The Western Sahara dispute took an unexpected turn overnight between Friday and Saturday, in what may prove to be one of the most consequential diplomatic twists in the conflict’s recent history. Hours after Russia vetoed a United States-drafted resolution at the UN Security Council that would have renewed the mandate of the Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara, King Mohammed VI announced that the mission’s activities on the ground would be wound down within days.
According to reporting by the Spanish daily La Razon, the Moroccan monarch said the United Nations presence must end in the coming days, closing a thirty-five-year chapter in the territorial dispute. A statement from the Royal Cabinet reinforced the message, indicating that the mission’s withdrawal should proceed without further delay.
The American draft resolution had sought to make Morocco’s autonomy plan the sole framework for future negotiations and even proposed renaming the mission. Russia’s rival text, by contrast, stripped out any reference to that plan altogether, prompting the United States ambassador to the United Nations, Mike Waltz, to dismiss it outright, arguing it disregarded two decades of diplomatic progress on the file.
Moroccan analyst Nabil Driouch described the outcome as a historic inflection point. In blocking the American text, he argued, Moscow had inadvertently handed Rabat what amounts to a de facto veto of its own, by accelerating the end of a mission whose relevance Morocco had long questioned.
The episode followed a tense Security Council session in which several governments, including Liberia, Bahrain, the United Kingdom and France, reiterated their backing for Morocco’s autonomy initiative as the most credible and realistic path to resolving the dispute. The American envoy himself had described the UN mission as a symbol of an aging project headed for failure.
Established in 1991 to monitor the ceasefire between Morocco and the Polisario Front, the mission was never able to organize the referendum it was originally created to oversee. Its announced demise would effectively cement Morocco’s autonomy plan as the only remaining avenue toward a settlement, a long-standing objective of Moroccan diplomacy.
