Both southern Sudan and Western Sahara have the right to self-determination -- yet only one is acted upon, writes Graham Usher Double standards are as old as the United Nations but they have rarely been on show so obviously as on 16 November. In the morning a high powered meeting of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) met to assert that the referendum on southern Sudan's right to self-determination must happen peacefully on 9 January with the outcome accepted by both Khartoum and Juba. In the afternoon a low key UNSC session met to address recent violence in Western Sahara, a people whose right to self- determination has also been promised by the UN, in their case for 35 years. Thus the world's powers had before them two similar situations from what will likely be Africa's newest state and its last colony. And the contrast in response was stark. The Sudan meeting was chaired by British Foreign Secretary William Hague, attended by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and addressed by Thabo Mbeki, the African Union chairperson mediating negotiations on the referendum between Khartoum and Juba. After dire warnings that a vote for secession could mean civil war, the mood in the council was "cautiously optimistic", said Hague. This is apparently due to Khartoum no longer insisting that core issues like the demarcation of a border, the sharing of oil revenues and citizenship be agreed prior to the referendum. The exception is Abyei, an oil rich region straddling the north-south divide which is supposed to have a separate vote to decide whether its people join the south or north. On 22 November negotiations began between President Omar Hassan Al-Bashir and the Sudan People's Liberation Movement (SPLM) leader Salva Kiir to hammer out a deal. The US -- in return for a peaceful secession of the south -- wants Juba to grant Khartoum a generous share in the Abyei oilfields. It also wants to grant the vote to the northern nomadic Misseriya tribes which use Abyei lands to graze. Washington is offering things too. In her prepared UNSC script Clinton said if it "chooses the path of peace, the Sudan government can have a dramatically improved relationship with the US, including normalisation of relations". But if it chooses conflict, it "will face consequences in the forms of additional pressure and isolation". However, by the time she addressed the council even this mildly menacing second sentence had been airbrushed. So desperate is America to win Khartoum's cooperation with the south's secession, the only stick it has against a regime defined as "a state sponsor of terrorism" is "the absence of carrots", said one analyst. The Western Sahara session was called in response to an attack by Moroccan paramilitary forces on a desert camp near Laayoune set up to protest Sahrawi living conditions. Rabat said 12 were killed, including 10 of its soldiers. The Polisario Front (PF) -- the movement for Sahrawi independence -- said 36 were killed, all Sahrawi civilians, and 700 injured. It called for a UN fact-finding mission to be dispatched to Laayoune. It also demanded that the UNSC's "unfulfilled promise" of a referendum on Sahrawi self- determination is expedited before "a bad situation gets worse," said Mohamed Khadad, a Polisario leader. France -- which, when comes to Western Sahara in the Security Council, plays the US role to Morocco's Israel -- vetoed all demands. In a limp statement the UNSC "deplored" the violence and backed a UN peace process that Rabat, Israeli-like, has long ensured goes nowhere. The Polisario turned to diplomacy once it became clear the gun would not bring freedom. Promised self-determination by the UN -- and a referendum on it by Spain, the colonial power in what was then Spanish Sahara -- both rights were denied when Morocco occupied their land after the departure of Spanish forces in 1975. For the next 25 years Polisario fought a guerrilla war, inspired by the Palestine Liberation Organisation. Like the Palestinians, they saw their land as occupied territory, the Moroccan invaders as settlers and looked to the UN for protection against a stronger enemy. In 1991 it agreed a ceasefire with Rabat in return for a UN promise that a referendum on Sahrawi self-determination would be held. The promise was never kept. In 2003 -- under pressure from Algeria, its main regional backer, and the US, its main global hope -- the Polisario agreed to "autonomy under Moroccan sovereignty" pending a referendum on independence. Since 2004 Rabat has refused even that. It talks only of autonomy. The Sahrawi quest for independence is "outdated", said Morocco's foreign minister, Taib Fassi Fihri. It may have become passé. Since 1976, Rabat has peopled Western Sahrawi with 250,000 Moroccan settlers, against perhaps 150,000 native Sahrawis. The rest of the indigenous people have been dispersed or fester in camps in Algeria. They are as close to genuine independence as the Palestinians. Why has the SPLM been successful in rallying the world powers behind its cause, and the Polisario not? One reason is that southern Sudan has become a domestic issue in US politics: Juba is "very much the good guy" in Congress, says one observer, while Khartoum is deemed Islamist, "terrorist" and "genocidal" for war crimes in Darfur. South Sudan has oil, compelling countries that were once allies of Khartoum, like China, to be more even-handed towards the prospect of a nascent state. Finally the size of Sudan means war or peace can send seismic shifts across the continent. "Sudan neighbours nine countries," says Sudanese analyst Suleiman Baldo. "If there is renewed conflict and destabilisation -- with all the chaotic violence and population movements that accompany them -- it will affect all countries in the region". It is for reasons like these "the promise of self- determination made to the Sudanese people in 2005" is a promise the "United States believes... must be kept," said Clinton on 16 November. It's presumably the absence of such reasons that the same promise to the Sahrawi people -- made repeatedly since 1975 -- is observed only in the breach.
