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Morocco World News with Agencies
New York, December 1, 2011
It seems that the isolation of the Polisario Front, as a result of its involvement with the late Moummar Gaddafi in quelling the Libyan revolution, in addition to the kidnapping, last October, of three humanitarian workers in Tindouf, is deepening.
On Thursday, Polisrio’s claims over the Sahara have been dealt a new blow, as The United Kingdom Parliament has described as “a serious” initiative, the autonomy plan, presented by Morocco in 2007 to solve the artificial problem of the Sahara,
In 2007, Morocco made “a serious” initiative to move negotiations forward by offering autonomy to the territory, under Moroccan sovereignty, said the parliament in a report to the house of Commons (lower chamber), carried by the Maghreb Arab Press news agency on Thursday.
The UK parliament recalled that in 2009, Peter Van Walsum, the then UN special envoy for the Sahara, concluded that independence was “an unrealistic option”.
The report further stressed that the UK, while supporting the UN Secretary General and his personal envoy, Ambassador Christopher Ross, in their efforts to find a negotiated political settlement, “regards the Moroccan Autonomy Plan as a serious and credible contribution to those efforts”, as set out in Security Council Resolution 1871.
In April 2007, Morocco presented an Autonomy Plan that was described as “serious and credible” by the Security Council. The said plan proposes significant autonomy for the Sahara with a local government and a parliament, within the Moroccan sovereignty.
The Polisario Front, supported by Algeria, rejects the Moroccan plan and claims the people of the Sahara have the right to self-determination through a referendum.
Over the past two years, Morocco and the Polisario have held 8 informal rounds of negotiations under the auspices of the United Nations Secretary General’s Special Envoy, Christopher Ross.
The last round of negotiations was held in July in New York. All of these negotiations have ended without any progress.
Many analysts voiced their concern that the current informal negotiations over the future of the Sahara are leading nowhere and that the Security Council ought to adopt a new approach in order to put an end to this long-lasting dispute.
With the changing geopolitical situation in the Maghreb after the demise of Muammar Gaddafi, the involvement of Polisario militias on behalf of Gaddafi and the implication of some Polisario in terrorist activities, as illustrated by the kidnapping on Sunday of three humanitarian workers in Tindouf, Morocco might be pushed to refuse to engage in any informal negotiations in the near future.
