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Endgame in the Western Sahara: What Future for Africa's Last Colony? By Toby Shelley. London and New York: Zed Books/War on Want, 2004. Pp. xii, 215; map; 16 illustrations. $69.95 cloth, $22.50 paper.
Firmly under the repressive rule of the kingdom of Morocco since late 1975, the former Spanish colony of Western Sahara has seen three full decades pass without any resolution of the fundamental question surrounding the territory: whether the native Saharawi inhabitants will be given the opportunity (as mandated by international law and the United Nations) to determine their own future, or whether they will continue to subsist under Rabat's authority or in the austere refugee camp system established in the mid-1970s by the Polisario Front, which has always demanded the establishment of an independent Saharan Arab Democratic Republic (SADR). A UN peacekeeping/peacemaking body, the United Nations Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara (MINURSO), has maintained a cease-fire in the territory since September 1991 but has accomplished little else of note for the $1.36 billion it had spent by late March 2005. Intense disputes between Morocco and Polisario, coupled with a reluctance by MINURSO to sanction Moroccan misbehavior in the face of Rabat's strong ties to France and the United States, doomed the effort by the start of the twentyfirst century.
In this rather compact volume, all aspects of the Western Sahara conflict as well as the historical, social, and cultural background to it are analyzed, although the author gives relatively less attention to the purely military aspects of the 1975-1991 Morocco-Polisario desert war as well as the details of life and governance inside Polisario camps in southwestern Algeria. What correctly concerns Shelley the most are the myriad regional and international aspects of the Sahara dispute, the relative strengths and weaknesses of not only Morocco and Polisario but also key regional actors such as Algeria, and-most significant in...