Western Sahara's government-in-exile took the unusual step last week of warning Hong Kong's Pacific Basin Shipping that it reserved the right to use 'all means' to defend its sovereignty and protect the interests of its people. The declaration was made as one of the shipping firm's vessels dropped anchor in Hobart to deliver a cargo of phosphate rock from Western Sahara's Boucraa minefields to Australian fertiliser manufacturer Impact.
Boucraa, home to some of the world's largest phosphate reserves, was seized along with the rest of Western Sahara in 1975 when King Hassan II ordered Moroccan troops to invade the former Spanish colony.
The annexation, joined by Mauritania from the south, was widely condemned but proceeded despite a ruling by the International Court of Justice that rejected any historical claim of Moroccan and Mauritanian sovereignty over the territory.
War ensued until 1981 when, Moroccan costs and casualties mounting, Rabat began building a 2,700km wall, or sand berm, across the Sahara. The wall continues to confine the Polisario Front - the Sahrawi (Western Sahara) liberation movement - to a sliver of territory along the Mauritanian and Algerian borders.
Notwithstanding a host of resolutions passed by the UN General Assembly calling for Sahrawi self-determination, 'Western Sahara [remains] the last great decolonisation situation on the international agenda,' according to Suzannah Linton, an associate professor in human rights law at the University of Hong Kong.
The Boucraa mines are operated by Morocco's Office Cherifien des Phosphates (OCP), a state-owned company and the world's largest phosphate producer. 'They are plundering the wealth from our land,' Mohamed Abdelaziz, president of the Sahrawi government-in-exile and Polisario secretary general, told the Sunday Morning Post from his headquarters in Algeria.