Morocco: Neutrality of UN mediator in negotiations is a must

Morocco, which withdrew its confidence in the personal envoy of the UN Secretary General for the Sahara, Christopher Ross, exacts a consensual political solution to the Western Sahara conflict.
The Moroccan government also exacts that UN mediators show neutrality and impartiality.
Although the nine rounds of informal negotiations, led by Christopher Ross, ended up in a deadlock, Morocco is still willing to endeavor on the diplomatic scale, to substantiate the seriousness and the credibility of its proposal on the Sahara issue. The Kingdom is still waiting the United Nations to express its official stand on the resumption of the negotiations.
The informal negotiations between Morocco and the Polisario front, held under the aegis of the United Nations Organization, with the participation, as observers, of delegates of Algeria and Mauritania, were theoretically meant to result in direct negotiations that were to lead to a final settlement of the Sahara conflict.

The nine rounds of informal negotiations held since the summer of 2009 made no tangible progress. And this is one of Rabat’s grievances against Christopher Ross, whose predecessor Peter Van Walsum had been forced to resign under the pressure of Algeria and the Polisario, after he said in April 2008 that the self-determination referendum was not, in his opinion, “a reachable objective” and that an “independent Western Sahara was not a realistic scheme “.
Walsum’s vision was actually lucid and logical, because four years later, the negotiations are still dragging on and the only solution, which so far gained most consensus on the international scale, is the Morocco-proposed autonomy plan providing for a large autonomy of the Western Sahara under Moroccan sovereignty. So, a word to the wise is enough!

 

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