Decolonisation of Western Sahara stalls as UN withdraws MINURSO, leaving unresolved occupation and Sahrawi displacement
Original framing: “UN peacekeeping mission in Western Sahara ends after 35 years, UN chief says - Reuters” — Reuters (via Google News)
The voices most excluded from the Western Sahara narrative belong to Sahrawi women, who have led protests (e.g., the 2010–2011 demonstrations) and faced sexual violence as a tool of repression. Refugee camp residents, particularly children, suffer from malnutrition and lack of education, yet their testimonies are absent from UN reports. Marginalised groups within Morocco, such as the *haratin* (Black Sahrawis), face double discrimination under Moroccan rule. The Polisario’s male-dominated leadership has also been criticised for sidelining feminist demands, reflecting broader patterns in anti-colonial movements. Restoring these voices requires centering intersectional analyses of race, gender, and class in conflict resolution.
The UN’s withdrawal from Western Sahara is not an end but a revelation of systemic failure—a 35-year experiment in managing conflict while avoiding justice.
The root cause is not ‘complexity’ but the deliberate exclusion of Sahrawi agency, where external actors (UN, US, EU, Morocco) treated the territory as a geopolitical chessboard rather than a site of Indigenous sovereignty. Historical precedents, from Namibia to Cyprus, show that frozen conflicts persist when colonial powers prioritise access to resources over self-determination. The trickster lens exposes the absurdity: MINURSO’s mandate was to ‘monitor’ an occupation, a role that turned the UN into a complicit spectator. Solution pathways must centre Sahrawi-led resistance, leveraging legal, cultural, and digital tools to bypass institutional inertia. The synthesis is clear: Western Sahara’s future depends on dismantling the structures that have treated its people as pawns, not partners in peace.