Sand War

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Sand War

Date	October 1963
Location	The former French colonial département of Saoura (Present-day Tindouf, Béchar Provinces.)
Result	The closing of the border south of Figuig, Morocco/Beni-Ounif, Algeria
Casus belli	Moroccan claim of Tindouf and Béchar provinces ^[1] ^[2]
Territorial changes	None

Combatants

Morocco

Algeria

The Sand War occurred along the Algerian-Moroccan border in October 1963, and was a Moroccan attempt to claim the Tindouf and the Bechar areas that France annexed to French Algeria a few decades earlier.

1 Background
2 The war
3 Results
4 Further reading
5 References and notes

[edit] Background

Before the French colonization in the 19th century, parts of southern and western Algeria belonged to Morocco.^[3] In the 1930s and later in the 1950s, France had integrated into what was known as the Overseas Departement of French Algeria, the areas of Tindouf and Bechar. When Morocco gained independence, it wanted to reassert sovereignty over these areas. In an effort to cut the support that the Algerian liberation movement was getting from Morocco, France offered to return those areas in exchange for Morocco stopping that support. King Mohammed V refused to make a deal with France behind the back of the "Algerian brothers", and agreed with the Algerian provisional governement's nationalist leader Ferhat Abbas, that once Algeria gained its independence it would renegotiate the status of the Tindouf and Bechar areas.

However, immediately after Algeria's independence, and before his agreement with King Muhammad V could be formally ratified, Abbas was purged from the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) government by a military-backed coalition led by radical leader Ahmad Ben Bella. The last, bloody years of the FLN's rebellion had been fought essentially to prevent France from splitting off the Sahara regions from the emerging Algerian state, and thus neither Ben Bella nor the rest of the wartime FLN were inclined to give them up to Morocco when independence was achieved. The Algerians therefore recognized neither Morocco's historical nor its political claims. Instead, they perceived the Moroccan demands as an attempt to infringe the country's hard-won independence and pressure it when it was at its weakest. Algeria was still reeling from the enormous damage caused by its war against French colonialism, and the government scarcely held control over its entire territory - significantly, a Berber anti-FLN rebellion under the leadership of Hocine Aït Ahmed had recently flared up in the Kabyle mountains. Tension escalated, as neither side wanted to back down.

[edit] The war

Skirmishes along the border eventually escalated into a full-blown confrontation, with intense fighting around the oasis towns of Tindouf and Figuig. The Algerian army, just formed from the guerrilla ranks fo the FLN's Armé de Libération Nationale (ALN) was still geared towards asymmetric warfare, and had little high-powered equipment ^[4]. They were still battle-ready and held tens of thousands of experienced veterans, and strengthening the armed forces had been a top priority for the military-dominated post-war government. On the other hand, while being modern, western-equipped Moroccan army was superior on the battlefield, ^[5] ^[3] it did not manage to penetrate into Algeria. The war stalemated with the intervention of the Organization of African Unity (OAU) and the Arab league and it was broken off after approximately three weeks. The OAU eventually managed to arrange a formal cease-fire on February 20, 1964.^[6] A peace agreement was then made after Arab League mediation, and a demilitarized zone instituted but hostilities simmered.

[edit] Results

The Sand War laid the foundations for a lasting and often intensely hostile rivalry between Morocco and Algeria, exacerbated by the differences in political outlook between the conservative Moroccan monarchy and the revolutionary, Arab nationalist Algerian military government^[3]^[7]. Final border demarcation in the Tindouf area would not be reached until many years later, in a negotiation process stretching from 1969 to 1972, and with Algeria offering Morocco shares in the iron ore earnings from Tindouf for recognition of its borders.

Both in Morocco and Algeria, the governments used the war to describe opposition movements as unpatriotic. The Moroccan UNFP and the Algerian-Berber FFS of Aït Ahmed both suffered as a result of this. In the case of UNFP, its leader, Mehdi Ben Barka, sided with Algeria, and was sentenced to death in absentia as a result. In Algeria, the armed rebellion of the FFS in Kabylie fizzled out, as commanders defected to join the national forces against Morocco.

Many have argued that the Sand War and its bitter legacy was a factor in the attitude of Algeria towards the conflict of Spanish Sahara in the early 1970s. In 1975, Morocco took control of this territory, now known as Western Sahara, while Algeria at the same time began backing poltically and militarily an independence-minded Sahrawi guerrilla organization, Polisario Front.

[edit] Further reading

Pennell, C. R. (2000), Morocco since 1830. A History, New York University Press (ISBN 0-8147-6676-5)
Stora, Benjamin (2004), Algeria 1830-2000. A Short History, Cornell University Press (ISBN 0-8014-3715-6)