This has been a big year for King Mohammed VI. His government is harvesting major diplomatic wins—thanks to hardball tactics on migration.
As Europe wrestles with migration and energy challenges, Morocco has masterfully leveraged its strategic position as a gatekeeper on these issues to gain international support for its controversial claims in Western Sahara. This diplomatic balancing act reveals a new era in Euro-Mediterranean relations—one where migration deals and energy pacts are increasingly intertwined.
With Europe turning to Morocco for solutions, the desert has become a battleground—not just for sovereignty and energy, but for human rights as well.
Everybody gets a (Migration) Deal!
The Western Sahara is often described as Africa’s last “colony,” but the conflict there appears to be coming to a close. After decades of stalemate on the Western Sahara dispute, it was announced in July that France would join Spain (in 2022) and the United States (in 2020) in backing Morocco’s plan for the territory, which essentially involves legitimizing Moroccan authority there. The UN diplomatic process to broker a permanent solution between Rabat and the Polisario Front, the armed political group fighting for Sahrawi liberation, has gone cold for many years.
This news comes as Morocco cozies up to Europe on green energy, becoming in 2023 the first country with which the European Union agreed to a Green Partnership. A landmark Morocco-EU deal on migration is also on the way, expected to be delivered by the end of the year. This migration deal will likely expand upon existing agreements between Morocco and EU countries.
This diplomatic momentum largely comes from Morocco’s geographical position as a critical gatekeeper on migration routes. Ahead of the June EU parliament elections, which delivered a surge of far-right anti-immigration politicians to office, EU Commission President Ursula Von Der Leyen’s government passed the Pact on Migration and Asylum. The new Pact aims to standardize and synchronize EU member states’ border and asylum procedures and comes after eight years of parliamentary deadlock.
The Pact essentially codifies the securitizing perspectives that identify migration, especially so-called “irregular” migration, as a threat to be controlled. The pact boasts stringent, techno-optimistic identification screenings at EU borders and attempts to differentiate the various responsibilities of EU member states, financial or otherwise.
One imperative of the Pact is to embed migration-related priorities in all future EU foreign policy on interests as varied as “security, economic development, energy, and trade.” Acting in “solidarity” with EU-neighborhood third countries, the Pact established border externalization deals with Tunisia, Mauritania, and Egypt, trading large sums of money for partnership on external migration control.
Under border externalization, human mobility is deterred and discouraged in ways less obvious than a physical fence at an international border and extending far beyond their imaginary lines. Borders are permeable. By turning entire geographical regions into border zones, border externalization policies attempt to take pressure off borders themselves. These policies often result in violent “pushbacks,” where migration control officers violently move people away from a border. They also result in the institutionalization of burdensome financial and legal barriers and the clandestine perpetration of human rights abuses in mass detention centers.
Hiring neighbor countries to perform border control and often to carry out the human rights abuses with which the EU would rather not be directly involved is a deadly practice. Ahead of the Pact, Medecins Sans Frontieres published a report detailing the human costs of the EU border externalization policy. Describing the Pact’s reforms as further institutionalizing the “web of violent deterrence” faced by those seeking safety in the EU, the report decries the enshrinement of direct financial contributions to non-EU states as deals that trap people in countries with violent track records toward migrants.
In Tunisia, whose hefty border externalization deal with the EU has been framed as a ‘model’ for the region, President Kais Saied spent the summer vilifying migrants from Sub-Saharan Africa, inciting race riots and authorizing violent pushbacks. The Tunisian government rounded up migrants and bussed them to remote desert borders without any resources to survive. Al Jazeera reported that among the hundreds of people trapped in the “no man’s land” between Libya and Tunisia, many were nursing wounds dealt to them by Tunisian security forces, and some described drinking seawater to survive.
Morocco is also accused of abandoning migrants to the far reaches of its desert, including to the Western Sahara. Numerous reports show that the EU is directly involved in supporting horrific operations across North Africa to brutally forsake migrants to the Sahara desert. The practice even has a name: “desert dumps.”
Morocco’s New Rules
The intermingling of migration policy with other foreign policy matters is well exemplified by the developing tripartite relationship between the EU and Morocco, in which matters concerning migration, green energy development, and political recognition of the occupied Western Sahara are increasingly related.
On the Moroccan side, this largely stems from the monarchy’s commitment to advancing its position on Western Sahara so that it may more freely pursue its economic and political interests there.
Not long ago, the diplomatic relationship between Spain and Morocco was in shambles over disagreement on Western Sahara. Spain, whose Ceuta and Melilla territories lie within Morocco on the African continent, has had a long-standing partnership with Morocco on border control matters.
A highly publicized diplomatic incident occurred in 2021 when Spain admitted Brahim Ghali, the leader of the Polisario Front, to receive medical attention for COVID-19 within its borders. Moroccan leaders condemned this decision and, in protest, recalled the Moroccan ambassador to Spain and allowed border authorities to loosen controls, leading to a surge in border crossings to Spain. Numbered at 8,000 people over three days, this border crossing is, to date, the largest in Spain’s history and was described by anti-immigrant voices as an “invasion.”
The incident highlights migrants’ vulnerability as pawns used for political leverage. Within a year, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez took the unprecedented step of backing Morocco’s plans for Western Sahara, traveling to Rabat in April 2022 to smooth over relations.
Two months after Morocco and Spain renewed their partnership on migration, tragedy struck at a Melilla border crossing. On June 24, 2022, at least 70 people went missing, and 37 migrants died in a violent pushback perpetrated by the freshly reconciled Moroccan and Spanish authorities. Government-sanctioned reports describe the main cause of death that day as suffocation from crowd crush, and Spanish and Moroccan authorities have defended their actions. However, video and photographic evidence have revealed that Moroccan and Spanish authorities acted violently. Spanish authorities shot rubber bullets at close range; Moroccan authorities beat unarmed people, trapped the crowd in small confines, and entered Spanish-controlled areas to drag lifeless bodies back to Morocco, where an unknown number of people were hurriedly buried in a nearby site. The BBC documented the excessive use of force and attempted cover-up in a harrowing investigation.
Days later, the EU pledged further financial support for Moroccan border control. The additional funds would appear to have been a reward for the violent events of June 24.
In the background of these events was the Pegasus Affair, an espionage scandal involving allegations that Moroccan intelligence used Israeli-developed spyware to hack the phones of Spanish and French officials, as well as Sahrawi human rights activist Aminatou Haidar.
This past has been put behind Spain and Morocco. In 2023, the governments signed further deals on migration and several other interests, boosting Spanish investment in the country. This past spring, King Mohammed VI announced the “Morocco Offer,” a plan to develop one million hectares of land for the green hydrogen industry. Germany, another country whose relations with Morocco were recently strained over the Western Sahara issue, has all but cosigned this development, as the two countries signed a deal this year on green hydrogen. Despite various voices close to the leading Social Democratic Party in Germany warning that Spain and Germany would do well not to become too dependent on Morocco with regard to migration and energy, the march of bilateral agreements has continued.
The NGO Western Sahara Resource Watch reported that up to 80 percent of the land earmarked by Morocco for green hydrogen production lies in the Western Sahara. For the time being, the official EU position bars the EU from purchasing energy originating in the conflict zone. However, it is technically impossible to differentiate exact energy sources at the point of distribution to Europe.
Leaks from the emerging EU-Morocco migration deal suggest that the EU position on Western Sahara will change by the end of 2024. German news sources report that “the equation is that the EU supports Morocco’s territorial claim and Morocco supports Europe’s refugee policy.”
If true, EU backing of Morocco’s position on Western Sahara is the hard-won victory of years of Moroccan diplomatic jockeying on this issue. Morocco has long been accused of strategically implicating European companies in the Western Sahara.
Industrializing the Desert: Who Pays the Price?
Morocco’s ambitious green energy projects have boosted its climate profile, but they come at a steep cost to local communities. The glossy promise of solar and wind farms in and around the Sahara masks the deeper issues of land dispossession, potentially irreversible environmental degradation, and ongoing devastating drought. As Hamza Hamouchene, a researcher focused on energy and environmental justice in the Arab region, puts it, these projects frame the desert as “vast empty land that is sparsely populated and as representing an Eldorado of renewable energy.” But that land isn’t empty—it is home to indigenous pastoralists, subsistence farmers, the Sahrawi people, and others, many of whom are being pushed off their land to make way for “green” industrial projects.
Published this past Spring, Hamouchene’s Dismantling Green Colonialism argues that Morocco’s energy transition perpetuates colonial extraction practices. “Green-grabbing” is the term used to describe how land is seized for renewable energy projects, often in ways that echo neocolonial patterns of exploitation but under the guise of environmental progress.
One high-profile project is the Ouarzazate Solar Power Station, the world’s largest solar plant. Despite its green promise, the plant has strained local water supplies, pitting small-scale farmers against a vast energy complex that consumes water to cool solar panels. Not only were local communities never compensated for their appropriated land, which is now inaccessible behind military security, but farmers in the surrounding areas now compete with the massive plant for access to rapidly dwindling water. The decision to construct the Ouarzazate plant in a water-scarce region had immediate impacts, with activists reporting the subsequent disappearance of small lakes and streams.
In Morocco, where speaking out against the government is often a criminal offense, many subsistence farmers and pastoralists put their lives at risk to protest these developments. One local shepherd, Hassan El Ghazi, lamented to ATTAC Maroc, a human rights organization,
Our profession is pastoralism, and now [the Ouarzazate Solar Power Plant] has occupied our land where we graze our sheep. They do not employ us in the project, but they employ foreigners… We are oppressed, and the Sidi Ayad region is being oppressed… We do not exist with such policies, and it is better to die; it is better to die.
As these communities lose their livelihoods, migration is becoming a survival strategy. A small-scale farmer associated with ATTAC Maroc highlighted the impact of remittances on the region, saying, “Water access is becoming a matter of public order, as we only survive thanks to our emigrants, who send some money back home.” Many people in these communities travel to Europe as seasonal workers or to find a new life. Researchers document the feminization of Morocco’s vulnerable rural and desert communities: As the land degrades and water resources dry up, men migrate to find jobs elsewhere, leaving women behind in situations of precarity.
The communities in and around the Sahara desert constitute the “sacrifice zones” on which Morocco’s, and by extension Europe’s, green energy plans depend.
Following in the steps of the Ouarzazate plant are several other significant energy plants, including the Midelt solar plant and Desertec 3.0, an initiative to bring solar, wind, and hydrogen energy from North Africa to the European Union that has been billed as a “win-win” for the Euro-Med region. The Desertec 3.0 proposal presents the initiative as an opportunity to “create economic development, future-oriented jobs, and social stability in North African countries, potentially reducing the number of economic migrants from the region to Europe.”
But, Desertec 3.0 will not likely accomplish its goal of creating economic development or future-oriented jobs for local populations, as that has yet to be the impact of similar projects. The premise of instigating further environmental degradation in the region, not to guarantee energy access to local populations but instead to power the EU, is modern colonialism at work. However, the prospect of reduced South-North migration adds insult to injury.
As Europe looks to the Sahara for renewable energy, the reality is that these projects are likely to breach critical socio-ecological tipping points. The hidden cost of Morocco’s green energy boom isn’t just environmental—it’s the ongoing marginalization and exploitation of its people and those who pass through that land to fight for a better life.
In the flurry of agreements signed by EU member states and Morocco, two visions for the Sahara arise, and neither is attractive. The green energy vision sees the Sahara as the golden ticket to a renewable energy-powered future, its topography dotted with large-scale energy plants. However, at present, this vision does not respect ecological boundaries. At its foundation is the misguided belief that exorbitant energy consumption can go on unchallenged and the fallacy that the desert can sustain mega-industrialization. Research has even suggested loading the Sahara with solar plants could contribute to a warming climate.
The second vision for the Sahara is more shrouded. It is for the Sahara to become the far reaches of a regional South-North migration deterrence scheme, a deadly border zone extending far beyond the Mediterranean into North Africa, and a remote “no man’s land” to abandon individuals intercepted from traveling toward European borders.
These visions serve neither the planet nor the people.
