Fifty Years On, Western Sahara Is Still Africa's Last Colony — and Europe Still Cashes the Checks

In October 1975 Morocco marched 350,000 civilians across the border into Western Sahara while its army moved in behind them, as Spain withdrew from its colony without a referendum. Fifty years later the territory is still called, correctly, Africa's last colony. Roughly 70 percent of it sits under Moroccan military occupation; the rest is a strip of desert behind a 2,700-kilometre sand wall — the berm — held by the Polisario Front. Nothing about this is ancient history. It is a live occupation, financed today, in part, by European trade deals.

The people who paid for that 1975 invasion are still paying. An estimated 173,000-plus Sahrawi refugees live in five camps near Tindouf in the Algerian desert, in one of the world's most protracted displacement situations — not a wave that crested and receded, but a permanent second generation raised in tents, dependent on dwindling humanitarian funding, waiting out a referendum on self-determination that the UN promised in 1991 and never delivered. That's not a crisis. That's a policy choice, sustained by everyone who benefits from Western Sahara staying unresolved.

Who benefits is not abstract. In the phosphate mines at Bou Craa, Moroccan settlers hold the skilled jobs while Sahrawis face structural exclusion. In the fisheries off Dakhla, the EU has funneled sectoral support money into infrastructure that serves the settler economy, not the indigenous population — this despite the European Court of Justice repeatedly ruling that EU-Morocco trade and fishing agreements cannot lawfully apply to Western Sahara without Sahrawi consent, consent nobody has bothered to obtain. Brussels' answer to its own top court has been to rewrite the paperwork and keep the ships fishing. That is what "rules-based order" looks like when the rules are inconvenient to capital: ignored, quietly, forever.

This is the same colonial logic Faultline keeps tracing across contested territories: an occupying state that controls the resources, the checkpoints, and the narrative, backed by richer patrons who need the raw materials and the geopolitical alignment more than they need to look consistent. Morocco gets Western diplomatic cover — the US recognized Moroccan sovereignty over the territory in 2020 as a reward for normalizing relations with Israel, a straight-up transactional colonial handoff — while the EU gets phosphates and fish and a stable client on Europe's southern flank. The Sahrawis get five decades in tents and a UN mission, MINURSO, that has never been allowed to monitor human rights, uniquely among UN peacekeeping operations. That omission is not an oversight. It was negotiated that way, on purpose, to keep the abuses off the books.

None of this holds without international silence, and international silence is a policy too. Every year this drags on is a year Rabat's patrons decided the phosphate and the fish and the diplomatic favor were worth more than a people's right to self-determination. Solidarity here means what it always means: naming who profits, refusing to treat "complicated" as a synonym for "acceptable," and backing Sahrawi self-determination the same way we'd back anyone else's under a foreign flag and a foreign gun.

Sources

Tricontinental: Fifty Years of Moroccan Occupation
Africa Is a Country: Odyssey to Africa's last colony
Wikipedia: Western Sahara
European Commission: The Sahrawis — 50 years as refugees
Migration Policy Institute: Sahrawi Refugees Face Uncertain Future
Western Sahara Resource Watch: EU evaluation confirms fisheries deal depends on occupation