Western Sahara's history: a referendum set for 1992 and never held

Who moved through the territory before Spain

Neolithic rock engravings in Saguia el-Hamra suggest a succession of hunting and pastoral groups living here before the land began to dry, a process Britannica dates from about 2500 BCE. Islam arrived among the Berber population in the eighth century, and in the eleventh the Sanhaja confederation allied with the Lamtuna to found the Almoravid dynasty. Under the Marinid sultans the Beni Hassan, a branch of the Maqil Arabs, retreated south beyond the Saguia el-Hamra and fought the Sanhaja Berbers in conflicts that culminated in the Char Bouba war of 1644 to 1674. Over roughly five centuries the two populations intermarried, and Hassaniya Arabic became the dominant mother tongue here and in Mauritania.

The tribes' mobility is what the later arguments turned on. The International Court of Justice found in 1975 that "the nomadic routes of none of them were confined to Western Sahara; some passed also through areas of southern Morocco, or of present-day Mauritania or Algeria". The Islamic states of North Africa called the tribal Sahara bled es-Siba, "the land of dissidence", and some Hassaniya tribes occasionally extended allegiance, the bay'ah, to a prestigious neighbouring ruler for political backing or as a religious ceremony. Allegiance of that kind, owed by a tribe to a sultan with no line drawn on the ground, is the material from which Morocco's claim and the court's answer to it were both built.

How Spain turned a fishing coast into a province

Fishermen from the Canary Islands had worked this coast since the eighteenth century. On 28 November 1884 Emilio Bonelli of the Sociedad Española de Africanistas y Colonistas signed a treaty with three representatives of the Oulad Bou Sbaa authorising trading posts, and a Royal Order of 26 December 1884 took the Río de Oro under the Spanish king's protection on the strength of what it called "the deeds of adherence" signed by the coastal tribes. A garrison of 25 troops held the fort at Villa Cisneros, now Dakhla.

The claim ran far ahead of the presence. In 1898 Spain tried to sell the colony to Austria-Hungary, whose Hungarian House of Magnates vetoed the purchase. That year the marabout Ma al-Aynayn began building Smara at an inland oasis with the Sultan of Morocco's help, and he resisted the colonial advance until the French defeated his army in 1910. Spanish troops entered Smara on 15 May 1934, and by the end of that year Spain held the whole colony it had claimed half a century before. The Sahrawi way of life changed little under Spanish administration. Spanish settlers never exceeded 15,000, and El Aaiún, now Laayoune, was founded only in 1940, after an aquifer was discovered there.

Morocco became independent in 1956 and claimed the territory in 1957. With French help, Spain put down a revolt that the Moroccan Army of Liberation had encouraged, and in 1958 it joined Saguia el-Hamra and Río de Oro into the province of Spanish Sahara. Mauritania claimed it from 1960. In 1963 phosphate deposits were discovered at Bu Craa, and Spain registered the territory as non-self-governing with the United Nations Special Committee on Decolonization. General Assembly resolutions of 1965 and 1966 urged Spain to decolonise and to hold a referendum of the indigenous population, and the Assembly repeated the demand every year from 1967 to 1973. Sahrawi politics moved faster. Spanish police destroyed Muhammad Bassiri's peaceful Harakat Tahrir in the Zemla Intifada of 1970 and "disappeared" its founder, and on 10 May 1973 Sahrawi students and veterans of the Spanish Army founded the Polisario Front at Ain Bentili.

What the court in The Hague was asked

Spain took a census in 1974 to prepare the referendum it was promising. It counted some 74,000 Sahrawis and about 20,000 Spanish residents, a Sahrawi figure the Wikipedia account judges likely to be low because nomads are hard to count, and it became the base of the United Nations voter list drawn up twenty-five years later.

At Morocco's initiative, in the Congressional Research Service's account, the General Assembly adopted resolution 3292 on 13 December 1974. It urged Spain to postpone the referendum and put two questions to the International Court of Justice. The first asked whether Western Sahara at the time of colonisation by Spain, which the court dated from 1884, was "a territory belonging to no one (terra nullius)". The second asked, if not, "What were the legal ties between this territory and the Kingdom of Morocco and the Mauritanian entity?"

Morocco maintained that the territory had been under the Sultan's sovereignty, citing treaties that included one with Spain of 1 March 1767 and the Anglo-Moroccan Agreement of 13 March 1895. Mauritania argued that the land south of the Saguia el-Hamra belonged to the Bilad Shinguitti, the Mauritanian entity. Spain described "a Saharan people with its own well-defined character, made up of autonomous tribes". A United Nations visiting mission reported on 15 October 1975 "an overwhelming consensus" in favour of independence.

The court gave its opinion the next day. It found unanimously that the territory had not been terra nullius, because it "was inhabited by peoples which, if nomadic, were socially and politically organized in tribes and under chiefs competent to represent them". By 14 votes to 2 it found legal ties of allegiance between the Sultan and some of the tribes, and by 15 votes to 1 it found rights, some relating to the land, linking the territory to the Mauritanian entity. Neither set of ties established "any tie of territorial sovereignty", and so neither affected "the principle of self-determination through the free and genuine expression of the will of the peoples of the Territory".

The reasoning went tribe by tribe. The court found indications of a tie of allegiance between the Sultan and "some, but only some, of the nomadic peoples of the territory", chiefly Tekna septs whose migration routes ran through Morocco as well as parts of Western Sahara, and it called the Regheibat "essentially an autonomous and independent people in the region". Since then Morocco has stated that it holds sovereignty over the territory, and the Polisario Front has cited the court's finding in rejecting that claim. An advisory opinion binds no state, the House of Commons Library notes, though it can indicate the state of international law.

How Spain left and the war began

Moroccan troops entered the territory from the north on 31 October 1975. On 6 November King Hassan II launched the Green March, in which about 350,000 unarmed Moroccans gathered at Tarfaya, in southern Morocco, advanced several kilometres into the territory with the army alongside. Franco was dying, and his government wanted to avoid a war.

On 14 November 1975, six days before Franco died, Spain, Morocco and Mauritania signed the Declaration of Principles on Western Sahara, known as the Madrid Accords. Its publicised terms, as the historians Virginia Thompson and Richard Adloff give them, had Spain leave before 28 February 1976 and keep 35% of Fosbucraa, the Bu Craa phosphate company. The signatories did not consult the Sahrawi population. In a legal opinion of 2002 the United Nations Legal Counsel, Hans Corell, wrote that the agreement "did not transfer sovereignty over the Territory, nor did it confer upon any of the signatories the status of an administering Power". Morocco counts the accords among the grounds of its claim, and the Sahrawi republic denies that they held any validity.

Spain handed administration to Morocco at a ceremony in Laayoune on 26 February 1976, informed the Secretary-General that its presence had ended and repatriated Spanish remains from its cemeteries. The next day the Polisario Front proclaimed the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic at Bir Lehlou. In April Morocco took the northern two-thirds of the territory and Mauritania the southern third, which it named Tiris al-Gharbiyya. Algeria broke with Morocco, supplied the Polisario Front with weapons and refuge and expelled some 45,000 Moroccan citizens. The camps near Tindouf, in Algeria, had been set up in 1975 as the war began.

Mauritania could not hold its share. A Polisario raid on Nouakchott ended in the death of El-Ouali, the republic's first president, the Mauritanian army took power in 1978, and on 19 August 1979 Mauritania gave up its claim in an agreement with the Polisario Front. Morocco came to administer the sector Mauritania vacated. General Assembly resolution 34/37 of 21 November 1979 deplored "the continued occupation of Western Sahara by Morocco and the extension of that occupation". Morocco's own name for the territory is the Southern Provinces.

What the berm and the ceasefire divided

Morocco answered the guerrilla war with a wall. Its forces began a sand berm in 1980 by the Wikipedia account, or 1981 by the Congressional Research Service's, and built it in six stages, each enclosing more ground, until construction formally ended on 16 April 1987. Walls of sand and stone about 3 metres high run for roughly 2,700 kilometres, with bunkers, fences and minefields along them, and every major settlement lies to their west, as does the Bu Craa mine.

The Organisation of African Unity admitted the Sahrawi republic in 1982. Morocco left it in protest in 1984 and rejoined its successor, the African Union, on 30 January 2017. Morocco and the Polisario Front accepted settlement proposals from a United Nations and OAU mission of good offices on 30 August 1988. Resolution 690 established MINURSO on 29 April 1991. The mission deployed in September to run a referendum set for January 1992, and the ceasefire it monitored generally held until November 2020.

The ceasefire divided the territory along the berm, Moroccan forces to the west and Polisario forces to the east, with a buffer strip and a restricted zone between them. How much lies on each side is a figure each publisher states for itself. The Congressional Research Service put the Moroccan-held share at 85% in October 2014, the International Crisis Group at around 80% in March 2021 and the House of Commons Library at about three-quarters in June 2025. The Polisario Front calls the eastern part the Liberated Territories.

Why the voter list was never agreed

How the identification stalled

When they accepted the ceasefire, Morocco and the Polisario Front had agreed to take the 1974 Spanish census as the basis for registering voters. MINURSO's Identification Commission was set up in July 1991 and began work in August 1994.

The census was where the parties divided. The Polisario Front insisted on the 1974 lists alone. Morocco said the census had been flawed by evasion and sought to add members of Sahrawi tribes who had moved north into Morocco to escape the Spanish. Each side, the Congressional Research Service wrote in 2014, sought "an electoral roll that would support its desired outcome". The Secretary-General suspended identification in May 1996.

James Baker, named personal envoy in March 1997, brokered the Houston Agreement that year to restart it. In 1998 the mission identified 42,378 voting-age adults in the camps near Tindouf, and in December 1999 it announced 86,425 eligible voters in all, divided between the Moroccan-administered part of the territory and the camps, with smaller numbers in Mauritania and elsewhere. The Polisario Front accepted the list. Morocco refused it, and the mission faced more than 130,000 appeals from rejected applicants backed by Morocco. Erik Jensen, who held an administrative post in MINURSO, later wrote that neither side would agree to a registration it was destined to lose.

What the envoys proposed instead

In 2000 the United Nations concluded that the appeals could take longer than the identification itself, and resolution 1301 asked the parties to consider alternatives. Each alternative amounted to a different electorate:

Morocco indicated it would accept the 2001 framework, whose residence rule the Congressional Research Service said "would favor Morocco", and Algeria and the Polisario Front criticised it. The 2003 plan offered integration, autonomy or independence, with the United Nations determining the voters without appeal; the Polisario Front accepted it as a basis of negotiation and Morocco rejected it. Mohammed VI had announced in 2001, Britannica records, that Morocco would no longer agree to a referendum, and in 2002 he called the idea "out of date". The Polisario Front answered that it could not be implemented only because the King refused to allow it. Baker resigned in 2004, the year the Identification Commission formally completed its work and sent its files to Geneva.

Who counts the people of Western Sahara

The electorate was never agreed, and neither is the population. For the camps near Tindouf, which the Polisario Front administers, the Algerian government estimated 165,000 refugees and UNHCR 125,000, against a UNHCR planning figure of 90,000, according to the Congressional Research Service in October 2014; Algeria had not permitted UNHCR to take a census. The House of Commons Library, citing Oxfam in May 2020, put about 173,000 people in five camps. Morocco argues that the Polisario Front and Algeria overstate the numbers to attract attention and aid, and the Polisario Front accuses Morocco of trying to restrict aid as a means of pressure. Refugees built the camps in mud brick, and some, the Forced Migration Review records, refused more permanent materials, "preferring to remain perpetually ready to return to Western Sahara and a future independent State". In 2015 many of those houses dissolved in heavy rain.

West of the berm Morocco counts within its own regions. Its 2024 census gave Laâyoune-Sakia El Hamra 451,028 inhabitants and Dakhla-Oued Ed-Dahab 219,965 on 1 September 2024, by the count the HCP published in November 2024. Those regions do not match the territory, since Laâyoune-Sakia El Hamra includes Tarfaya province in southern Morocco and part of the territory lies in a third region, Guelmim-Oued Noun. The Special Committee on Decolonization gave the territory's population as 612,000 on 16 June 2026. Each side has also invoked the ballot box. Morocco said the reported participation in the elections of September 2021 was a "new confirmation, through the ballot box, of the unwavering commitment of citizens of the southern provinces to their Moroccanness"; the Polisario Front said the elections "cannot have any effect on the legal status of Western Sahara".

The Court of Justice of the European Union drew the distinction between the territory's people and its population on 4 October 2024. Upholding the annulment of the 2019 EU-Morocco agreements on fisheries and farm products, it held that applying them in the territory needed the consent of the people of Western Sahara, "the sole holder of the right to self-determination" there. The consultation held by the European Commission and the European External Action Service had reached the current inhabitants, "the majority of which do not belong to that people", because a large part of that people "has been in exile since the 1970s". In 2016 the same court had recognised the territory's "separate and distinct status".

What changed after the autonomy proposal

The parties gave the Secretary-General rival plans in April 2007. The Polisario Front's, on 10 April, recommitted it to a referendum on self-determination, and Morocco's, on 11 April, offered autonomy under Moroccan sovereignty with defence and foreign relations kept by Morocco. Resolution 1754 of 30 April 2007 took note of both and called for negotiations without preconditions. None of the rounds of talks held from June 2007 to February 2010, MINURSO records, moved the core issues.

In November 2010 Moroccan security forces cleared a protest camp of more than 12,000 displaced Sahrawis at Gdeim Izik near Laayoune, and each side gave its own account of the dead. In March 2016 Morocco expelled more than 70 MINURSO civilian staff after the Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, used the term "occupation" for the territory.

Roundtables in Geneva in December 2018 and March 2019 brought in Algeria and Mauritania, and ended when the envoy, Horst Köhler, resigned in May 2019. Morocco then invited friendly governments to open consulates in the territory, the first in June 2019. In late October 2020 Polisario supporters blockaded the road through the buffer strip at Guerguerat, which links Morocco to Mauritania. On 13 November Moroccan troops entered the strip to clear it, and the Polisario Front withdrew from the ceasefire. The United Nations has recorded "low level hostilities" since.

From December 2020 several governments changed their positions. The United States recognised Moroccan sovereignty over the whole territory on 10 December 2020, in a step linked to Morocco's normalisation with Israel, and Israel followed in July 2023. Spain endorsed the autonomy plan in 2022 as "the most serious, realistic and credible" basis for a settlement, and in October 2024 France's president, Emmanuel Macron, told Morocco's parliament that the territory's present and future "fall under Morocco's sovereignty". The United Kingdom called the plan "the most credible, viable and pragmatic basis" in June 2025 and said on 11 June that it still regarded the territory's status as "undetermined". By the Wikipedia count, 85 states had recognised the Sahrawi republic at some point as of September 2022, and 39 of them had frozen or withdrawn that recognition.

On 31 October 2025 the Security Council adopted resolution 2797 by 11 votes to none, with China, Pakistan and Russia abstaining and Algeria not taking part. It renewed MINURSO until 31 October 2026 and backed negotiations "taking as basis Morocco's Autonomy Proposal" toward a solution "that provides for the self-determination of the people of Western Sahara". At the Special Committee on Decolonization on 16 June 2026 Morocco's representative said the resolution had "reaffirmed the abandonment of the referendum", Namibia's that it "did not impose the Moroccan autonomy plan", and Algeria's welcomed direct negotiations between Morocco and the Polisario Front. The mission the Council renewed is still the United Nations Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara.