A Future on Hold

War on Want volunteers were bemused to receive a pair of second-hand ice-skates when they launched their latest toy appeal for the Western Sahara. But, as 165,000 Sahrawi exiles endure a twenty-sixth blistering summer in Algerian desert refugee camps, the unwanted ice-skates are strangely evocative – symbols of a frozen peace process and of a desert nation whose future is on ice.

The people of the Western Sahara – Sahrawis – lay claim to a barren but strategic stretch of phosphate-filled desert sprawling between Morocco, Algeria and Mauritania, a region whose long Atlantic coastline contains prime fishing grounds.