Western Sahara: the UN pulls out, and the Sahrawis' right to self-determination stays stranded

According to Courrier international, the mandate of the UN mission in Western Sahara (MINURSO, the UN Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara) ends this Saturday, 31 October. It was not renewed the day before, after American and Russian vetoes in the Security Council. The outlet describes total uncertainty about what comes next, in a file that has poisoned relations between Morocco and Algeria.

What the dispatch does not say, and what we do not yet know: the precise reasons behind each veto, the concrete fate of the staff and equipment on the ground, and what the capitals intend to do next. Caution, then. But the scene speaks for itself.

Let us recall what MINURSO was supposed to do. What we recall here comes from our own reading and general context, not from the dispatch: a peacekeeping mission, installed with the promise of a vote for the Sahrawis on their future. That promise was never kept. Western Sahara remains one of those unfinished decolonisation files, where the "process" ended up serving as an alibi for the absence of a solution.

And so two powers that vie for the planet find themselves, for once, blocking the same text, each for its own reasons. Washington and Moscow do not agree: they cancel each other out. And the result is the same for those who live there: nothing. The right to self-determination, a cardinal principle of the UN, becomes a bargaining chip in a game where the Sahrawis do not sit at the table.

This is where a classic Marxist anti-colonial reading proves useful. Amílcar Cabral (the Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde independence leader) argued that dominated peoples have their own history, but that imperialism introduces an external factor that bends its course, and even the forms of liberation struggles. Applied here: the fate of a people is decided in the Security Council according to interests that are not theirs. The region, its resources, its military and commercial alliances matter to the great capitals; the inhabitants of the camps and territories, far less. To be clear, the dispatch does not detail these interests; this is our working hypothesis.

We should also avoid the easy trap of symmetry. Morocco and Algeria are two states with their own calculations, and each can instrumentalise the cause in its own way. But the core question is not a neighbourhood rivalry: it is that of a people whose right to decide has been suspended for decades.

The end of MINURSO is, in itself, neither a liberation nor a catastrophe: it is a revealing moment. A mission whose mandate could have been quietly renewed becomes a stake in a balance of power, and its absence leaves a vacuum that the best armed will fill. The real deadline is not 31 October. It is the day when self-determination stops being treated as a bargaining option between great powers.