Fifty years ago this month, Morocco launched its armed invasion of Western Sahara and sent hundreds of thousands of Moroccan settlers across the border.
The complicity of Spain, the United Nations and Morocco’s allies in the invasion and occupation was only brought to light in 2010 by WikiLeaks.
Australian Western Sahara solidarity activist Ron Guy discusses these events with human rights activist Isabel Lourenço, an independent researcher in African Studies at the University of Porto (Portugal).
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In your research you reference leaked diplomatic cables that show Spain, the United Nations and Morocco’s allies in Washington and Paris already knew that Morocco intended to launch its armed invasion of Western Sahara in 1975. Can you please explain?
The historical record is now unmistakable. On October 31, 1975, Morocco launched its armed invasion of Western Sahara. Just days later, on November 6, the so-called “Green March” sent hundreds of thousands of settlers into the territory to entrench the occupation. Both actions flagrantly violated international law.
What the leaked cables and other documents reveal is that none of this came as a surprise. Spain, which remained the de jure administering power under the UN Charter; senior UN officials, including Secretary General Kurt Waldheim; and Morocco’s principal allies in Washington and Paris, were all fully aware of Morocco’s plans weeks before they happened.
The cables record private discussions in which governments and UN staff sought to “manage” the consequences rather than prevent aggression. In other words, they knowingly allowed Morocco and Mauritania to seize Western Sahara while claiming to uphold international law. The Sahrawi people, enduring napalm and phosphorus bombing, forced displacement and the destruction of their villages, simply did not feature in these calculations. Only Algeria consistently raised their plight.
This is why I describe the UN’s role as a “theatre of neutrality” — a performance of mediation masking an abdication of responsibility.
You argue that instead of protecting the Saharawi people’s right to self-determination, the UN appointed Swedish diplomat Olof Rydbeck as a Special Representative in 1976. His mission was portrayed as impartial fact-finding, but was, in reality, a diplomatic exercise to buy time for Morocco and Mauritania to consolidate their hold on the territory. What evidence did you find to reach this conclusion?
My dissertation, , reconstructs exactly that moment.
Rydbeck was appointed as an ostensibly neutral envoy, charged with assessing conditions for a referendum on self-determination. Yet, only months before, he had presided over the UN Security Council and was already well informed of the situation. His mission took place precisely as Morocco and Mauritania were consolidating their control.
When I first heard about Rydbeck’s report, there were only vague references suggesting he “did not see possibilities on the ground” for a referendum. But after the WikiLeaks cable releases, the picture changed dramatically. The cables contained transcripts and records of secret diplomatic meetings. By cross-referencing dates, locations and names with material from the Algerian, French and Spanish archives, I was able to piece together what had been deliberately hidden.
Rydbeck’s own reporting, now declassified in the UN archives, makes the duplicity plain. But even more revealing is what surfaced in a released by WikiLeaks. It records that Rydbeck “seemed to think Moroccan-Mauritanian take-over is fait accompli, not likely to be reversed. Problem for UN is what kind of gloss to put on the de facto situation. Several times he expressed regret that Moroccans-Mauritanians had not ‘at least covered their actions with some kind of fig leaf.’”
Spain had already shrugged off its legal responsibilities. The United States and France prioritised Cold War geopolitics and Morocco’s control over Western Sahara’s phosphate, iron and fisheries above human rights.
And crucially, nobody spoke to the Sahrawi themselves. Rydbeck did visit the refugee camps, but for that he was swiftly declared persona non grata by Morocco and Mauritania. The Sahrawi were not treated as a people with rights. They were treated like cattle — driven off their land, forced into exile, and implicitly regarded as expendable, as if their very lives could be sacrificed to serve the interests of the powerful.
This evidence shows the mission was less about impartial fact-finding and more about buying time: time for Morocco to establish “facts on the ground”, transfer populations and reorganise administration so that any future referendum would be meaningless. The UN became an instrument of delay rather than a guarantor of decolonisation.
You have mentioned that Rydbeck’s mission and the complicity it exposed remained hidden, locked away from public scrutiny and not even circulated to the UN Security Council and the General Assembly. Does your research find any reason for this happening and what conclusions can we draw from this?
One of the most striking findings of my research is how much discretion the Secretary-General had in deciding what the General Assembly saw. In Western Sahara’s case, Waldheim simply did not circulate Rydbeck’s reporting to the Security Council or the General Assembly — except, of course, to the US and France.
This allowed the UN to preserve the appearance of neutrality and avoid a direct confrontation with powerful member states backing Morocco. Publishing the findings would have meant admitting that member states were violating the UN Charter and that the UN itself had failed in its decolonisation mandate.
By burying the reports, the organisation could continue to act as mediator, while tacitly accepting Morocco’s fait accompli. This is only one case — Western Sahara — but imagine how many other issues have been handled in the same way. It reveals a structural problem: the UN can be used to manage conflicts politically rather than uphold international law, especially when the interests of great powers are at stake. That is why I call it the “theatre of neutrality”.
You state that your research could not have happened without the courage of Julian Assange. Would you care to expand on this and when did the documents first come to light?
Without the WikiLeaks releases from 2010 onwards, my work would have been impossible. The cables confirmed what Sahrawi people and their supporters had long claimed: that Western Sahara was betrayed behind closed doors by a coalition of powers intent on making Morocco’s occupation a de facto reality.
These disclosures didn’t just provide isolated facts; they offered context — showing who was in the room, what was said and how decisions were justified. They also gave me crucial leads: dates, locations, even code words to search for in other archives. We are talking about thousands of documents. A key reference to Western Sahara might be buried in a cable about Latin America or Asia. Without WikiLeaks, those leads would never have existed.
Assange’s courage didn’t just inform scholarship; it provided hard evidence of state behaviour that had been deliberately concealed. For me, the most shocking revelation was how completely the human dimension of the Sahrawi plight was absent from these discussions. Except for Algeria, no one cared about the people themselves. The debate was about land, resources and power. The Sahrawi were treated like cattle, to be pushed away, driven into exile, or ignored entirely.
That is why I express a deep and profound thanks to Julian Assange. His steadfastness, resilience and commitment to truth-telling have made it possible to reclaim buried truths — not just about Western Sahara but about the way imperialism operates globally. Now that he is back in Australia after years of persecution, we should also see his freedom as an Australian victory for truth-telling, one that connects directly to struggles like Western Sahara.
Western Sahara is not a “forgotten conflict”. It is a living example of how international law can be bent to serve the powerful, how decolonisation can be subverted, and how an entire people can be erased from the diplomatic record. By revisiting Olof Rydbeck’s mission with the help of declassified UN material, national archives and WikiLeaks cables, my research has tried to show the mechanics of that betrayal.
If we are serious about an Africa that is united and sovereign, we must insist on remembering and exposing these buried truths. For that, we owe a great debt to Assange. His work has enabled not just my dissertation but a wider struggle for transparency and justice — a struggle that the Sahrawi people, after decades of occupation and exile, continue to embody.