Un envoy informs Spain of preparations to launch negociations between the parties in the western Sahara

5/21/2007

Personal Envoy of the UN secretary General for the Sahara, Peter Van Walsum informed, here Friday, Spanish Foreign minister Miguel Angel Moratinos of the "consultations he is undertaking to prepare negotiations between the parties."

According to a communiqué of the Spanish Foreign ministry, this issue was evoked at a business lunch in the Spanish capital.

On April 30, the United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 1754 that calls upon the parties to enter into negotiations "without preconditions in good faith," with a view to achieving a just, lasting and mutually acceptable political solutions.

Morocco submitted, on April 11, a proposal to the UN Security to solve the three decade-old dispute Sahara dispute with the separatist Polisario movement over the Sahara issue, which broke out in 1976, a year after the Spanish colony was ceded under the Madrid Accord.

In its resolution, the Council also calls upon "the parties and States of the region to continue to cooperate fully with the United Nations and with each other to end the current impasse and to achieve progress towards a political solution", reads the resolution in an allusion to Mauritania and Algeria. The latter, despite its political, diplomatic, financial, logistic and military support to the separatists, has always denied any involvement in the dispute. An argument that is not shared by Mr. Walsum who, in a statement to MAP bureau in New York in April 20, insisted that Algeria plays a "preeminent and dominant role" in the Sahara issue.

“Algeria has in this whole dossier (Sahara issue) played an absolutely preeminent, dominant role ever since 1975,” said the Senior UN official following a closed hearing of the Council on the Sahara issue.

“I have to say it would be totally dishonest if I didn’t mention that they (Algerians) played an important role" in the conflict, he said, noting that "if there is one thing I've learnt in this one year and a half (as a Personal envoy), it is not to try to formulate exactly the role of Algeria," a country that insists "it is not a part in the conflict".