Marrakech – The fabricated narrative of a separate “Sahrawi people” stands today as one of the most calculated political manipulations of the post-colonial era. The recent UN Security Council Resolution 2797, adopted October 31, exposes this decades-long charade by endorsing Morocco’s autonomy plan as the sole framework for resolving the Western Sahara dispute. The resolution marks the final collapse of an obsolete separatist ideology crafted in the crucible of Cold War geopolitics.

The Popular Front for the Liberation of Saguia el-Hamra and Rio de Oro, known by its Spanish acronym “Polisario,” was established on May 10, 1973, by Sahrawi-origin youth studying at Mohammed V University in Morocco’s capital, Rabat.

Rooted in strong Arab socialist and leftist ideas, the group launched a few limited attacks against Spanish colonial forces in the Spanish Sahara during 1973.

Its key founders included El-Ouali Mustapha Sayed, Mohamed Abdelaziz, and Ould Sheikh Beidallah, all of whom embraced leftist socialist ideology inspired by revolutionary movements of the era – an era of radical decolonial, anti-imperialist, Sandista-inspired ideology.

The historical record exposes a stark truth: before Mauritanian diplomat Ahmed Baba Miske defected to the Polisario, the movement’s founder, El-Ouali Mustapha Sayed, spoke exclusively of the “Arab people” of Saguia el-Hamra and Rio de Oro.

Sayed himself was a Moroccan national who attended primary school in Tan-Tan in 1962, then continued his studies at the Islamic Institute of Taroudant in 1966 with outstanding results, earning scholarships to attend Mohammed V University in 1970.

There, he studied law and political science, becoming the first student in the history of Moroccan universities to score 19 out of 20 in Constitutional Law.

Born in 1948 in a nomadic encampment on the hammada desert plains, El-Ouali’s parents were poor, and his father was disabled. Severe drought and the aftermath of the Ifni War forced his family to abandon their Bedouin lifestyle and settle near Tan-Tan in southern Morocco in the late 1950s.

His early years, education, and socialization were therefore shaped entirely within the Moroccan cultural and institutional framework – a fact that underscores the artificial nature of the later separatist narrative and his claim to Sahrawi identity.

Another prominent founder, Mohamed Abdelaziz Rgubi, was born on August 17, 1948, in Kasba Tadla, Morocco. He pursued secondary studies in Marrakech and later university studies in Rabat until 1973. He was the son of Khalili Ben Mohamed Al-Bachir Rgubi, a veteran of the Moroccan Liberation Army who later served in the Royal Moroccan Army.

Abdelaziz’s father lived in Morocco with part of his family and served as a member of the Royal Advisory Council for Saharan Affairs. He was also granted two transport licenses for the Rabat-Casablanca-Essaouira route, one by King Hassan II in 1983 and another by King Mohammed VI in 2002.

Abdelaziz would later become the president of the self-proclaimed “SADR” (so-called Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic) from 1982 until his death in 2016, after which the leadership passed to Brahim Ghali.

The engineered identity: A systematic fabrication

It was Miske who systematically invented and codified the concept of a distinct “Sahrawi people” through his ideological treatise “Polisario: Soul of a Nation.”

Miske was not the only Mauritanian within Polisario – the organization harbored numerous Mauritanians, Algerians, Malians, and ot