In November, Ryanair CEO Eddie Wilson traveled to the port city of Dakhla, on the West African coast, to launch his budget airline’s latest destination. On the runway, he posed for photos with Morocco’s tourist minister Fatima-Zahra Ammor and announced that Ryanair would run four weekly flights between the city and Spain. “Dakhla will become the thirteenth airport in Ryanair’s Moroccan network,” the company reported, insisting it was “looking forward to further developing Morocco’s infrastructure, connectivity, and tourism in the near future.”

Yet the fact that the CEO of Europe’s largest airline traveled three thousand miles to unveil just a handful of new flights — and that he was met by a government minister — suggests that this wasn’t a routine expansion of an existing market. Dakhla is not part of Morocco but is located in Western Sahara, a resource-rich country subject to a brutal Moroccan occupation. Denied independence in 1975 after former colonial power Spain carved up the territory between Morocco and Mauritania, Western Sahara is known as Africa’s last colony — that is, what the United Nations designates as a “non-self-governing territory.”