I’m North African and I can’t find someone to explain this to me without being biased, especially since my country has issues with morroco.
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This is going to be an extremely high level explanation of a long and complicated conflict — they all are. But the first thing to understand is that the Western Sahara / Southern Moroccan Provinces are culturally, ethnically, and linguistically distinct to some extent from the rest of Morocco. The major ethnic group there is the [Sahrawis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sahrawis), which according to Wikipedia make up about 30% of the population currently in Western Sahara (with the rest being Moroccan settlers), although there are more Sahrawi living in refugee camps in Algeria (174k, again according to Wikipedia). They were a historically nomadic people, descended from a mix of the Berber African ethnic groups that lived in the region prior to the arrival of Islam as well as Hassani Arab groups and others. You may know better than me how similar their Hassaniya Arabic dialect is to the predominate Moroccan Arabic.
Until 1975, Western Sahara was a colony of Spain known as the Spanish Sahara. In 1975, Spain agreed to transfer the colony to Moroccan and Mauritanian control, and the two countries partitioned the territory. So now the majority of the Western Sahara lands, the homeland of the Sahrawi nomadic tribes, are under the control of the Moroccan government.
In this way it’s similar to many other countries where there is a territory with a predominate ethnic group and that ethnic group wants political autonomy and power. Oftentimes that’s because the ethnic majority in the larger country has a history of dominating or appropriating the resources of the minority. Other examples include the Armenians in Azerbaijan, the Albanians in Serbia that broke off and became Kosovo, the Chechyns in Russia, the Nilotic groups in Sudan that then establish South Sudan, and many others.
As in many of these cases, some elements of the ethnic group that wants control over their own territory end up taking up arms and starting a rebellion, and that’s what happened in Western Sahara, with the [Polisario Front](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polisario_Front). And as in many other cases, the rebel movement attracts outside support, in this case from Algeria and Libya. Was the support of Algeria and Libya for the Western Saharan rebels an act of goodwill toward a people that were oppressed? Or was it a cynical way to weaken Morocco?
Regardless of the motivations, the result was a violent conflict that pushed well over 100,000 refugees out of Western Sahara as they fled the advancing Moroccan forces, mostly settling in Algeria. Those people have never been able to return, and they live in pretty horrible circumstances.
I’m not sure there’s a version of this story where Morocco is the “good guy”. They could let the Sahrawi refugees return home, grant them citzenship, and grant the Southern Provinces significant autonomy, but as far as I know they aren’t doing any of those things. Algeria’s support for the Polisarios could seen as a genuinely good thing, but it also greatly increased the ability of the Polisarios to be a violent threat to Morocco, arguably instigating the level of conflict and oppression that lead to and is continuing the refugee crisis. I suspect their support has more to do with wanting to weaken a regional rival. The US meanwhile backed Morocco against the leftist Polisarios during the Reagan administration, and also has blood on their hands.
Spain controlled Western Sahara until 1975. Before that time, Morocco and Mauritania (both its northern and southern neighbor) claimed sovereignty over that territory. A nationalist movement called the “Polisario Front” also emerged, which claimed Western Sahara as an independent sovereign nation called “Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic”.
Spain left the region under the Madrid Accords, where it temporarily transferred administrative rule to both Morocco and Mauritania. The Polisario Front then fought with both countries in the area, and Mauritania withdrew its claim afterwards in 1979. Both the Polisario Front and Morocco were engaged in hostilities until 1991, when a UN backed ceasefire was initiated, pending a UN backed referendum.
Due to disputes by both sides on how to initiate the referendum, the referendum has never been held. Right now, Morocco controls the vast majority of Western Sahara, while the Polisario Front has been mostly exiled in nearby Algeria, leaving the entire region in legal limbo.
the wikipedia article seems to be pretty good https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Sahara the short version is that it use to be a spanish colony until spain gave it up and let Mauritania and Morroco administer it together. shortly after a rebel/freedom fighter group sprung up and started a civil war which is in a UN ceasefire currently with about 20⅝ of the disputed area controlled by the new government and 80% by morroco, Mauritania has abandoned its claims.
as far as I can tell, no one outside the region cares about what the outcome is, but it has becone a minor barganing piece in the unrelated Israel Palistine conflict.
this video may be helpful as well https://youtu.be/4AivEQmfPpk but it doesnt directly talk about the area
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