As UN peacekeeping mission in Western Sahara ends, refugees cling to hopes of return

At 51, Binina Mohamed is as old as the conflict that drove her from the Western Sahara region into a refugee camp in southern Algeria, where she has spent her life among tens of thousands of others facing a similar fate.

The confrontation over her native land, often described as Africa’s longest-running territorial dispute, was brought back into focus this weekend by a UN Security Council row that led to the end of a decades-old peacekeeping mission there.

The Western Sahara conflict pits Morocco, which considers the territory its own, against the Algeria-backed Polisario Front, a political and military organisation that has been seeking a separate state there since the departure of former colonial power Spain in 1976. Peacekeepers have watched over the territory since 1991, when the UN brokered a ceasefire ending years of guerrilla warfare between the two sides.