Western Sahara: Africa's Last Colony
By Molly Lukas
Last month, the UN Special Committee on Decolonization met in New York, where Delegates and petitioners urged the Committee to liberate what they called the "last colony in Africa" through a self-determination referendum. Others backed Morocco's proposal of autonomy under Moroccan sovereignty as the only realistic path forward. The territory in question is Western Sahara, a sparsely populated stretch of desert which has sat on the UN's list of Non-Self-Governing Territories since 1963.
The roots of the dispute lie, as in many similar cases, in the colonial carve-up of North Africa. Morocco was itself divided between France and Spain until independence in 1956. Spain held on to its desert colony further south, a territory of little apparent worth were it not for some of the world's largest phosphate reserves (a key ingredient in fertiliser) lying beneath it. When Spain abruptly withdrew in 1975 without organising the self-determination required under international law, three claimants emerged: Morocco, Mauritania, and the indigenous Sahrawi people's liberation movement, the Polisario Front. In October 1975, the International Court of Justice ruled that Morocco had no legal ties of territorial sovereignty to the territory. Within hours, King Hassan II announced the "Green March," promising Moroccans they would "touch the sand of your sands." Some 350,000 unarmed civilians (with the army close behind) crossed the border that November to stake his kingdom's claim. Morocco and Mauritania partitioned the territory between them, the Polisario declared the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic, and war broke out.
Mauritania renounced its claim in 1979, so Morocco annexed the vacated share and fought on until a UN-brokered ceasefire in 1991. That ceasefire established MINURSO (the United Nations Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara), in which Sahrawis were to choose between independence and integration with Morocco, but the referendum has never been held.
The referendum was stalled by a dispute over who would be eligible to vote. Morocco pushed for a broad electorate that included tens of thousands of additional applicants with tribal ties to the territory. Meanwhile, the Polisario insisted on a narrow roll based on Spain's 1974 census. Each side calculated that the other's voters would decide the outcome, and the identification process collapsed into deadlock.
Today, an estimated 150,000–170,000 Sahrawi refugees still live in camps near Tindouf in the Algerian desert, hosted by a state that remains Morocco's top regional rival and (alongside Gaddafi's Libya in the movement's early years) the Polisario's chief backer.
Most strikingly, between 1980 and 1987, Morocco constructed the "Berm," a fortified sand-and-stone wall running roughly 2,700 kilometres through the desert, second in length only to the Great Wall of China among the world's barriers, and around twelve times longer than the Berlin Wall ever was. Its first section was built to enclose the "useful triangle" around El Aaiún and the Bou Craa phosphate mines, walling Polisario fighters off from the territory's resources. The Berm is lined with trenches, barbed wire, radar posts, over 100,000 Moroccan soldiers, and an estimated seven million landmines, making it the longest continuous minefield on Earth. Everything west of the wall, about 80% of the territory, is administered by Morocco as its "Southern Provinces." The mostly empty land to the east forms the Polisario-controlled "Free Zone."
Image: Getty Images/AFP/P. Hertzog
After the ceasefire collapsed in late 2020, diplomacy has recently accelerated, largely in Morocco's favour. King Mohammed VI has described the Sahara as "the prism through which Morocco considers its international environment." In December 2020, the first Trump administration recognised Moroccan sovereignty over the territory in exchange for Morocco normalising relations with Israel. Spain, the former colonial power, endorsed Rabat's autonomy plan in 2022, and France's President Macron followed in 2024, declaring that the territory's present and future lie within the framework of Moroccan sovereignty. The decisive shift came on 31 October 2025, when the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 2797, explicitly taking Morocco's autonomy proposal as the basis for negotiations and dropping any reference to a referendum. King Mohammed VI hailed a "new and victorious chapter," while the Polisario's UN representative insisted the resolution "does not imply any recognition" of Moroccan sovereignty.
Ireland, for its part, has long stood apart from the pro-Rabat wave, treating Western Sahara as a non-self-governing territory under international law, supporting Sahrawi self-determination, and engaging the Polisario as "a legitimate party to a territorial dispute". When Polisario president Brahim Ghali visited the Dáil in 2024, he appealed directly to Irish history, saying "people here understand the right to self-determination." Yet even Dublin was party to the EU's unanimous decision in January 2026 to align the bloc's position with Resolution 2797. In February 2026, US-led talks in Madrid brought Morocco, the Polisario, Algeria, and Mauritania to the same table for the first time since 2019, with Morocco presenting an expanded 40-page version of its autonomy plan, which produced a "Madrid Roadmap 2026". Meanwhile, some in the US Congress are pushing legislation to designate the Polisario a terrorist organisation over alleged ties to Iran and Hezbollah. The claims, promoted heavily by Morocco, which cut diplomatic ties with Tehran over them in 2018, include allegations that Hezbollah operatives trained Polisario fighters near Tindouf. The Polisario, Iran, and Algeria all deny this. Analysts warn that a designation could derail the very negotiations Washington is working on, since the group remains the UN-recognised representative of the Sahrawi people.
The US government is pressing for a settlement this year, but the fundamental disagreement, whether Sahrawis will ever be offered independence on a ballot, remains unresolved.
SOURCES
This article is part of our 2026 online summer series
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