Injustice: Within Western Sahara, Sahrawis have been targeted for raising a flag, participating in a demonstration or asserting an identity. Photo: Michele Benericetti/Wikimedia Commons
Fifty years after the conflict over Western Sahara began, the Sahrawi experience represents far more than an unresolved political dispute.
It is a prolonged human story of displacement, repression, legal limbo and moral endurance — one that continues to test the credibility of international law and the ethical coherence of the global order.
This is not an argument on behalf of any political organisation. It is an examination of a people’s struggle to exist, to be recognised and to retain dignity under conditions that international law itself defines as unfinished decolonisation.
Public debate often reduces the Sahrawi cause to a brief period of armed confrontation in the late 20th century.
This framing is misleading. The essence of the Sahrawi struggle has not been military, but civic, legal and human.
For half a century, Sahrawis have lived with the consequences of a conflict that never reached resolution: forced displacement, prolonged exile, political repression and the suspension of a promised act of self-determination.
Since 1975, tens of thousands of Sahrawis have lived as refugees in camps in south-western Algeria — among the longest-standing refugee situations in the world. Entire generations have been born and raised without having seen their homeland.
Alongside them exists a broader Sahrawi diaspora across North Africa, Europe and beyond, shaped not by voluntary migration but by the enduring absence of a
political solution.
Within Western Sahara itself, Sahrawis who express political, cultural or civic identity outside officially sanctioned narratives have long faced arrest, surveillance and intimidation.
International human rights organisations have consistently documented arbitrary detention, unfair trials, restrictions on freedom of expression and the criminalisation of peaceful protest.
Students, journalists, activists and ordinary civilians have been targeted for acts as simple as raising a flag, participating in a demonstration or asserting a distinct identity.
The repression has not been episodic but structural, reinforced by the absence of an independent human rights monitoring mechanism for the territory.
Yet the injustice faced by the Sahrawis is not confined to repression on the ground. It is compounded by a broader failure of perception.
In much of the Arab world, Sahrawis have often been viewed through the distorting lens of geopolitics — portrayed as a Western-backed project rather than a people asserting a right recognised by international law.
The mischaracterisation has weakened regional solidarity and reduced a decolonisation struggle to ideological suspicion.
In Western capitals, a different but equally limiting perception prevails. Sahrawis are frequently seen not as a people with political agency but as an inconvenient case — a society whose nomadic heritage, social organisation and insistence on self-determination do not align neatly with a global order driven by economic liberalism and strategic utility.
In a world increasingly governed by market access, security partnerships and transactional diplomacy, cultures that resist easy integration into these frameworks are often sidelined.
This helps explain a persistent contradiction.
Despite Morocco’s documented human rights record in Western Sahara and the unresolved legal status of the territory, many Western states continue to favour the Moroccan monarchy as a partner. The preference is not rooted in legal principle but in perceived stability and utility.
The monarchy is seen as a predictable actor, capable of delivering cooperation on migration control, counterterrorism, trade and regional security — even if this comes at the expense of international law and the rights of the Sahrawi people.
The result is a quiet hierarchy of values in which order is prioritised over justice, governance over consent and strategic alignment over legal clarity.
For the Sahrawis, this has meant existing at the margins of both regional and global political imagination — mistrusted by some, deemed expendable by others.
Yet narrative substitution has not altered legal reality.
In 1975, the International Court of Justice concluded that there were no ties of sovereignty between Morocco and Western Sahara.
The United Nations continues to list the territory as non-self-governing. European courts have repeatedly affirmed that Western Sahara is legally distinct from Morocco and that its natural resources cannot be exploited without the consent of its people.
Law, unlike propaganda, accumulates rather than erases meaning.
Beyond law and politics, Sahrawi endurance has also been cultural.
In refugee camps and diaspora communities alike, language, poetry, oral history and collective memory have become tools of survival and resistance against erasure. Culture has functioned as a substitute homeland, transmitting identity across generations born into displacement.
After 50 years, Western Sahara poses an uncomfortable question to Europe and the wider international community: Can a legal order that claims universality afford such prolonged selectivity?
Principles invoked elsewhere — self-determination, consent and the rule of law — lose coherence when indefinitely postponed in one of the world’s last unresolved decolonisation cases.
Half a century on, the question is no longer whether the Sahrawis will disappear. They have not. The real question is how long the international community can continue to look away from a reality it has long recognised — and what that silence ultimately costs.
Mohamed Elbaikam is an independent activist from Western Sahara.