables in Africa: Marrakech hosted two COP editions and the last was in 2017. Since then, renewable energy projects have multiplied.. Morocco exploits land, air and sea in Western Sahara despite having no sovereignty over it. In the last year Spain and France recognized Morocco’s effort to legitimize the occupation inside the “autonomy plan.” Spain’s interest includes Moroccan willingness to assist with migrant pressures.
Western Sahara is connected to the Moroccan grid via the capital Laayoune. A new 400kV power connection is planned between Laayoune and Dakhla, and to Mauritania. Through this powerline, Morocco plans to export renewable energy to West Africa. Exports to the EU will occur via existing and planned submarine connections with Spain, Portugal and with the UK. The UK project would see a 3.6GW submarine high-voltage direct current interconnector between the UK and the Occupied Territories, which would meet 6% of the UK’s demand. All these plans are particularly focused on cutting the energy trade of Morocco’s main competitor and geopolitical enemy in the Mediterranean region, Algeria.
The implications for the Saharawi right to self-determination are huge. These planned energy exports would make the European and West African energy markets partially dependent on energy generated in occupied Western Sahara. An aggressive energopolitics is implemented through the operations conducted by the Moroccan army against the Saharawis remaining in the Occupied Territories, as the army threatens to cut off the electricity to make it impossible for them to record violence against the community.
The National Office of Electricity (ONEE), Moroccan state’s electricity and water company, plays a central role in managing the King’s family interests, as well as European interests and global capitalists’ interests. Regarding wind projects launched in 2010, the Moroccan government announced a project to double its national wind energy production by developing an additional 1 GW by 2020. It planned to develop 40% of this additional capacity within the occupied area, according to the NGO Western Sahara Resource Watch. A consortium of three companies - Enel Green Power, Siemens-Gamesa and Nareva Holding (owned by the Moroccan royal family) - won a bid for the development, design, financing, construction, operation and maintenance of the new 5 renewable power plants. Two are located in Western Sahara.
GREEN PARTNERSHIPS
Morocco is quite successful in attracting international cooperation projects in the field of renewable energy. EU sees the country as a supposedly reliable partner in North Africa, not least because of its alleged role in the fight against international terrorism and in isolating the EU from migratory movements. In detail, the EU-Morocco Green Partnership Agreement signed at the end of 2022 opened new opportunities for Europeans renewable energy companies. An example of this is a research project with German involvement to study the production of hydrogen and green ammonia.
Morocco’s strategy underlines the place of energy in realising the Kingdom’s diplomatic efforts in securing support for its occupation in traditionally pro-Saharawi land., pro-Polisario, sub-Saharan Africa (specially Nigeria). The final purpose of this strategy is to strengthen economic and energetical relations with African countries in return for recognition of its illegal occupation.
There are hundreds of foreign businesses involved in the exploitation of occupied Western Sahara’s natural resources. One of the most active is Siemens Gamesa. Siemens Gamesa is the result of the merger, in 2017, of the Spanish Gamesa Corporación Tecnológica and Grupo Auxiliar Metalúrgico, inc. in 1976, and the German Siemens Wind Power, their “green” division. The profits are huge, annual revenues in 2018 has been more than 10 billion euros. The renewable energy company develops, produces, installs and maintains onshore and offshore wind turbines in more than 90 countries; but the most relevant is its participation in 5 wind farms in the Occupied Territories., one of which provides 99% of the energy required to operate the phosphate extraction and export mine of Phosboucraa.
The interests of EU for hydrogen are entering a new phase for Moroccan green colonialism, the fact that Morocco can exploit Western Sahara’s resources so easily reverberates into the cheapest costs for enterprises to invest there. This is also reflected in the expected production costs of hydrogen: in a study published in March 2023, Moroccan scientists assumed that the costs in Western Sahara are about three times lower than in Morocco. Similarly, most of the existing and planned wind and solar plants are located on occupied territories in violation of international law. The parallels with the hydrogen plans are obvious: here again, it is mainly European companies such as Siemens and Enel that are building energy infrastructure on occupied territory in cooperation with the occupying power, thereby profiting from exploitation in violation of international law.
One of the goals of the Dakhla wind farm's green hydrogen project would also be to mine cryptocurrencies and manage data using clean energy, therefore overcoming their huge carbon footprint. This project involves the construction of a 900 MW wind farm of over 10,000 hectares and will be built in several phases over a 6-year period, with an expected price tag of $2.5 billion. The other green hydrogen project in the Dakhla region is the White Dunes project. The project area may reach 150,000 hectares and aims to produce green hydrogen competitively on a global scale.
RECENT EURPOEAN MANUEVERS
On 19 December 2023, in Brussels, the so-called European Wind Energy Action Plan was signed, which proposes 15 key actions to strengthen the competitiveness of the European wind energy value chain. The Charter has been ratified by EU members and 300 of Europe's biggest wind energy companies, including Siemens Gamesa and ENEL-Endesa and the Spanish, Italian and German governments. As a result of this initiative, the Commission has launched a call for grants worth 4 billion euros (Innovation Fund) with resources to boost investment in ‘clean technology manufacturing’ projects.
The European Union continues to promote the sector and create alliances with Simens Gamesa regardless being aware that the company operates in occupied territory and therefore violating international law. According to the position of the German government, as well as that of the European Union and the United Nations, the situation in occupied Western Sahara is not resolved. Siemens Gamesa's actions in the occupied territory, like those of other companies, contribute to the consolidation of the Moroccan occupation. Business activity in the occupied Saharawi territory has been addressed by multiple UN resolutions on the right to self-determination of occupied Western Sahara and the right of its citizens to dispose of its resources.
On the ground, it is almost exclusively an outside elite that benefits from the projects: the operator of the energy parks in Western Sahara and direct business partner of Siemens Energy and ENEL is the company Nareva (owned by the king). The Sahrawis themselves have no access to projects on their legitimate territory. Instead, Sahrawis who continue to live under occupation in Western Sahara facing massive human rights violations by the occupying power.
Saharawis living in the occupied territory are aware that energy infrastructure—its ownership, its management, its reach, the terms of its access, the political and diplomatic work it does—mediates the power of the Moroccan occupation and its corporate partners. The Moroccan occupation enters, and shapes the possibilities of, daily life in the Saharawi home through (the lack of) electricity cables. Saharawis understand power cuts as a method through which the occupying regime punishes them as a community, fosters ignorance of Moroccan military manoeuvres, combats celebrations of Saharawi national identity, enforces a media blockade so that news from Western Sahara does not reach “the outside world” and creates regular dangers. They also acknowledge that renewables are not the problem per se but are a tool for the kingdom to renovate the colonization in a new form and with news legitimizations from foreign countries. The new projects are being built so fast that the local opposition to them is ineffective. The Saharawi decolonial struggle is deeper and the final goal is liberation and self-determination; they acknowledge that the renewable powers plants could be good if managed for the benefit of the Saharawis in a free RASD. As a fisherman from Laayoune said in an interview about the offshore windmills: “They do not represent anything but a scene of the wind of your land being illegally exploited by the invaders with no benefits for the people”.
Peoples interviewed list: Khaled, activist of juventud active Saharawi, El Machi, Saharawi activist, Ahmedna, activist of juventud active Saharawi, former member of red ecosocial Saharawi, Youssef, local Saharawi from Laayoune, Ayoub, youth activist from Laayoune injured by police, Khattab, Saharawi journalist (interviewed with Ayoub), Asria Mohamed, Saharawi podcaster based in Sweden.
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