ABSTRACT
The region described as trans-Saharan Africa saw two United Nations operations launched in the 1990s. The first was a major undertaking in the territory of Western Sahara and the second a very small-scale observation mission in northern Chad. In Western Sahara a crisis of 'decolonization' similar in many ways to that in Namibia brought in a United Nations mission with the task of organizing and supervising what should have been a straightforward referendum on the territory's future. The independence of Namibia and the Cuban withdrawal from Angola are the clearest illustrations of this perhaps, but it has also been evident in the interposition between Ethiopia and Eritrea. Western Sahara had passed through most intense period of anticolonial agitation in Africa as a whole largely untouched by the advancing tide of nationalism. A treaty was then signed between Libya and France at the instigation of the government in Paris in order formally to settle all its colonial borders in the region.
