How the monarch now follows through on decentralization will greatly determine to the extent he is able to achieve his most cherished goals: sustainable socio-economic development of the Kingdom achieved through participatory democracy; and a resolution of the Western Saharan conflict by way of meeting the self-determined needs of people in the region as part of the Kingdom.

There are four major paths to a nation’s decentralization that have been applied around the world. Morocco’s decentralization roadmap is highly innovative in that it combines three of the four approaches. The three arrangements incorporated in Morocco’s plan are devolution, deconcentration, and delegation, or what the King often refers to as the participatory democratic method (Morocco’s roadmap does not incorporate privatization, and instead intends to use public funds to implement the plan).

In the past, decentralization in Ghana, Ivory Coast, Canada, and China applied more heavily the devolution model, which emphasizes greater authority and capacities among local government. In Tanzania, under the still revered President Julius Nyerere, delegation occurred in which groups of people living as a community exercised self-government in all matters which concerned their own affairs. And India and Sri Lanka utilized deconcentration, whereby government and community groups collaborate to promote development.

Morocco’s incorporation of the three approaches would create a progressive system whereby provincial and local government, and communities and their organizations, exercise decision-making authority, newly built skills, and other capacities, including financial, to carry out greater developmental responsibilities. Furthermore, His Majesty emphasizes that ultimate determination of specific kinds of projects should rest with local communities, or the beneficiary groups. Local beneficiaries are the “engine and objective” and are to “take charge” of programs, with government and civil support.

The King of Morocco should now use his upcoming November 6th speech to build on the existing roadmap by offering more specifics on the reforms and initiatives that will carry out decentralization. Here are some suggestions:

First, local civil and government technicians (across Moroccan ministries) require training in facilitating participatory methods that assist communities in analyzing their challenges and determining project solutions (in job creation, clean drinking water, school construction, etc.). This necessitates, for example, new development studies and training programs at universities (including here at Morocco’s flagship Al Akhawayn University), well beyond the few recently created in the country. Morocco’s goal to train 10,000 new social workers and the same number of engineers per year should include in their curriculum building skills in managing project development and participatory democracy. Since universities play an indispensable role toward decentralization, the King ought to announce his intention to establish the first university in Western Sahara.

Second, His Majesty should take this opportunity to highlight important lessons from Morocco’s National Initiative for Human Development and suggest how they may guide the implementation of decentralization. Scores of Moroccans benefitted from the Initiative, and it raised the public’s consciousness about sustainable development, creating fertile ground for decentralization. However, as the King himself suggested, the Initiative has been too centrally managed, which contradicts its original intention of promoting local self-reliance. Far more non-government facilitators of community planning of Initiative projects are needed. The Ministry of Interior, charged with internal national security, has been in too much control and results unfortunately show. Therefore, although the King’s ongoing role in the decentralization process is essential, central government should not be the primary caretaker, but rather a new “third-party” agency inside the royal cabinet is probably necessary.

Finally, there are too many cases where local officials of the Ministry of Interior have stirred distrust and division, particularly in rural areas where most of Morocco’s poverty exists, impeding collaborative development. Decentralization should reform their traditional functions, and subsume them to local Communes, which are governed by elected representatives directly involved in meeting human needs. Reforming the Ministry of Interior is inevitable if genuine decentralization is to occur, and the King now stating so will increase public awareness and confidence. After all, as he recognizes, it is the people, minimally encumbered, who are to grab hold of their own development.

He castigated Spanish civil society — which is very active on the issue since Western Sahara is a former Spanish colony that Franco threw to the Moroccans to protect his own “Gibraltars” in Morocco, the Spanish enclaves of Melilla and Ceuta — for encouraging the Sahrawis in their resistance.

Van Walsum almost has a point when he says the UN security council “is not ready to exercise its authority under article VII of the UN charter, and impose it.” But why is he attacking the victims and their friends? One would have thought a Dutch diplomat, with the record of acquiescence to “facts on the ground” in Srebrenica, would be more circumspect. Why has he not pilloried Morocco and its friends in the Security Council — the US, France and Britain?

The silence of the UN Secretariat over the years has been stunning, since Morocco reneged on its 1991 agreement to allow a referendum in the territory. Indeed, there has often been complicity and connivance, as when then UN secretary-general Perez de Cuellar, in his last week in office tried to get the security council to adopt a pro-Moroccan resolution over the Christmas and New Year’s holidays.

I was at the press briefing back in 1991 when Johannes Mantz, the Swiss diplomat charged with heading MINURSO announced that it would only take a year to identify the voters and hold the referendum. I asked him at the time if he had consulted the King of Morocco, who had made it plain that the only referendum he would allow was one that he was guaranteed to win. Since then, Hassan and his heir Mohammed each refused to allow the referendum while the UN has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into the sand dunes in preparation for it.

There is a deafening sound of silence about Morocco’s refusal to accept international law and security council resolutions, let alone honour its own promises. Initially backed strongly by France, Morocco now has American support, which nowadays always carries automatic British acquiescence as an added bonus.

At least partly, Washington’s support is because Morocco is Israel’s closest partner in the Arab world, even though the King hedges his bets by being chair of the Arab League committee on Jerusalem. The latter position ensures that Arab states perennially concerned about Palestinian refugees and the separation wall are calmly insouciant about the Saharan refugees and the huge sand berm that Morocco has built across the territories it has occupied.

However, there is a solution from the example of the British Commonwealth, which has been endlessly inventive in finding ways to maintain symbolic ties without real authority or responsibility. When the Moroccans referred the issue to the World Court, the ICJ, the judgement found no evidence “of any legal tie of territorial sovereignty” between Western Sahara and Morocco and said that the territory needed an act of self-determination. Neverthless, it did detect “indication of a legal tie of allegiance between the [Moroccan] Sultan and some of the tribes of the territory.”

So, enter King Mohammed of Western Sahara, with all the powers and honours of Queen Elizabeth in her realms of Canada, Australia, Barbados and so on. The security council can then tell the King that he gets his due, while the Western Saharans clearly get what they want: effective independence. Polisario would surely be happy to offer a 21-gun salute and a few garden parties every time the King visited — maybe even build him a royal sand-castle somewhere.

But first, the western members of the security council have to put some truth to the rumours they keep spreading about their attachment to international law, democracy and the rights of small countries not to be bullied and occupied by their neighbours.