infobae.com.- The UN envoy for Western Sahara, Staffan de Mistura, has continued his tour of the region with a stop in Algeria, whose government has once again claimed “the right of the Saharawi people to self-determination” after Morocco’s refusal to consider any other plan than its own autonomy initiative.
De Mistura met with the Algerian Foreign Minister, Ahmed Attaf, who underlined Algiers’ “full support” for the envoy’s work. He hopes that his contacts will culminate in the reactivation of “direct” negotiations between the Moroccan government and the Polisario Front, “without preconditions and in good faith”, according to a statement from the ministry.
Algiers, a key ally of the Polisario and without diplomatic relations with Rabat since 2021, recalled that in the eyes of the UN itself, Western Sahara remains a territory pending decolonisation. Once his visit to Algeria is over, Attaf’s office has announced that De Mistura will travel to Mauritania, another of the countries listed as “observers” in this conflict, according to the official note.
The UN, however, has given hardly any information about this tour, which has included stops in El Aaiún, Dakhla and Rabat. As part of these contacts, the UN Secretary General, António Guterres, received on Monday in New York the Secretary General of the Polisario Front, Brahim Ghali, who also expressed himself in similar terms to Algeria.
The Moroccan Foreign Minister, Nasser Burita, on the other hand, stressed in a statement after meeting with De Mistura that the solution for the former Spanish colony is “exclusively” based on the autonomy plan presented in 2007 by King Mohammed VI and that it does not contemplate the possibility of self-determination under any circumstances.
