The diplomat Staffan de Mistura, 77, former United Nations mediator in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and other sources of global tension, has returned to Tindouf (southwest of Algeria) amid silence in another attempt to keep an exit open. policy for the conflict in Western Sahara, a colonial territory abandoned by Spain in 1975. For the third time since his appointment to the position, in 2021, the UN envoy heard in the Sahrawi refugee camps the memorial of grievances of the leader of the Polisario Front , Brahim Gali: he will only accept the option of self-determination that opens the way to independence. Three days before, Morocco had stressed to him in New York, through its Foreign Minister, Naser Burita, that the plan for “autonomy under Moroccan sovereignty is the only solution to this dispute.”
On the 16th, the Security Council must review for another year the permanence of Minurso, its diplomatic and military mission in Western Sahara since the ceasefire agreed in 1991. Those acronyms originally referred to the organization of a referendum to decolonize a “non-self-governing territory,” a UN euphemism for domination by a foreign power. Now they do not seem to go much further than preserving the existence of a political solution, particularly after the Polisario broke the ceasefire four years ago following the takeover by Rabat forces of the border crossing with Mauritania of El Guerguerat.
The UN seeks to “reactivate a process that has been at a standstill” since then, in the words of Mohamed Omar, representative of the Polisario Front to the UN. This diplomat reported on Thursday night from Tindouf, through an exchange of text and voice messages, that the independence organization considers that the Sahara conflict continues to be “a matter of decolonization.” Although Omar expressed the willingness to cooperate with the UN to reach “a definitive and peaceful solution” to the conflict with Morocco, he warned that the Polisario “defends the right of the Sahrawi people to continue their struggle by all means, including armed struggle, to recover full sovereignty over the territory” of the Sahara. For this professor trained in Arab universities, the framework of the process must be “decolonization”, and not the exit from the autonomy that Morocco postulates.
Algeria, the host country of the Sahrawi diaspora, and other countries on the same continent, such as South Africa, openly support the formula of self-determination maintained by the Polisario. Anchored since 2007 in the thesis of autonomy after the drift in its favor of the United States, which recognized its sovereignty over the territory at the end of 2020, Morocco seems to count time in its favor while the UN envoys for Western Sahara happen in office.
The Spanish Government considers the autonomy solution proposed by the Moroccan side as the “most serious, realistic and credible” after the turn taken by President Pedro Sánchez in March 2022. The French head of state, Emmanuel Macron, recently gave more In two months, a turn of the screw in favor of Rabat by defining it as “the only basis” for a solution to the Western Sahara conflict, whose “present and future,” he emphasized, “are part of the framework of Morocco’s sovereignty.” .
“A potential approach”
But while Spain and France, former colonial powers (under respective protectorates during the first half of the 20th century) and the economies with the greatest presence in the Maghreb country raise the diplomatic bid, the United States maintains a cautious distance. Despite formally recognizing Moroccan sovereignty over the Sahara – a decision adopted in recent days in the White House of Republican Donald Trump – Washington reminded Morocco on Tuesday that it sees its autonomy proposal as just another option. “A potential approach to satisfy the aspirations of the people of Western Sahara,” according to the statement released by the State Department after the meeting in the US capital between the respective diplomatic heads, the American Antony Blinken and the Moroccan Burita.
Western Sahara is divided by a military sand wall built by Morocco. The berm or embankment separates 80% of the territory that, according to the UN, remains under Moroccan control to the north and west, from the remaining 20% that is under Polisario control. After the formal end of the truce between the parties in force since 1991, the United Nations has defined the clashes of the last four years as “low intensity”, with occasional Sahrawi ambushes and Moroccan attacks, mainly with drones, on Polisario patrols.
