Western Sahara: MINURSO packs up, the referendum stays undated

According to RFI, the contours of the wind-down of MINURSO, the United Nations Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara, are becoming clearer. Four days after Russia's veto of the amendment draft tabled by Washington at the Security Council, the departure plan has been spelled out: all 13 of the mission's sites in Western Sahara will close, under the supervision of a small team sent on the ground. At the same time, the head of the mission is in Morocco, in Laayoune and then Rabat, to talk with the parties concerned.

That is the facts. What the dispatch does not say, however, is considerable: nobody knows the precise timetable for the closures, what will replace the mission's presence, or what the Sahrawis think of this decision. We do not pretend to fill these gaps. What remains is the question of structure, which what follows offers as our reading.

MINURSO carried, in its very name, a promise: to organise a referendum. It is fading away without having held one. What strikes is the mechanism: an American amendment, a Russian veto, and a mission dissolved in the gap between them. Washington and Moscow are not fighting over the fate of a people; they are settling scores on the back of a decolonisation file the Security Council has dragged along for decades. The people concerned, meanwhile, have no seat at the table and no veto to wave.

This is where the dependency lens sheds some light. In the anti-colonial tradition, self-determination is not a procedural luxury but the condition for a people to decide how its territory and its resources are used. When the right to vote is postponed indefinitely, the decision over the fate of the land passes into other hands: those of the states that control the ground, and of those who, on the Council, arbitrate according to their own interests. Cabral reminded us that liberation does not stop at a flag; here, we are not even at the question of the flag.

What do the Sahrawis concretely lose? First, a framework, however imperfect: an international presence, a witness and a symbolic guarantee that the question remained open. Then, a horizon: without a mission tasked with preparing a vote, the referendum ceases to be a working object and becomes a communiqué formula. The risk, which we put forward as a hypothesis and not as a fact, is that the status quo, lacking challenge from an institution, ends up passing for a state of law.

Note the discretion of the method: no proclamation, a "small team", discussions with "the parties concerned". The liquidation of a promise rarely happens with a fanfare. It happens with logistical timetables.

The coming days will show whether the Sahrawis and their representatives are genuinely consulted, or merely informed. That difference, between being a party to the discussion and being its object, is exactly what decolonisation was meant to abolish.