Revisiting the Early Years of the Spanish (Western) Sahara Conflict (1957-1975)
The Saguia el-Hamra and Wadi el-Dhahab (Río de Oro) is a former Spanish colony listed in 1963 as a Non-Self-Governing Territory (NSGT) by the United Nations under the colonial name “Spanish Sahara”. Following Spain’s withdrawal from the territory in 1976, Morocco and Mauritania assumed control under the Madrid Accord signed with Spain. The dynamics of the conflict subsequently shifted with the emergence of the Polisario Front in 1975, based in and supported by Algeria, seeking the territory’s independence. Arbitrarily renamed “Western Sahara” by the UN, the conflict over this territory remains unresolved.
Dominant historiography, widely endorsed across academic, media, and NGO narratives, dates the conflict back to 1975, marginalizing the Spanish period. Drawing primarily on UN records, I argue that the Sahara conflict erupted in 1957, alongside the 1957-1958 Ifni-Sahara war. I further argue that the UN General Assembly’s (GA) Committee of Six overstepped the UN Charter by extending to the NSGTs the option of independence, a provision reserved under the Charter solely for trust territories, and that the UN records of this early stage of the conflict reveal the Moroccan origins of “Saharawi” nationalism.
The 1957 Outbreak of the Sahara Conflict
Sarah Mitchell, Paul Hensel, Paul Huth and other scholars trace the beginning of territorial disputes to the moment when government officials of one country openly claim sovereignty over a territory that is administered or claimed by another country. Consequently, territorial claims are considered “pristine” in origin, beginning with an assertion of ownership rather than military hostilities. Accordingly, UN records indicate that the Sahara conflict began in 1957; on October 14, 1957, during the 670th meeting of the GA’s Fourth Committee, Moroccan Foreign Minister Abdellatif Filali protested potential listing of the French-occupied Mauritania, Spanish Sahara, and the Ifni enclave as NSGTs, asserting them as integral to Moroccan sovereignty (A/C.4/SR.670). The Spanish representative, Ramón Sedó, rejected this claim, affirming Spain’s undisputed sovereignty over Spanish Sahara and Ifni.
Armed actions on the ground, notably the Ifni-Sahara war waged against Spain by the Moroccan Liberation Army (MLA) South, reinforce the 1957 start date. Backed by some Saharan tribal members, this irregular force was reportedly clandestinely supported by the Moroccan monarchy. In the “Battle of Dcheira” (January 12-13, 1958), the MLA forced Spanish forces to retreat to coastal outposts, seizing several towns and threatening French-held territories from the Algerian border to Mauritania. In response, France and Spain launched a joint war—codenamed Opération Écouvillon in France and ‘El Huracán’ in Spain. Following two months of bombardment, they defeated the MLA South and its tribal allies.
While King Mohammed V reiterated Morocco’s claim to the Sahara in his February 1958 Mhamid Ghizlane speech, pledging to “continue his efforts to recover the Sahara for Morocco,” the government refrained from openly endorsing the MLA’s liberation war. Although Moroccan envoy Ahmed Laraki had discussed the broader territorial disputes with UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld in March 1958, Rabat deliberately avoided submitting to UN debate the second Franco-Spanish military alliance following the Rif War against Moroccan nationalists.
This silence could be understood as a strategic ambiguity serving a dual imperative: avoiding direct confrontation with militarily superior colonial powers while containing domestic opposition from radical nationalists. The fragile monarchy, still consolidating authority following the 1956 partial independence, was facing pressure from the Istiqlal Party, which claimed all territories formerly under Sultan’s rule before colonization, and from the MLA, whose revolutionary posture, refusal to integrate into the nascent Royal Armed Forces, and links to Pan-Arab revolutionary movements threatened royal authority. The government’s minimization of the MLA’s actions was later reflected in Foreign Minister Laraki’s September 1974 UN address, in which he referred to their struggle merely as “various local confrontations”.
In line with Louis Kriesberg’s model, the asymmetric Ifni warfare unfolded in a full cycle, following six non-linear phases of: eruption, escalation, failed peacemaking, institutionalization, de-escalation, and termination. The war erupted both diplomatically and militarily in late 1957, escalated through February-March 1958, and de-escalated in April 1958 with Spain’s retrocession of the Tarfaya strip to Morocco until 1976, when a second cycle began with Moroccan-Mauritanian forces opposing the Algeria-backed Polisario. Following Spanish withdrawal, Morocco, Mauritania and Polisario became the “concerned parties” of the conflict and Algeria an “interested party”.
The Committee of Six: Consequences of Altering the UN Charter
UN records also reveal a largely overlooked but decisive aspect of the first cycle of the Sahara conflict: the alteration of the UN Charter’s provisions on NSGTs. The Charter distinguishes two types of non-sovereign territories and prescribes different methods for their settlement: Trust Territories, to be overseen by the UN Trusteeship system until they attain “self-government or independence” (Article 76), and NSGTs, where administering states are obligated to promote advancement until “full measures of self-government” are established (Article 73). However, the GA would alter NSGT provisions in contravention of Article 108 of the Charter, which stipulates that any amendment of the Charter requires a two-thirds GA vote and ratification by two-thirds of UN members, including all permanent Security Council members.
Upon Spain’s admission to the UN in 1955, Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld sent a letter to the Spanish Government on February 24, 1956 inquiring whether it administered any NSGTs. Madrid did not reply until 1958, when it denied administering any NSGTs and asserted that both the Sahara and the Ifni enclave were classified metropolitan provinces, exempt from reporting the information required under Article 73. Amid mounting decolonization pressures, the GA in 1959 created the Special Committee of Six—India, Mexico, the Netherlands, Morocco, the UK, and the US—to establish principles for reporting obligations under Article 73. The Committee’s report (A/4526), adopted by the GA through resolution 1541, defined 12 principles that clearly overstepped the UN Charter by introducing three pathways to reaching full self-governance in NSGTs, none of which is envisaged in the UN’s foundational Treaty: independence, free association, or integration with an independent state (Principle 6). It also defined NSGT as “a territory which is geographically separate and is distinct ethnically and/or culturally from the country administering it” (Principle 4).
The Committee’s report justified these revisions by proclaiming the UN Charter a “living document” that must adapt to evolving political realities. However, it failed to submit its revisions of the Charter to the explicit amendment procedures. The Spanish and Portuguese delegates rejected the outcome as an illegitimate overreach that unilaterally altered Charter provisions and extended Trusteeship arrangements to NSGTs beyond UN jurisdiction. (A/C.4/SR.1038)
Records of the Committee’s New York meetings in 1960 show no objection from Moroccan representatives to the reinterpretation of the Charter, including the introduction of the independence option. This stance reflects Rabat’s perception of Ifni and Spanish Sahara as colonies that needed to gain independence from Spain by all means. GA resolution 2072 (1965), the first on the Spanish Sahara, envisaged the decolonization of both territories in terms of territorial sovereignty, instead of people’s self-determination. It called on Spain “to take immediately all necessary measures for the liberation of the Territories of Ifni and Spanish Sahara from colonial domination and, to this end, enter into negotiations on the problems relating to sovereignty presented by these two Territories.” Instead of continuing to press Spain to implement the resolution that echoed its decade-long sovereignty claim, Rabat called, on June 7, 1966, for the liberation and independence of the “Moroccan people” of both territories based on “the conviction that unity could be achieved only through liberation and independence” (A/6300/Rev.1).
Framing the independence of the territories as a transitional step toward union with the Kingdom entailed a significant risk should the local population resist integration. Furthermore, Rabat’s approach shifted the decolonization process from the territorial integrity framework initially endorsed by the GA toward a people-centered approach, while a notion of a distinct “people of the Sahara” was gradually being politically constructed.
Moroccan Origins of “Saharan” Nationalism
Like most colonial territories in Africa, the Spanish (Western) Sahara never constituted a nation. The territory was arbitrarily carved by Spain and France within a broader, borderless Sahara (desert) spanning Morocco, Mauritania and Algeria, where the Hassaniya dialect has been spoken for centuries by nomadic and settling tribes. Thus, the people of the Spanish Sahara could only be considered geographically, ethnically and culturally distinct in relation to the Spanish colonizers, as per the GA definition of NSGTs.
This is reflected in early GA resolutions, which refer to the people of the Sahara and Ifni as “inhabitants” or “indigenous population”, conveying a territorial rather than national meaning. From 1957 to 1975, UN resolutions and discussions did not differentiate between the inhabitants of the Sahara and those of Ifni. Both territories were listed in 1963 as NSGTs under Spanish colonial rule, and until resolution 2428 (1968), no distinction was drawn between their legal status. Under Mauritanian pressure, however, a distinction was made between Ifni and the Sahara territory that Nouakchott was claiming. Spain retroceded Ifni to Morocco in 1969, while the Sahara was to undergo a people-centered decolonization process.
Between 1957 and 1969, the GA attributed no agency to the people of the Spanish Sahara, despite reaffirming their right to self-determination from 1966 onward. The first anti-colonial movement following the 1958 MLA/South defeat erupted in 1970, in El Aaiún, led by the avant-garde Movement for the Liberation of the Sahara (MLS), founded and organized by Moroccan journalist Mohammed Bassiri, a descendent of the Saharan Reguibat tribe, born in the Atlas Mountains. Assembly resolution 2711 (1970) expressed regret over “incidents of bloodshed” in June 1970 but made no explicit reference to Spain’s deadly repression of the movement. Subsequent resolutions, however, began framing the people of the Spanish Sahara in terms of a “struggle” for self-determination, with resolution 2983 (1972) the first to call for their independence, while resolution 3162 (1973) and resolution 3292 (1974) still referred to them primarily as “inhabitants” and “population” of the territory.
Based on the report of the UN Visiting Mission to the Spanish Sahara in May––June 1975, resolution 3458 (1975) for the first time used the language of a newly-constructed national identity associated with the emerging Polisario, referring to the population of the Sahara as “Saharans”, a designation that would later become “Sahrawi people”, claiming ethnic distinction from Moroccan Saharans. This emerging nationalism was politically engineered by several Moroccan Saharan students, following in the footsteps of Bassiri, including Mustapha Sayed El-Ouali, Polisario’s founder raised and educated in Morocco, and his Marrakech-born successor, Mohammed Abdelaziz, Secretary of the Front for forty years, alongside many other Moroccan nationals whose origins have been denied in the movement’s narrative. Most of these leaders had studied in Morocco, where their leftist views and ties to Moroccan opposition drew suspicion from the authorities. Lacking military support from the Moroccan left and facing repression by Moroccan authorities, Polisario’s leadership subsequently turned against Morocco, aligning with Libya and Algeria, both opposed to the Moroccan monarchy.
Conclusion
The UN records of the 1957-1975 phase of the Spanish (Western) Sahara conflict fundamentally challenge the dominant historiography, revealing that Morocco’s formal claim of sovereignty in October 1957 and the outbreak of the Ifni-Sahara war mark the true beginning of the ongoing conflict. Erasing this first cycle distorts chronology and hinders understanding of its recurrent, violent and cyclic nature. Equally overlooked is the institutional shift engineered by the Committee of Six in redefining the framework of decolonization; its omission conceals how controversial international maneuvers shaped the conflict’s trajectory. Finally, the Spanish Sahara was initially treated as a colonial territory with no distinct national identity, indistinguishable from Moroccan Ifni, and Saharan nationalism was politically constructed, emerging from Moroccan-led anti-colonial figures.
Polisario’s silence on the pre-1975 phase serves to obscure the Moroccan state and people’s central role in leading the liberation struggle against Spain in Ifni and the Sahara for nearly two decades. Morocco’s neglect of the Spanish Sahara period in official narratives can be attributed to the contradictions and shortcomings in its management of this early stage of the conflict, including Rabat’s shifting approaches to decolonization, its role in the Committee of Six, and its failure to support major grassroots liberation movements, namely the MLA, MLS, and Polisario.
Watch again the lecture by Aicha Elbasri at the Aula Mediterrània series.
