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The 12Regions of Morocco are subdivided into 75 second-level administrative subdivisions, thePrefectures and provinces. There are 13prefectures and 62provinces. Each prefecture or province is subdivided intoarrondissements (only in prefectures of somemetropolitan areas),municipalities (communes, sing.commune) or urban municipalities (communes urbaines, sing.commune urbaine) in otherurban areas, anddistricts (cercles, sing.cercle) in rural areas. The districts are subdivided into rural municipalities (communes rurales, sing.commune rural). One prefecture (Casablanca) is also subdivided intopréfectures d'arrondissements (sing.préfecture d'arrondissements), similar to districts (cercles) except they are grouping a few arrondissements instead of rural municipalities.
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Note: The arrondissements and (urban) municipalities should probably be thought of as fourth-level subdivisions, on the same level as the rural municipalities, but they are not part of any district.[1]
Most of Western Sahara is administeredde facto by Morocco (where the area is informally named theSouthern Provinces by the Moroccan government and media);the rest is administered by theSahrawi Arab Democratic Republic.
TheUnited Nations considers the territory to be disputed, as it was not legally transferred by Spain when it abandoned its former colony in 1975, and several states (notably members of the African Union) either recognize the SADR as the sole legitimate government of Western Sahara, or consider that the status of the region (either as an independent state, or as part of Morocco, or as part ofMauritania that initially claimed a part of it) has still not beenautodetermined by the local population prior to its annexation. The United Nations has no legal instruments confirming the claims on the region made by the governments of Morocco or the self-proclaimed SADR, and in international treaties, it is still a formal part of Spain that remains to be properly decolonized, even though Spain and Mauritania no longer claim any part of it.
Since the annexation, the situation is worsened by the fact that most of the historic Western Saharan population has fled either to the remainingfree zone (now isolated by the Moroccan militarized berm) or to refugee camps in neighbouring countries (notablyAlgeria), due to lack of resources in thefree zone.[citation needed] The remaining native Western Saharan population now lives as a minority among the new Moroccan occupants. The absence of a legal government with a permanent administration in thefree zone has also introduced a threat to the security of the surrounding countries in the Saharan and Sahel regions, including Morocco itself.