Moroccan diplomacy has once again underscored that the major obstacle hampering the final settlement of the Western Sahara conflict is none other than the Algerian regime and that the Polisario Front leaders are actually mere puppets manipulated by Algerian rulers to serve the geostrategic interests and hegemonic ambitions of Algeria.

In a strong-worded address before the UN 4th Committee, Morocco’s Ambassador to the United Nations in New York, Omar Hilale, pinpointed some root causes that perpetuate the artificial conflict over the Moroccan Sahara.

Through a set of questions and answers, the Moroccan diplomat demonstrated to the audience that Algeria can in no way claim the status of “observer” in the Sahara conflict as Algerian diplomats keep shouting it from the rooftops.

Algeria is indeed a party in this dispute and is, at the same time, the main instigator, promoter and sponsor of the conflict, he argued.

Without Algeria, its generals, its diplomats, and its media, the Polisario would never have emerged, the Moroccan diplomat said, adding that likewise, the front would never have resisted all mediation attempts for a mutually acceptable political settlement.

Omar Hilale went on saying that Algeria mobilizes all its diplomatic apparatus and media against Morocco and declines to disclose to its own parliament and to its own people the budget allocated annually to the Polisario. In addition to that, Algeria indoctrinates young Sahrawis in the notorious Boumerdes Summer University and sends them back to commit acts of violence, vandalism and destruction in the Moroccan Sahara, he said before recalling Algeria’s rejection of the repeated calls by UN bodies to conduct a census of the inhabitants of the Tindouf camps.

Apart from its blatant bias in the conflict, Algeria has spent over the past forty years, colossal amounts of money to buy votes and consciences, not to defend, as it claims, a supposedly “principle of self-determination”, far from it, but rather to better serve its own hegemonic interests, the Moroccan diplomat stated further.

In order to deal with the Algerian regime’s hegemonic spirit, Morocco embarked recently on a diplomatic campaign to explain the rightfulness of its Sahara cause to the few English-speaking African countries and the handful of Latin American countries that continue to support the Polisario Front in a bid to please the Algerian regime.

And that is another root of evil that needs to be pulled up quickly to bar the way to Algerian leaders in the war of attrition they have been waging against Morocco for four decades, to weaken their neighbor and impose their leadership in the Arab Maghreb and the Sahel region.