UN envoy for Moroccan Sahara begins visit to Rabat
UN envoy for the Moroccan Sahara Staffan De Mistura begins Saturday an official visit to Rabat.
The UN spokesman announced on Friday that De Mistura will visit Morocco on Saturday to meet “all stakeholders in the region in the coming days”.
UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric said that De Mistura “intends to visit the Moroccan Sahara as well” during this trip.
The UN envoy “intends to remain guided by the clear precedents set by his predecessors”, he said.
The UN spokesman made no comment about relaunching a similar roundtable for dialog as the one organized by former German envoy Horst Kohler in 2019 before his resignation.
“What De Mistura is looking for is how we can advance the dialog in the context of the relevant Security Council resolutions”, he said.
While Morocco supports the resumption of round-table meetings, Algeria opposes them and calls for bilateral negotiations between the Kingdom and the Frente POLISARIO.
Asked why Algeria or Mauritania were not mentioned in the envoy’s announcement about the new flight, Stephane Dujarric replied that he would announce other information if available as the trip progresses.
After his appointment last November, Staffan De Mistura made his first tour of the region in January, taking him to Rabat, Nouakchott, Algeria, and the Tindouf camps in Algeria.
The issue of the Moroccan Sahara has witnessed a marked increase in international support for the Moroccan proposal, which is autonomy under national sovereignty.
Twenty-four countries have already opened consulates in the cities of Dakhla (12 countries) and Laayoune (12 countries).
Autonomy is a 2007 proposal by Morocco to the United Nations, through which governance would be created in Morocco’s southern desert territories, under Moroccan sovereignty.
This proposal is aimed at creating a consensus between the two parties to the conflict and the Moroccan vision, based on the United Nations resolutions, which have reached 19 resolutions since 2007 to 2021, the latest of which is resolution 2602, which urges the relevance of the Moroccan autonomy initiative.
