MINURSO through Sahrawi eyes: a critical assessment of the UN mission in Western Sahara

MINURSO through Sahrawi eyes: a critical assessment of the UN mission in Western Sahara

Sahrawi journalist and activist Malainin Lakhal assesses the UN Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara (MINURSO) from the perspective of the people it was created to serve. Sahrawis, he argues, welcomed the mission in 1991 as a genuine chance to exercise their right to self-determination, but its credibility steadily eroded and its failures produced a sense of abandonment shared across generations.

The article rests on thirty semi-structured interviews conducted in Hassaniya in 2018 and 2019 with Sahrawis in the occupied cities and in the refugee camps, alongside the author’s own experience as a former detainee who witnessed the mission’s early deployment. Interviewees describe a voter identification process shaped by Moroccan agents, and Lakhal recounts the 1992 arrest of a 17-year-old inside the MINURSO compound. He also draws on the 1995 congressional testimony of former MINURSO official Frank Ruddy and on fieldwork with Sahrawi children.

Lakhal concludes that the testimonies reveal a political trauma that cuts across age, gender and location, in which MINURSO appears passive or complicit, and calls for bottom-up evaluations of international missions. He is open about the limits of a small sample and about how his own background shapes the analysis.

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