South Africa's Deputy Minister Inconsistent Claims About Morocco's Territorial Integrity: A Response

Morocco World

23-04-2025

My reading of an article published last month in South African newspaper IOL NEWS, written by the Deputy Minister of International Relations and Cooperation of South Africa, Alvin Botes, was a source of provocation for me, as it would be for any Moroccan citizen, regarding our foremost national cause, which enjoys a national consensus, namely, the completion of our territorial integrity.
However, as a newcomer to the legal profession, after a career in the financial sector, I find myself morally obligated, by my affiliation with this noble profession, to stand in defense of our homeland's sovereignty and to counter these provocations, which I address with the following arguments :
Alvin Botes began his article with an introduction in which he noted that March 21 is a national Human Rights Day in South Africa, commemorating the events of that day in 1960 when apartheid police opened fire on a peaceful demonstration against racist pass laws, killing 69 people and the injuring hundreds more. He wrote that this anniversary led him to reflect on what he called the ongoing struggle for the self-determination of the Sahrawi people in North Africa.
It is evident that the deputy minister was not successful in this biased comparison – equating a Moroccan people living in permanent peace from the north to the south in the Moroccan Sahara, with a nation where citizens endure oppression in a place where crime rates are among the highest in the world.
His misstep is clear in what his memory allowed him to recount and exploit in his claims, as he dwelt on events from the 1960s in South Africa – events that occurred even before his birth in 1973 – while forgetting the atrocities of the current South African regime, which he himself witnessed, including the killing of its own citizens. Indeed, he must have truly forgotten, because if he had truly grasped the matter, he would have realized that using this comparison would backfire on him. Condemning the very system of which he is a part of, he is a fitting example of the English poet and orator George Herbert's adage that 'people who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones'.
The reality is that he forgot about the Marikana massacre of 2012 – one of the most shocking interventions by their regime in the post-apartheid era against its own citizens. At the Lonmin platinum mine in Marikana, striking workers were demanding wage increases when orders were given for the police to open fire on them, resulting in 34 miners killed, 78 others injured, and 250 strikers arrested.
This massacre occurred for no reason other than to suppress the workers' right to strike, a right guaranteed by the constitutions and laws of democratic nations. Yet, in an entirely unexpected response, the state met the workers' demands for better living conditions that preserve their dignity with live ammunition.
Knowing the history of the South African regime in this massacre as well as others, it would be more fitting for Alvin Botes to confront himself and feel ashamed before his own citizens first, rather than attempting to give lessons that he believes others are in greater need of. He should refrain from delving into fabrications of his own imagination that infringe upon the sovereignty of a state that does not concern him, supporting mercenary separatists against it. His aim is to distract citizens from South Africa's internal problems by claiming false ideological leadership – as do other politicians of his like.
Moreover, even in recent history, South African forces intervened against protests by their citizens following former President Jacob Zuma's arrest in 2021, resulting in the deaths of some people and the arrest of more than 5,500 individuals.
One of the most prominent causes was that more than half of South Africa's population lives in extreme poverty, with an unemployment rate of 32% according to the World Bank. It is certain that the uprising of South African citizens was not in support of President Zuma, who was arrested due to corruption cases and who had boasted of supporting separatists against Morocco's territorial integrity. Rather, it was a protest against the dire conditions in which they live in and the lack of economic democracy in their country. These, sadly, are the figures and tragedies of post-apartheid South Africa, or simply, the new apartheid.
On the other hand, the South African regime, which did not welcome Morocco's return to the African Union and opposed it in vain for the sake of its own interests and those of its Algerian ally, finds itself today, lamenting this rightful return of Morocco. As Alvin Botes in his official position alludes to, South Africa almost bitterly acknowledges the failure of their opposition, a result of the support from a large number of brotherly and friendly nations for Morocco's decision. This is because Morocco rejoined the African Union as one of its founding members through the predecessor organization in 1963, the Organization of African Unity, at that time, to support the complete liberation of Africa.
While Alvin Botes speaks of the end of colonialism in his retelling of history from his perspective, he does not mention the Green March of 1975, which was part of the process of ending colonialism to reclaim territories that had been divided by the European colonial powers, just as they had divided other African nations by a ruler who drew straight lines – both vertical and horizontal – on the African map. These divisions continue to cause wars and conflicts in Africa to this day.
The Green March was a peaceful affirmation of sovereignty with significant support from the local population, which contradicts the article's portrayal of Morocco as a colonizing country. At the time, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) confirmed the existence of ties of allegiance between the inhabitants of the Moroccan Sahara and the Moroccan Alawite throne, given that Morocco is historically one of the oldest monarchies and not merely a state born of colonialism.
Alvin Botes falsely claimed that the inhabitants of the Sahara do not benefit from the natural resources of Morocco's southern provinces. However, his statements, which fundamentally lack the truth, just as his claims lack the language of figures that would certainly not support him, would find him either absent from, or oblivious to, reality – if he considered the level of prosperity and peace enjoyed by the inhabitants of the Moroccan Sahara compared to the citizens of his own country, South Africa.
In terms of numbers, and regarding an internal matter that concerns him and not us as Moroccans, out of respect for the norms of international relations, violent crime in South Africa has reached its peak over the past decade, to the point where almost everyone is at risk.
In South Africa, 27,494 murders were recorded in the decade ending in 2022-2023, compared with 16,213 murders at the end of the 2012-2013 period. In 2022-2023 alone, the homicide rate in South Africa reached 45 murders per 100,000 inhabitants, compared to a rate of 6.3 in the United States and around 1 in most European countries. These are official figures, not the unsubstantiated claims of Alvin Botes.
Morocco has always stood by the people of South Africa in their struggle against the apartheid regime and was an early supporter of Nelson Mandela. However, like other countries that called for justice and democracy in South Africa, it could not have imagined that those who came after Mandela would plunge South Africa into a new apartheid regime, more sinister than its predecessor. This new regime has subjected the fate of its people to the hammer of political corruption scandals, internal tensions shaking the country's political landscape, and the anvil of diplomatic provocations with several nations to relieve internal pressure. The most recent consequence of this was that the United States was forced to expel the South African ambassador in Washington, after the Trump administration expressed the resentment and hatred that the expelled ambassador harboured.
It is certain that the statements of South African officials, to which the international community pays no attention because of the revelation of their intentions – with the exception of some of their sister regimes, especially their twin, Algeria – are nothing short of an attempt to throw dust in the eyes of their people and to deceive them with things that do not exist, in order to cover up their failure and corruption in improving their standard of living, despite the wealth that these countries possess.
It would have been more appropriate for the South African deputy minister, who dared to challenge Moroccan sovereignty and discuss the country's natural resources, to instead criticize the poor distribution of wealth among South African citizens and the misery left behind by his political leadership, as evidenced by official figures from both the United Nations and the World Bank. According to one of the latter's reports, 55.5%, or 30.3 million people, live in extreme poverty below South Africa's upper national poverty line, while a total of 13.8 million people, or 25%, suffer from food poverty.
Rather, it would have been more appropriate for him to compare the path of reconstruction and prosperity that the Moroccan Sahara has experienced since the Green March in 1975, after its liberation from the colonizer, with the results of his regime's deviation from the path of its leader, Nelson Mandela – a setback that the aforementioned report itself pointed out at the social level.
Alvin Botes should have realized, as a supposed man of politics, that the broken record of secession went out the window with the fall of the Berlin Wall, where many of the artificial political issues were the result of the Cold War, as did the fall of the apartheid regime in his own country after the fall of the Wall, and after the unification of Germany as well as Yemen, and the subsequent return of Hong Kong and Macau to China.
Quite simply, the issue of Moroccan unity has been settled, even if its resolution is somehow embodied in addressing this artificial problem by granting autonomy – yet under Rabat's rule – to the inhabitants of the Moroccan Sahara – a solution supported by the majority of United Nations member states. These include major powers in the International Security Council such as the United States and France, which recognize Morocco's sovereignty over its Sahara. Meanwhile, the remaining member states of the Council do not express any objection to the Autonomy Plan proposed by Morocco to resolve this artificial issue.
The truth is that this resolution is rooted first in Morocco's history and the unity of its people, in the democratic process that has been evolving for years through elections from northern Morocco to its Sahara, and then in the prosperity and development brought about by the massive investments Morocco has provided for its citizens in its southern provinces. These were achieved in record time, with its sons contributing first by sacrificing their blood for the unity of the homeland and then by bearing the cost of those investments.
Finally, it falls South African Deputy Minister Alvin Botes to compare the decent standard of living Morocco has provided to the inhabitants of its southern provinces with the misery into which Algeria has plunged detainees of Sahrawi origin in the human trafficking camps of Tindouf. Tags: Morocco saharaSaharaSouth AfricaTerritorial IntegrityWestern sahara