South Africa could go a long way toward restoring its African diplomatic credentials as the continent’s default leader. Were South Africa willing and able to negotiate a compromise bridging the Moroccan-SADR/Algeria divide? In the process, should a UMA-SADR synthesis emerge, this could potentially result in a stabilizing game changer for regional and trans-Mediterranean security in the Maghreb. The ultimate goal would be a Eurafrican ‘Zone of Peace and Cooperation’ architecture for the Mediterranean. With an autonomous Sahrawi republic headquartering the UMA, there is no reason why, for example the Polisario Front could not form the military nucleus of a Regional Stabilization Force within the AU’s still underdeveloped peace and security architecture with the Eurafrican interregional security cooperation potential that might derive from such a development. This would refill the vacuum left by the destabilizing western ouster of Libya’s Muammar al-Qaddafi. Qaddafi, with his Sudano-Sahelian CEN-SAD grouping, exercised an inherently unstable dominance throughout the Sahara and borderlands. This also precluded the UMA. Revealingly, the western-Arab League alliance against Qaddafi exposed the failure in mobilizing an AU-Arab League Libyan strategy that might have been facilitated had there existed a functioning UMA as a regional pillar of linkage between the AU and Arab League.
