A year after his appointment as personal envoy of the United Nations Secretary General for Western Sahara, the Italian-Swedish diplomat Staffan de Mistura is still far from being consensual, in view of the slow results in the mediation of the conflict.
LUSA,. Considered by international observers as “mission impossible” – that of forcing Morocco and the Polisario Front to reach a consensus – other experts maintain that the multiplicity of factors obliges patience, pointing out the small and slow advances in a process over which de Mistura has little control.
The context does not help, with the constant political disputes between Morocco and Algeria — Algiers has always supported the Polisario Front, the liberation movement of the former Spanish colony –, with Rabat adamantly defending the autonomy plan for Western Sahara, refused by the Saharawis, who demand the referendum of self-determination promised by the UN in 1991.
“De Mistura has advanced very slowly, but he does not yet face failure, on the contrary. The last resolution of the Security Council [of the UN at the end of October] did not change many things because of the opposition of Morocco and its allies, but it introduced some potentially very important words about the actors in the conflict”, Riccardo Fabiani, director of the North Africa programme of the International Crisis Group (ICG), told Lusa news agency.
And those words are “all concerned”, which, for Fabiani, is a “broader expression than before”, since previous resolutions spoke of resuming negotiations under the “round table” format, also involving Algeria and Mauritania.
“This change opens the way to a new plan to resume negotiations between Morocco, the Polisario Front and Algeria, in a new format, a middle-ground between the demands of Polisario, which advocates bilateral negotiations, and those of Morocco, which wants the round-table format”, he explained.
Fabiani pointed out that the Americans and the Europeans “are ready to support this kind of plan”, as soon as the envoy presents it officially.
“This does not mean that the return to the negotiating table is immediate, because there is still a lot of work to be done and there is always a risk that Morocco, Polisario or Algeria will refuse this hypothesis. Resumption does not equal success in the negotiations and the barriers are huge. But I think it is too early to judge the work of the envoy”, Fabiani maintained.
For Romuald Sciora, a French-North American filmmaker and researcher specialising in the UN, to whom he has devoted several books and documentaries and who got to know de Mistura well when he was deployed in Lebanon in the early 2000s, the Italian-Swedish is “one of the last, if not the last, of the heavyweights of the UN’s great post-World War II period, when the organisation was the ‘key piece’ and when multilateralism made sense”.
For Sciora, quoted last Wednesday by Jeune Afrique magazine, de Mistura, with a mediation experience of more than 40 years, “knew very well what awaited him when he agreed to take on the Western Sahara case, especially given the lack of political will of the actors to reach a compromise, or by the interference of an external power, Algeria.”
Moreover, he recalled, one must recall the “disrespect for international law”, which complicates the work of UN diplomats, that constituted the recognition by Donald Trump’s administration of Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara, carried out outside any international legislation.
“It is a ‘modus operandi’ that does not bother Morocco, as long as it allows it to achieve success in the diplomatic field,” Sciora stresses, a situation that explains why, despite meetings with Moroccan, Algerian and Polisario authorities, de Mistura finds himself “isolated, even marginalised from the conflict”, like the institution he embodies, and whose influence on the course of events diminishes from year to year.
“The UN has become a dwarf on the political stage, while the humanitarian agencies continue to do remarkable work. But the Security Council no longer represents any authority and states do not feel obliged to follow recommendations,” Sciora argues, pointing to an “ostracism” that, he says, is illustrated by the emissary’s two unsuccessful visits to the region, in January and July/September this year 2022.
“If there is anyone who can try it is de Mistura. He knows how to communicate and open dialogue. The problem is that he inherits an insoluble dispute, a bit like the case of Cyprus. A real dialogue between Rabat and Algiers is currently impossible, and the attempt to appeal to Russia to participate in mediations is no longer relevant because of the war in Ukraine,” the French researcher stressed.
At the current stage, with the talks are suspended, de Mistura’s main objective is to bring everyone back to the negotiating table, especially Algeria, as his predecessor, former German President (2004/10) Horst Köhler, tried to do between December 2018 and March 2019, when he resigned from office.
De Mistura is also confronted with the context of deteriorating relations between all parties to the conflict, the breakdown of the 1991 ceasefire agreement following the Guerguerate events, when Morocco militarily ended a blockade on the border with Western Sahara in November 2020, followed a few months later by the freezing of diplomatic relations between Morocco and Algeria.
At the end of October, the UN Security Council decided to renew MINURSO’s mandate, considering that the mission “represents the commitment of the United Nations and the international community to a just, lasting and mutually acceptable political solution” to the conflict in Western Sahara.
The Polisario Front, for its part, accused the UN of lacking firmness in the application of various resolutions, with the chief of staff of the Saharawi People’s Liberation Army, Mohamed Luali Akeik, pointing out that for 30 years the UN has shirked responsibility, “which has repercussions for the Saharawi people, who are paying a high price for the stubbornness of the Moroccan occupier”.
It will be up to de Mistura to untie this “Gordian knot”.
