Morocco and Polisario front meet on Western Sahara"s future
18/06/2007-EITB

EITB: Basque News and Information Channel
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Under pressure from the United Nations, officials of the two sides and Mauritania will hold two days of talks at a private estate near New York.

Morocco and Western Sahara”s independence movement will make a new push on Monday to resolve the territory”s future, but diplomats and experts expect little immediate movement to end the 32-year-old dispute.

Under pressure from the United Nations, officials of the two sides -- and of neighboring Algeria, where Sahara”s independence-seeking Polisario Front is based -- and Mauritania will hold two days of talks at a private estate near New York.

Claiming centuries-old rights, Morocco annexed the phosphate-rich former Spanish colony after Madrid pulled out in 1975. The United Nations brokered an end to a low-level guerrilla war in 1991 but no political solution has followed.

U.N. officials have billed this week”s talks as the best chance so far after previous abortive meetings, but analysts said they could still see no way around the fundamental problem of whether or not Sahara is to become fully independent.

"Optimism may eventually be vindicated, but is likely to prove premature, since the underlying dynamics of the conflict have not changed," the International Crisis Group think tank said in a report.

With much fanfare, Morocco issued a plan in April for the territory of 260,000 people, but it provided only for autonomy under Moroccan sovereignty, with key levers of power held by Rabat. Polisario produced its own plan reviving a long-standing proposal for a referendum, with independence as an option.

Dutch diplomat Peter van Walsum, the U.N. special envoy for the Western Sahara, will moderate the talks at the Greentree estate in Manhasset on Long Island. The venue was previously used by the United Nations for border negotiations between Nigeria and Cameroon.

Ice-breaker

Diplomats said van Walsum was keen to press on with the agenda but they doubted the talks could be much more than an ice-breaker. "It”s very hard for them to talk to each other after many years without any contact," one Arab diplomat said. "You need to build a lot of things before you get into substance. If you just have lunch, that”s an achievement."

One spur to negotiations has been that the United States is now impatient for a deal in hopes it will bring more cooperation between North African states and help combat terrorist groups in the regions bordering the Sahara. The Western Sahara dispute is the main cause of friction between Morocco and Algeria, whose land borders, closed in 1994 amid security tensions, remain shut. Morocco said in an official statement last week it would negotiate in "good faith and with a firm and sincere political will." But Polisario leader Mohamed Abdelaziz said last month that failure at the talks could reignite his movement”s armed struggle.