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.