The UN Security Council is due to meet at the end of October to vote, as it does every year, on a resolution covering Western Sahara and the mandate of Minurso. The United States and France already want that mission reduced to a tool that would simply validate Morocco’s autonomy plan.
Minurso was created in April 1991 to monitor a ceasefire between the Polisario and Morocco. It followed urgent requests from Rabat’s allies, Western states and Gulf countries alarmed by Sahrawi military superiority on the ground. Sahrawi leaders doubted Morocco’s willingness to accept a referendum, which had been a condition for agreeing to the ceasefire. Algeria backed that referendum track despite those reservations. Later, many states, including Algeria, failed in calls to extend Minurso’s mandate to human rights in Western Sahara, as with other UN peacekeeping forces.
The piece says the mission could now be stripped even of its original task of organising a referendum, renamed Minuso, and wound up as a peacekeeping operation before May 2027. Staffan de Mistura, the UN secretary-general’s personal envoy for Western Sahara, is described as struggling to keep neutrality, objectivity and equal treatment between the Polisario and Morocco. His role would be strengthened and widened to seek more accommodating Sahrawi interlocutors in the diaspora or in refugee camps, alongside the Polisario, which the UN still recognises as the legitimate representative of the Sahrawi people.
An influence effort by some American senators is said still to present the Polisario as a terrorist group. The stated aim is to accredit a second Sahrawi representative, already designated and encouraged, who was received last June by the American and French ambassadors to the UN. Algeria is described as indirectly targeted, to be cast as a state backing that group, a proxy of Iran and a country hostile to Israel. The author argues that Algerian elites are being pressed toward the transactional diplomacy of President Trump, with the real effects on the region expected only after his term. Algeria and the Polisario, the article says, bear the diplomatic cost of the deal that restored relations between Morocco and Israel in exchange for US recognition, on 10 December 2020, of the situation in Western Sahara.
Sahrawi refugees hosted by Algeria are presented as victims of fifty years of occupation of their land, entitled to return and to choose self-determination. Western powers on the Security Council are said to offer international funding for individual, voluntary solutions, likened in the article to arrangements discussed for people from Gaza, that would turn involuntary exiles into forced stateless people. Spain is described as offering only limited compensation by restoring Spanish nationality to some of the people it administered and left in 1975 as the Franco regime was ending.
The Fourth Committee is said to have just sent a strong message on the Sahrawi right to self-determination through the UN General Assembly, which the author calls the truer expression of equal sovereignty among states. The Security Council is described as still reflecting the military balance after the Second World War, with only Russia and China trying to hold a fragile balance in a body unlikely to be reformed soon. The three Western permanent members treat Morocco’s autonomy plan as the only basis for a mutually acceptable and viable settlement, and say any proposal should stay inside that frame. The author calls that condition enough to discredit the current process.
The United States, which drafts the Sahara text, is said not to rule out further measures, still unspecified, if the parties do not engage constructively in the political process. Over five decades, a span Western states cite as a reason to speed the process, the article says the Sahrawis remain the only victims, folded for forty years into talk of independence within interdependence. President Abdelmadjid Tebboune is praised for recently putting the Sahrawi people’s free future back at the centre of any process. The author says Sahrawi leaders cannot decide that future without a prior, direct consultation free of constraint and foreign interference, that a settlement must run through direct talks between the Polisario and Morocco, and that it cannot depend only on the domestic agendas of President Trump and King Mohammed VI. The piece warns that unconstrained talks are unlikely and that the Sahrawi people are now cast as an obstacle to a planned reconfiguration of North Africa. The article is signed by a former minister and former ambassador.