The Western Sahara file

Abstract

The war between Morocco and the Frente Popular para la Liberacion de Saguia el-Hamra y Rfo de Oro, better known as the Polisario Front, is raging in one of the most remote and least known corners of the globe. Who are the people of Western Sahara, the Saharawis? What kind of relations did they have historically with their Moroccan neighbours to the north, and with the Mauritanian tribes to their south? How did such an apparently barren territory as Western Sahara come to be colonised by Spain, and what was Spanish rule there like? The territory's phosphate deposits are well known; but are there any other resources? How and why did Morocco and Mauritania lay claim to Western Sahara from the late 1950s? What indigenous political parties and liberation movements took shape within the Spanish colony, and what have the United Nations, the Organization of African Unity and the International Court of Justice (ICJ) had to say about the controversy surrounding its future? These are some of the questions that this file will address, in the hope of shedding some light on a contemporary decolonisation problem which seems as intractable as it is obscure. It will also examine how Western Sahara was ceded to Morocco and Mauritania in 1975-6, the consequent refugee movements to Algeria and the creation of Polisario's Saharan Arab Democratic Republic, the Moroccan-Mauritanian partition treaty of April 1976, the evolution of the war since 1975, Mauritania's withdrawal from Western Sahara in 1979, the role of the world powers and the prospects for peace.