Vol. 8 Issue 7 - Public International Law & Policy Group
Vol. 8 Issue 7 - Public International Law & Policy Group
Vol. 8 Issue 7 - Public International Law & Policy Group
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Morocco<br />
UN envoy to head for Western Sahara talks<br />
Gerard Aziakou, Agence France Presse, 2/17/09<br />
The new UN envoy to the Western Sahara was to embark on his first trip to the region<br />
Wednesday to sound out prospects for resuming stalled talks between Morocco and the<br />
Polisario independence movement.<br />
Christopher Ross's week-long tour was to begin in Rabat to meet Moroccan leaders and<br />
would include stops in Tindouf, in the southwestern Algerian desert, for talks with Polisario<br />
chief Mohamed Abdelaziz, and then in Algiers, according to UN spokeswoman Michele<br />
Montas.<br />
Montas said in a statement that Ross, a former US ambassador to Syria and Algeria, would<br />
leave Algiers February 25 for Madrid and then Paris, capitals of two countries belonging to<br />
the <strong>Group</strong> of Friends of Western Sahara.<br />
The <strong>Group</strong> of Friends also includes Russia, Britain and the United States.<br />
For more than three decades, Tindouf has been home to Sahrawi refugees from the Western<br />
Sahara, a phosphate-rich territory which was annexed by Morocco in the 1970s following the<br />
withdrawal of colonial power Spain.<br />
That sparked a war with the Polisario. The two sides agreed a UN-brokered ceasefire in<br />
1991, but a promised self-determination referendum never materialized.<br />
UN officials cautioned though against expecting too much from Ross's tour, which they said<br />
was aimed at sounding out the parties about the prospects for resuming the stalled UNmediated<br />
talks in the New York suburb of Manhasset.<br />
Morocco and the Algerian-backed Polisario have held four fruitless rounds in Manhasset<br />
since June 2007.<br />
Ahmed Bujari, the Polisario's UN representative, said last week that his group reiterated to<br />
Ross, who took up his post last month, that "we are dealing with an issue of selfdetermination<br />
in the framework of UN Security Council resolutions."<br />
"It's up to the people of Western Sahara to choose their future," he added.<br />
In Rabat, Moroccan government spokesman Khalid Naciri meanwhile told AFP Tuesday:<br />
"Ross will find in Morocco the same openness of mind and the same good faith requested by<br />
the (UN) Security Council to move the negotiation process forward."<br />
That process, he added, "must pick up from where his predecessor (Peter Van Walsum) left<br />
off."