Western Sahara: the UN steps back, the vetoes speak, and the Sahrawis wait

According to Courrier international, which picks up the analysis of Guinean newspaper Le Djely, the mandate of the UN mission in Western Sahara ended on 1 November. The renewal sparked a diplomatic skirmish, with successive vetoes, between Washington and Moscow. Still according to Le Djely, each of the two capitals was acting on behalf of its "poulain" (protégé): Morocco on one side, Algeria on the other. The Guinean paper believes that the end of UN mediation increases the risk of direct confrontation between the two North African countries.

That is what the dispatch reports. What it does not say, however, is just as striking: it gives neither the precise terms of the vetoes, nor what will concretely happen on the ground, nor the voice of the Sahrawis themselves. We do not yet know which structure, if any, will take over. This silence is already a piece of information.

What follows is our reading. Western Sahara is one of those decolonisation files left fallow: a territory whose people were, in principle, to decide their own fate, and whose fate is now settled among others. Washington, Moscow, Rabat, Algiers: four capitals are speaking, and the fifth party, the one who lives there, is asked to wait. When the great powers squabble over vetoes, the right to self-determination becomes a bargaining chip, not a principle.

Le Djely speaks of "poulains", and the image is telling. It reminds us that the rivalry between two neighbouring states also serves as a showcase for powers that find clients, alliances and markets there. Cabral stressed that imperialism is an external factor that violently shaped the course of colonised peoples' history, their social structures as well as the forms of their liberation struggles. Here the mechanism is the same: a people's history is made subordinate to a game being played elsewhere.

We should also be wary of the narrative in which two Maghrebi states alone are responsible for the tension. The concepts of dependency and division are useful here: we are quick to pass off as a quarrel between neighbours what is also a game of influence. Who profits from this sustained hostility? Rarely the workers of Morocco or Algeria; more often the arms budgets and the chancelleries that sell their arbitration.

The risk of direct confrontation, should it materialise, will be paid for by those who never sat on the Security Council: the Sahrawi people, in the camps as in the territory, and the inhabitants of two countries whose leaders preferred confrontation to negotiation. The UN was not a perfect solution, far from it, but its mission served as a reminder that a colonial question remained open. Closing it by default is a way of settling it without ever having consulted those it concerns.