Western Sahara

A vast Atlantic desert and the homeland of the nomadic Sahrawi, whose colonial past under Spain gave way to a contested, still-unresolved question of self-determination that the United Nations calls the world's longest-pending decolonisation case.

Western Sahara is a sparsely populated stretch of Atlantic desert long inhabited by the Sahrawi, Hassaniya-speaking peoples of mixed Arab-Berber heritage whose nomadic, tribal society was bound to the trans-Saharan caravan trade. Spain claimed the coast in 1884 in the wake of the Berlin Conference and ruled the territory as Spanish Sahara into the 1970s. In 1975 the International Court of Justice found that the territory had not been terra nullius and that, while certain tribes had given allegiance to the Moroccan sultan, no ties of territorial sovereignty bound it to Morocco or Mauritania, affirming the population's right to self-determination. That same year Morocco's Green March and the Madrid Accords led Spain to withdraw and partition the administration between Morocco and Mauritania, triggering a war with the Polisario Front, which had proclaimed the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR) in February 1976. A UN-brokered ceasefire in 1991 established the MINURSO mission and promised a referendum that has never been held; today Morocco controls roughly the western four-fifths of the territory behind a long sand wall and proposes autonomy, the Polisario controls the area to the east and runs refugee camps near Tindouf in Algeria, and the UN still lists Western Sahara as a Non-Self-Governing Territory.