Toby Shelley, Endgame in the Western Sahara: What Future for Africa's Last Colony.

• Author: Bevan, Brock L.
• Position: Book review

Toby Shelley, Endgame in the Western Sahara: What Future for Africa's Last Colony London: Zed Books, 2004, 215 pages $27.95.

In this book, Toby Shelley, a journalist for the Financial Times and Middle East International, tackles the Western Sahara conflict. Although the International Court of Justice ruled in 1975 that the people of the former Spanish Sahara had the right of self-determination, thereby dismissing the Moroccan claim to the territory, and the United Nations General Assembly determined that the territory was not self-governing, Morocco and Mauritania ignored the (UNGA 3458) resolution and conquered the land accorded to them in the Madrid Accords signed with Spain in 1975.

The Frente Popular para la Liberacion de Saguia el-Hamra y de Rio de Oro (Polisario) contested the neat division of the territory it considered its own. Shelley explains that after brusquely forcing the Mauritanians to cede the southern third of the former Spanish Sahara to Morocco in 1979, Polisario posed such a significant threat that Rabat built a sand-berm to counter the mobility of the Algerian-, and formerly Libyan-, backed liberation organisation.

On 6 September 1991, Polisario and its parallel government in exile, the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR) based in Tindouf, Algeria, and Morocco signed a ceasefire agreement. Just a few months before, on 29 April 1991, the Security Council established the United Nations Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara (MINURSO). The initial task of MINURSO was to supervise the ceasefire agreement, a task that remains to this day. Its secondary duty was to implement a referendum on the status of the territory in 1992. Known as the Settlement Plan, the referendum would use a 1974 Spanish census as the basis for determining who was eligible to vote.

Shelley covers the evolution of the Settlement Plan from its conception in the mid-1980s to its demise in 2003, when Polisario accepted a revised version of the Baker Plan: Baker II. In the meantime, the Houston Agreement, which was negotiated by James Baker III, the personal envoy of UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan in 1997, failed as did the first Baker Plan, or the Framework Agreement, of 2000.

The parties to the conflict disagreed over what options would be on the ballot. Morocco favoured a wide interpretation of who could vote, whereas Polisario wanted the electoral rolls limited to those who were in the Spanish Sahara at the time of the 1974 census and their...