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by Lusa.pt.- The UN envoy for Western Sahara “has a difficult but not impossible mission” to resolve the conflict in the former Spanish colony in Africa, annexed by Morocco in 1975, Sahrawi diplomat Sidi Omar told Lusa.
In an interview in Lisbon, the Polisario Front’s permanent representative to the United Nations stressed, however, that the UN envoy, Staffan de Mistura, could fail the mission if he does not have the backing of the UN Security Council, as has happened with all his predecessors since 1991, when the then former US Secretary of State James Baker took on the role of mediator.
“I would rather say that it is a difficult mission, not impossible. On the one hand, Morocco has neither the political will nor the power to create settlements in Western Sahara and, on the other, there is a lack of political pressure from the Security Council for Morocco to honour the peace commitments” signed in 1988 and ratified in 1991 through a UN resolution, Omar said.
In Lisbon to participate as a speaker at a conference taking place on tuesday at the Faculty of Law of the University of Lisbon on “The Question of Western Sahara in the Light of International Law”, the Saharan diplomat, 52 years old and in New York since April 2008, stressed that without these two premises, “everything will go back to square one”.
“If de Mistura does not have sufficient support from the Security Council, the situation will worsen in view of the fact that the ceasefire was violated by Morocco in 2020 and there are now military clashes between the Saharawi army and the occupying forces. If nothing is done to decrease the tension, the situation will only get worse,” he maintained.
Stressing that the issue of Western Sahara is a “case of decolonisation”, Omar emphasises the support that Portugal can give to a process that he considers similar to the one that led to the self-determination referendum in East Timor, which allowed the Timorese people to gain independence from Indonesia.
The division which reigns between the permanent members of the UN Security Council also “does nothing to help” the process, the Saharawi diplomat added, accepting the idea that Russia and China are on the side of Algeria, which has always supported the Polisario Front, and that France and more recently the United States, support Morocco.
In this context, Omar defended a reform of the UN, “a demand which has been going on for decades”, demanded by “many countries”.
“Many groups, many commissions have already been set up for this purpose. It is still not clear why in the 21st century we are still living in a post-Second World War world. Five of the 193 member states of the UN have more power than all the rest put together,” he lamented.
Asked if the Polisario Front, a liberation movement fighting since 1976 for the independence of Western Sahara, is ready to sit at the negotiating table only with Morocco and not in a quadripartite format, involving Algeria and Mauritania, Omar expressed “openness”.
“The Western Sahara issue, apart from being a decolonisation issue, as defined at the UN, is also a peace and security issue. It is an international conflict between two parties, Polisario Front and Morocco, which have been at war, which signed [in 1991] a peace plan and which are now fighting on the ground,” after, according to Omar, Rabat violated the ceasefire in 2020.
“As far as the Polisario Front is concerned, yes, we are open and ready to resume the peace process with Morocco so that a peaceful and lasting solution can be found within the framework of the referendum of self-determination of the Sahrawi people under the terms of the 1991 UN resolution,” he added.
For Omar, however, the conflict can only be resolved through peaceful means, based on the principles of international law, which include above all the right of the Saharawi people to self-determination.
“There is no other way forward. Morocco believes it can solve the problem by entrenching the conflict, increasing the number of settlements in Western Sahara, involving third parties who can open consulates in Western Sahara and getting statements of support, as in the previous US administration in the time of President Donald Trump. But all these statements are going nowhere. Morocco has been trying to act this way for 40 years without managing to gain any international recognition,” he argued.
For this reason, he continued, there is only one way forward and that is through the United Nations resolution agreed by the parties in 1991 and which gave the Sahrawis the possibility of choosing, in a referendum, between independence and integration in Morocco, for whom the Polisario referendum demand “is a dead issue”.
“Sooner or later, Morocco and its allies will have to learn the lesson and come to the right conclusions: the only path to a fair and sustainable solution is to let the Sahrawi people freely and democratically choose their destiny,” he stressed, stressing that Morocco “cannot under any circumstances” guarantee extended autonomy for Western Sahara “because it does not have UN recognition of Western Sahara’s sovereignty.”
The former Spanish colony is considered a “non-self-governing territory” by the UN, although Rabat controls almost 80 per cent of a nearly deserted territory of 266,000 square kilometres