and the Western Sahara partition agreement, treaties that divided the administration of the territory between Morocco and Mauritania, but did not impact the sovereignty debate. Spain, Morocco and Mauritania did not consult the Sahrawi population, and the Polisario violently opposed the treaties. The developments chance in the region until the 1990s were strongly influenced by the power struggle of the Cold war. Algeria, Libya and Mali were allied to the Eastern bloc. Morocco was the only African country in the region that was allied to the West. Algeria gave help to the Movimiento de Liberación del Sahara, that in the late 1960s and early 1970s formed a section of new split youngs. The majority of the Sahrawi people supported its patriotic actions and identified with this movement, which later was called Polisario, and gradually had more misunderstandings with the Autonomous and Central Government of the Metropoli for the signs of a vacilante, or feeble foreign policy, made up by generals that had the "última palabra" or "last word", feeling a possible betrayal of the Motherland''. On November 14, 1975, Spain, Morocco and Mauritania signed the Madrid Accords, hence setting up a timetable for the retrieval of Spanish forces and ending Spanish occupation of Western Sahara. These accords were signed by the three parties in accordance with all international standards. In these accords, Morocco was set to annex back 2/3 of the northern part of Western Sahara, whereas the lower third would be given to Mauritania. Polisario established their own Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic, and combined guerrilla warfare with their conventional military forces, the Sahrawi People's Liberation Army (SPLA). On February 26, 1976 Spain's formal mandate over the territory ended when it handed administrative power on to Morocco in a ceremony in Laayoune. The day after, the Polisario proclaimed in Bir Lehlou the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR) as a government in exile. Mauritania in its turn renamed the southern parts of Río de Oro as Tiris al-Gharbiyya, but proved unable to maintain control over the territory. Polisario made the weak Mauritanian army its main target, and after a bold raid on the Mauritanian capital Nouakchott (where a gunshot killed El-Ouali, the first president of the SADR), Mauritania succumbed to internal unrest. The presence of a large number of Sahrawi nationalists among the country's dominant Moorish population made the Mauritanian government's position yet more fragile, and thousands of Mauritanian Sahrawis defected