October 29th, 1953

The end of the late Spanish-Moroccan War had brought negotiations at the behest of the UN, whose peacekeepers were deployed to help bring the conflict to a swift resolution. While Spain had been happy to clean their hands of the issue in the first Zurich treaty conference, following its disastrous conclusion, the second had been far more controversial.

The goal of the conference had been to establish the status of Western Sahara - the fought-over strip of mostly desert to the south of Morocco, which it had swiftly occupied in the first month of the war without significant Spanish resistance. While the conference had been intended to facilitate discussions between the local Sahrawi tribesmen and Moroccan officials, controversy immediately erupted as the Moroccan delegation claimed the UN had no jurisdiction to facilitate this interaction, pointing towards the UNSC’s resolution A/RES/6/2, which had reaffirmed that the UN had no right to rule on matters of local intersectional conflict within states. The UN Commission on Western Sahara, set up to rule on this matter specifically, had replied by pointing out the extraordinary circumstances and the presence of UN Peacekeepers bringing an end to the conflict. Questions immediately arose among attendees as to the faithfulness of the Moroccan delegation, as the idea of splitting the Zurich conference into two subconferences had originated with the Moroccans themselves.

Then came an incident which rapidly developed into an international scandal. UN Peacekeepers, on patrol near a washed-out ravine near Khraybichat in Western Sahara on October 16th, 1953 came upon a caravan of Sahrawis traveling in the moonlight. As was standard procedure, the men were stopped and questioned - suspicions immediately arose as they initially refused to identify themselves, or state their destination or origin. Suspicious, the UN mission had summarily arrested the leader, who later identified himself as Khalili Erguibi, a Moroccan-affiliated Sahrawi. Hundreds of hand-wound radios and rolls of banknotes were found amongst the caravan, and under interrogation in Laayoune it soon transpired that the men had been charged by the Royal Moroccan Army to transit Western Sahara, laying exorbitant bribes and distributing radios tuned to pro-Arab stations in an effort to turn Sahrawi public opinion towards Moroccan subsumation. The Khraybichat Incident was immediately reported to Zurich - just as UNCOWS was prepared to close the conference by handing Western Sahara over to Morocco as a semi-autonomous region.

With the ramifications rapidly becoming clear, UNCOWS rescinded its original recommendation. A week passed of hurried conferences (without consultation to the Moroccans or the Sahrawi representatives), with the result that Western Sahara would become a United Nations Trust Territory. UNCOWS dissolved in disappointment, with some members expressing private disgust at the Moroccan plot. Whatever the outcome in the future, it is clear that Morocco’s standing on the world stage would be damaged by this incident.

Summary

• Western Sahara becomes a UN-administered Trust Territory
• Moroccan forces ordered to leave Western Sahara
• UN Peacekeepers kept on in dwindling numbers until at least 1956 to prevent additional Moroccan incursions into the territory