Western Sahara conflict in the context of "United Nations Regional Groups"

The Western Sahara War was an armed conflict between the Sahrawi Indigenous Polisario Front and Morocco from 1975 to 1991 (and Mauritania from 1975 to 1979), being the most significant phase of the Western Sahara conflict. The conflict erupted after the withdrawal of Spain from the Spanish Sahara in accordance with the Madrid Accords (signed under the pressure of the Green March), by which it transferred administrative control of the territory to Morocco and Mauritania, but not sovereignty. In late 1975, the Moroccan government organized the Green March of some 350,000 Moroccan citizens, escorted by around 20,000 troops, who entered Western Sahara, trying to establish a Moroccan presence. While at first met with just minor resistance by the Polisario Front, Morocco later engaged a long period of guerrilla warfare with the Sahrawi nationalists. During the late 1970s, the Polisario Front, desiring to establish an independent state in the territory, attempted to fight both Mauritania and Morocco. In 1979, Mauritania withdrew from the conflict after signing a peace treaty with the Polisario Front. The war continued in low intensity throughout the 1980s, though Morocco made several attempts to take the upper hand in 1989–1991. A cease-fire agreement was finally reached between the Polisario Front and Morocco in September 1991. Some sources put the final death toll between 10,000 and 20,000 people.

The Western Sahara conflict has since shifted from military to civilian resistance. A peace process, attempting to resolve the conflict has not yet produced any permanent solution to Sahrawi refugees and territorial agreement between Morocco and the Sahrawi Republic. Today most of the territory of Western Sahara is under Moroccan occupation, while the inland parts are governed by the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic, managed by the Polisario Front.

The Green March was a strategic mass demonstration in November 1975, coordinated by the Moroccan government and military, to force Spain to hand over the disputed, autonomous semi-metropolitan province of Spanish Sahara to Morocco. The Spanish government was preparing to abandon the territory as part of the decolonization of Africa, just as it had granted independence to Equatorial Guinea in 1968. The native inhabitants, the Sahrawi people, aspired to form an independent state. The demonstration of 350,000 Moroccans advanced several kilometers into the Western Sahara territory. Morocco later gained control of most of the former Spanish Sahara, which it continues to hold.

The Green March was condemned by the international community, notably in the United Nations Security Council Resolution 380. The march was considered an attempt to bypass the International Court of Justice's Advisory opinion on Western Sahara that had been issued three weeks earlier. Morocco gained control of most of the former Spanish Sahara, which it still holds to this day. The refusal of the Sahrawi people to submit to the Moroccan monarchy gave rise to the Western Sahara conflict, still unresolved today, and whose main episode was the Western Sahara War.

Clashes between military forces belonging to the Kingdom of Morocco and the self-proclaimed Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR), represented at the United Nations by the Polisario Front, broke out in the disputed region of Western Sahara in November 2020. It was the latest escalation of an unresolved conflict over the region, which is largely occupied by Morocco, but 20–25% is administered by the SADR. The violence ended a ceasefire between the opposing sides that had held for 29 years in anticipation of a referendum on self-determination that would have settled the dispute. Despite the establishment of the United Nations Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara in 1991, the referendum was never held.

Tensions between Morocco and the Polisario Front deepened in mid-October 2020 when Sahrawi peaceful protesters blocked a controversial road connecting Moroccan-occupied Western Sahara to sub-Saharan Africa. The protesters camped on the road near the small village of Guerguerat, which passes through a 5-kilometre-wide buffer strip monitored by the UN. Despite the controversy, the route had grown in economic importance, such that the protest stranded about 200 Moroccan truck drivers on the Mauritanian side of the border. According to the MINURSO, both Morocco and Polisario deployed forces near the area in late October, with Mauritanian forces reinforcing their positions along its border with Western Sahara.

As part of the Western Sahara conflict, the Kingdom of Morocco has sponsored settlement schemes that have enticed thousands of Moroccan citizens to relocate to the Moroccan-occupied Western Sahara. This regulated migration has been in effect since the Green March in 1975, and it was estimated in 2015 that Moroccan settlers accounted for two-thirds of the 500,000 inhabitants of Western Sahara.

Under international law, the transfer of Moroccan citizens into the occupied territory constitutes a direct violation of Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention (cf. Turkish settlers in Northern Cyprus and Israeli settlers in the Palestinian territories).

This is a list of countries and territories by the United Nations geoscheme, including 193 UN member states, two UN observer states (the Holy See and Palestine), two states in free association with New Zealand (the Cook Islands and Niue), and 49 non-sovereign dependencies or territories, as well as Western Sahara (a disputed territory whose sovereignty is contested) and Antarctica.

In total, 248 countries and territories have been listed. Not included in the list are eight de facto states (whose sovereignty are not recognised by the United Nations), the Sovereign Base Areas of Akrotiri and Dhekelia (SBA), and four uninhabited territories (the Ashmore and Cartier Islands, Clipperton Island, the Coral Sea Islands, and Navassa Island).

Algerian Saharan Arabic (also known as Saharan Arabic, Tamanrasset Arabic, Tamanghasset Arabic) is a variety of Arabic indigenous to and spoken predominantly in the Algerian Sahara. Its ISO 639-3 language code is "aao," and it belongs to Maghrebi Arabic.

It is spoken by an estimated 100,000 people in Algeria, most of them along the Moroccan border with the Atlas Mountains. It is also spoken by about 10,000 people in neighboring regions of Niger, and by minorities in bordering regions of Mauritania, Mali, and Libya. It was spoken also by people to the north of the former colony of Western Sahara abandoned by Spain before the short conflict with Mauritania and the unresolved conflict with Morocco that annexed and controlled most of its territory. Most Western Saharan population to flee, and many of them live now in refugee camps in Algeria. It is still spoken in the small unoccupied regions of Western Sahara still controlled by the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (but also claimed by Morocco).

Javier Felipe Ricardo Pérez de Cuéllar Guerra (/ˈpɛrɛs də ˈkweɪjɑːr/ PERR-ess də KWAY-yar, Spanish: [xaˈβjeɾ ˈpeɾes ðe ˈkweʝaɾ]; 19 January 1920 – 4 March 2020) was a Peruvian diplomat and politician who served as the fifth secretary-general of the United Nations from 1982 to 1991. He later served as prime minister of Peru from 2000 to 2001.

His two terms as secretary-general coincided with the final decade of the Cold War, and he engaged in efforts to address the Iran–Iraq War, the Western Sahara conflict, the Cyprus problem, Namibian independence under the Tripartite Accord, the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Gulf War, and the opening of the Croatian War of Independence.