In 2012, Dancing Turtle founder Dominic Brown documented the forgotten conflict in Western Sahara through his documentary film La Badil. We return to it now because the situation has deteriorated, the international community has largely turned its back, and the story deserves to be told again.
The immediate backdrop is a steady collapse of diplomatic support for Sahrawi self-determination. France recognised Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara in July 2024, breaking with decades of formal neutrality. The United Kingdom followed in June 2025, as did Portugal in July. According to Morocco, 118 countries now back its autonomy proposal — a plan that would grant the territory a degree of self-governance while keeping it permanently under Moroccan control and removing independence as an option entirely. The UN Security Council’s October 2025 resolution shifted its own language in the same direction, prompting Human Rights Watch to warn that the Sahrawi people’s right to self-determination is now actively at risk.
On the ground, the ceasefire that held from 1991 to 2020 has not been restored. Low-intensity hostilities between Moroccan forces and the Polisario Front continue. The UN’s human rights body has been denied access to the territory for ten consecutive years. Sahrawi activists who advocate for independence face intimidation, surveillance and prosecution. The UN Secretary-General has repeatedly condemned the situation; it has made little difference.
The European Court of Justice confirmed in October 2024 that EU-Morocco trade agreements, insofar as they apply to Western Sahara, are unlawful — a ruling that affirms the territory’s distinct legal status and the rights of its people. It is a significant finding that has received less attention than it deserves.
The Sahrawi people have been waiting for a promised referendum on self-determination since 1991. More than thirty years later, that referendum has still not taken place, and the international momentum that once existed to ensure it does has largely evaporated. Half a century after the Green March, during which Morocco sent hundreds of thousands of its citizens into the territory to claim it by sheer weight of numbers, the question of what Western Sahara is and who it belongs to remains officially unresolved — and for the Sahrawi people living under occupation, deeply and urgently real.
