Opinion · Western Sahara
Let them know: Algeria will not bend
With Washington's complicity, the Makhzen wants the Security Council to sign the death certificate of the Sahrawi people. It has misjudged the times, misjudged its adversary, and may pay dearly for this arrogance.
Things must be called by their name. The draft resolution submitted by the United States on 20 October 2026 is not a text of peace. It is an act of annexation dressed up in diplomatic language. It decrees that autonomy under Moroccan sovereignty is the "only solution". It strips MINURSO of its "R", the R for referendum, the letter that has haunted Rabat for thirty-five years. It even erases the word "people", speaking only of "Sahrawi components", as if an entire people could be dissolved into a footnote. The Sahrawis are no longer being negotiated with. They are being crossed out.
A heist against international law
Make no mistake: this text creates no rights. Western Sahara remains a non-self-governing territory on the United Nations list. The International Court of Justice settled the matter as early as 1975: no tie of sovereignty entitled Morocco to take this territory in defiance of self-determination. The Court of Justice of the European Union said it again in 2024: this territory is separate and distinct from Morocco, and nothing can be decided there without the consent of its people.
What the law denies the Makhzen, the Makhzen tries to obtain through lobbying, bargaining and closeness to an accommodating American administration. It is a heist. And stolen loot remains stolen, no matter how many hands are raised to applaud it.
Votes can be bought. The will of a people that has decided not to die cannot.
Morocco will win a vote and lose the peace
Rabat imagines that a vote in New York will settle what fifty years of occupation could not. What an illusion. On 22 October, the Polisario Front warned that it would walk away from negotiations if the text adopted Morocco's position. How could it be otherwise? A people cannot be asked to negotiate the terms of its own disappearance.
By closing the last door of the law, Morocco is destroying with its own hands the only framework that protected it. It will have no one left to talk to. It will have no ceasefire left to invoke. It will have nothing but the sand wall it built across the desert, and history has shown what walls are worth against a people with nothing left to lose. The Polisario took up arms in 1973 against Spain, then against Morocco. It took them up again in 2020. Those who believe it will lay them down by UN decree have understood nothing about the Sahrawis.
Algeria's patience has its limits
For decades, Algeria has been the pillar of restraint. It was Algeria that supported the 1991 ceasefire. It was Algeria that backed every UN envoy. It was Algeria that, when fighting resumed, threw its full weight behind containing the blaze. The Makhzen mistook this restraint for weakness. It is the gravest miscalculation it could make.
Algeria has not forgotten 1963. It has not forgotten the "Sand War", nor the doctrine of "Greater Morocco" that shamelessly laid claim to Tindouf, Béchar and part of our Sahara. Today it sees the same expansionist appetite, now armed with new military alliances stationed at its doorstep. It knows that Western Sahara is only a stage, and that those who swallow one neighbouring people always end up eyeing the next.
The people who defeated one of the greatest colonial armies of the twentieth century take no orders from Rabat.
If war is what they want
Let us be clear, for the time for euphemism is over. Algeria does not want war. It has never been the aggressor and never will be. But if the Makhzen, emboldened by a text wrested from New York, believes it can strangle the Sahrawi people and redraw the map of the Maghreb on its own, let it know what awaits it. The Polisario will have no language left but that of arms. And Algeria will not allow a brother people to be crushed on its border, nor its vital interests to be threatened.
The People's National Army, heir to the National Liberation Army, is one of the most powerful on the continent. It was never built for adventure, but to defend a sovereignty won at the price of immense sacrifice. The current Algerian government has said it again and again: Algeria's sovereignty and security are not up for negotiation. Those who play with fire on our borders will bear sole responsibility before history.
A high-intensity war in the region would be no walk in the park for Rabat. It would hit its economy, its investors, its tourism and its internal stability. The capitals encouraging it today will be the first to look away the day things go wrong.
The Russian trap Rabat refuses to see
There is one actor the Makhzen should fear more than Algiers: Moscow. For if a high-intensity war broke out in Western Sahara, there is one capital that would have everything to gain, and it is neither Rabat, nor Algiers, nor Washington.
The Iranian precedent speaks volumes. Since the American-Israeli offensive against Iran launched on 28 February 2026, Russia has been reaping the dividends of a war it is not fighting. Weapons promised to Ukraine have been diverted to the Middle East. Soaring energy prices have refilled the Kremlin's coffers just as its war budget was running out of breath. Western chancelleries have turned their attention away from the Donbas. The President of the European Council himself acknowledged that Putin was the big winner of this war.
Now transpose this pattern to the Maghreb. Morocco is one of Washington's major non-NATO allies, the pivot of the American military presence in North Africa, the guardian of the southern shore of the Strait of Gibraltar. A war on its southern flank would force the United States to choose between backing its protégé and staying focused on Eastern Europe. It would shake Spain, France and Italy, threatened by a migration and security crisis on their doorstep. And it would send gas prices in Europe soaring, at the very moment the continent is striving to wean itself off Russian gas. For Moscow, it would be a second front opened against the West, without a single Russian soldier having to cross it.
The Kremlin does not need to fire a single bullet in the Sahara. It only needs to let a resolution pass.
This is why Russia's position in the Security Council deserves to be watched with the utmost clarity. In 2025, Moscow simply abstained on resolution 2797, in the name of a so-called "active neutrality". It now cultivates with Rabat a relationship it describes as friendly and strategic. Nothing prevents us from thinking that this time it may let a text it knows to be explosive go through, or even support it. Not out of love for Morocco, but because a resolution that closes every political avenue is the perfect fuse to light a fire that would weaken Washington and relieve the Ukrainian front.
The Makhzen thinks it is playing the United States against Algeria. It may discover too late that it was only a pawn in a far larger game. By pushing the Security Council beyond every red line, Rabat is handing the great powers the conflict some of them dream of. Algeria, for its part, has never agreed to be anyone's instrument. Its doctrine is well known: it fights no one else's wars, and it will let no one fight its own in its place.
A final warning before 31 October
There is still time to step back. The 20 October text is only a first draft, and some members of the Security Council know that nothing lasting can be built on the denial of a people. Let Morocco return to the law, to the Charter, to a genuinely negotiated solution that gives the Sahrawi people the final say.
Otherwise, let it bear the consequences. It may celebrate its vote in Rabat. But it will have opened a door it will not know how to close. Algeria, for its part, will remain standing, as it always has: faithful to its martyrs, faithful to the peoples who fight for their freedom, and unyielding towards anyone who threatens its sovereignty.
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