For half a century, the Tindouf region has transformed into an uncontrolled territory where the Polisario and the so-called Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR) reign as absolute masters.
On Algerian soil, a foreign entity exercises de facto sovereignty, runs a parallel diplomacy, and manages a full administration, all under the complacent or powerless gaze of Algerian authorities.
As international jurists and experts bluntly describe it: Tindouf has become a Sahrawi city-state, a space beyond Algerian authority, where the Polisario acts as a government not in exile, but right on Algerian territory. A political and legal anomaly that Algeria has been carrying for fifty years as an unmanageable burden.
In Tindouf, the scene is unmistakable: ministers, president, national assembly, armed militias, social control, internal administration… everything operates as in an independent state. While Algiers proclaims its sovereignty, the Polisario enforces it.
Brahim Ghali’s movements between Tindouf and Algiers perfectly illustrate this drift: a president moving across Algerian territory as a leader in Tindouf would be received by an Algerian state.
The paradox reaches its peak when one recalls that the Polisario maintains an official diplomatic representation in Algiers. An organization born on Algerian soil, settling there, governing a population, and establishing its embassies. A geopolitical aberration that only Algeria seems to consider reasonable.
The truth is harsher: the Tindouf Wilaya has become an autonomous territory beyond Algerian sovereignty, a unique precedent in the world.
For fifty years, generations of Sahrawis have been born, lived, and died in Tindouf without knowing any horizon other than that of the Polisario. Many hold Algerian passports, a further proof of the political entanglement maintained by Algiers.
Brahim Ghali has even arrogated to himself the right to grant “Sahrawi nationality” to an Italian activist, as if the territory belonged to him personally, without the approval of President Abdelmadjid Tebboune or Chief of Staff General Saïd Chengriha.
This city-state that the Polisario has built in Tindouf, with Algiers’ tacit blessing, is now turning against its patron. Algeria is paying the price for half a century of ambiguity, political calculation, and the renunciation of its own sovereignty.
The foundations of international law are present: population, territory, government in Tindouf, all under the passive eye of the Algerian state.
A situation that Western experts, such as D.C. and J.W., describe as a “parallel reality of international law,” where an organization exercises full power over a fragment of Algerian territory.
This de facto autonomy is visible even in the movements of Polisario leader Brahim Ghali, regularly seen traveling between Tindouf and Algiers as well as abroad, as if oscillating between two legitimate authorities of two sovereign powers.
Should there be mediation between the Polisario and Algeria? The question imposes itself, as these two actors officially allies and politically aligned reveal strategic tensions that no one openly admits.