Western Sahara: Russian veto buries MINURSO, but not the Sahrawi question

According to Le Monde, Russia vetoed on Friday a US draft resolution that would have extended MINURSO, the UN mission in Western Sahara, for one year and placed Morocco's autonomy plan at the centre of efforts to settle the conflict. The conflict has pitted Rabat against the Polisario Front for fifty years. The mission's mandate has therefore not been renewed. What will become of the mission concretely, and what the parties will do, the dispatch does not say: at this stage, that is unknown.

Our reading, now. It would be tempting to cheer Moscow across the board, or to denounce it across the board. Neither will do. Russia has not suddenly become the champion of peoples' rights: it is playing its own game in the Security Council, and a veto is first and foremost an instrument of power. But the fact remains: the American text sought to turn a mission created to organise a self-determination referendum into a mere cover for an autonomy plan under Moroccan sovereignty.

Let us recall the history. Western Sahara was a Spanish colony; decolonisation there was hijacked, not completed. For fifty years the territory has been disputed, part of its population has lived in refugee camps, and the referendum promised at MINURSO's creation has never taken place. Half a century of waiting is not a neutral "status quo": it is an occupation that settles in by dint of lasting.

Amílcar Cabral described dominated societies in which imperialist influence produces "paralysis, stagnation" in their historical process, by confining them or by settling outside populations among them. There is no need to mechanically apply the grid to see what it illuminates: a people whose fate is discussed between capitals, with its resources and territory as the backdrop, and its voice uncounted.

The autonomy plan has its defenders, who see in it a realistic compromise. But a compromise one of whose terms is decided in advance is not a negotiation; it is a surrender presented with courtesy. Self-determination presupposes that the option of independence remains on the table. Removing it means settling the question before asking it.

The paradox is cruel: the UN loses its mission at the very moment when a veto driven more by interest than by principle prevents the endorsement of a text that hollowed out the principle itself. The Sahrawis have won neither a referendum nor any added protection; they have won time, which, for a people who have already lost fifty years, is cold comfort.

The real question therefore remains the one the great powers avoid: who, in Western Sahara, has the right to decide the fate of the Sahrawis? So long as that question is answered without them, Friday's veto will be just one more episode in a long history of decisions taken elsewhere.