Western Sahara: UN votes on MINURSO as the referendum stays stuck

According to RFI, the UN Security Council meets this Friday, 30 October, to decide the future of MINURSO, the United Nations mission for the organisation of a referendum in Western Sahara. In recent days, several US-drafted preliminary resolutions have leaked, and the broadcaster says it has seen them. An first version had particularly irritated the Polisario Front, the Sahrawi independence movement; the text finally tabled is due to undergo several significant changes. The precise content of those changes, and the outcome of the vote, are not among the facts available to us.

What follows is our reading, not an established fact.

Start with the irony of the name. The mission is one "for the organisation of a referendum". Yet there is no referendum, and there never has been. A mission created to let a people vote has, year after year, served to manage that people's waiting. Each autumn the mandate is renegotiated, adjectives are filed down, commas are weighed, and the core question, that of self-determination, slides a little further down the agenda. Western Sahara thus remains one of the decolonisation files the UN has never closed.

That the pen is American is no minor detail. In these chambers, whoever drafts a text frames the debate, and the others negotiate within that frame. That the Polisario bristles at a first version, and that it is then amended, shows that the balance of power is played out behind the scenes, through leaks no one will own up to, far more than in the chamber itself. The Sahrawis, for their part, watch their future being discussed in New York by powers with other priorities than theirs.

The lens of dependency helps here to pose the right question. The dispatch says nothing about the territory's resources, and we will not invent any. But colonial history teaches that a territory whose status remains suspended is also one whose wealth, land, seas, subsoil, can be exploited without its inhabitants having any say. Marxists speak of accumulation by dispossession: a process that never stopped, and that legal ambiguity makes easier. Amílcar Cabral described imperialism as "piracy transplanted from the sea to the mainland" (our translation, L'arme de la théorie). Today's pirates wear neckties and draft resolutions, but the question stays the same: who decides, and who cashes in?

We do not yet know whether the final text will keep the prospect of a consultation of the Sahrawis or bury it under diplomatic formulas. What can be said is that the measure of success should not be the smooth running of the mission, but a people's right to choose. A referendum mission without a referendum is no longer peacekeeping: it is the management of the status quo.