Marcus Reichmann Western Sahara – The Last Colony A mainly desert territory in north-west Africa, Western Sahara is the subject of a decades-long dispute between Morocco and the Algerian-backed Polisario Front. Western Sahara fell under Spanish rule in 1884, becoming a Spanish province in 1934. A gradual increase in national consciousness and anticolonial sentiment during the subsequent decades led to a guerrilla insurgency by the Spanish Sahara’s indigenous inhabitants, the nomadic Saharawi, in the early 1970s. After Spain had to move out of the country, it “sold” the Western Sahara to Morocco and Mauretania. The Polisario Front continued their struggle for independence and soon Mauretania signed a peace agreement. Polisario declared the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR) on February 2, 1976 and announced its first government on March 4. In April 1991, the UN established MINURSO, the United Nations Mission for a Referendum in Western Sahara. Its brief was to implement a peace plan outlined in a 1990 Security Council resolution. In September 1991, the UN-brokered ceasefire was declared. The peace plan provided a transition period leading to a referendum in January 1992. Western Saharans would choose between independence and integration with Morocco. To this day, Morocco refuses to hold the referendum, while people in the occupied zone live under a regime striped of basic human rights. Meanwhile, about 200 000 refugees that had fled the war zone to the camps in south Algeria, have been waiting to go back to their country for over 40 years.
Posted on: Wed, 06 Aug 2014 12:02:31 +0000
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