Reuters: Polisario attacks Moroccan W.Sahara plan before talks
18/06/2007-By William Maclean

(Reuters) A bid to relaunch Western Saharan peace efforts this week will fail if Morocco insists its "colonial" plan offering only autonomy be the starting point for talks, the Polisario Front independence movement said on Monday.

Mohammed Khadad, a Polisario negotiator, called instead for a referendum on self-determination among Sahrawis themselves, with independence as an option.

"We do not ask the impossible. We ask only that the people are consulted on their future," he told Algerian state radio.

Moroccan and Polisario officials begin two days of talks later on Monday at a private estate near New York to try to end a 32-year-old dispute over the phosphate-rich territory on the northwest coast of Africa.

Claiming centuries-old rights, Morocco annexed the former Spanish colony after Madrid pulled out in 1975, a move which Polisario was formed to fight until 1991 when the United Nations brokered an end to a low-level guerrilla war.

The ceasefire accord promised a referendum on the territory”s fate, but it never happened and Rabat now rules it out, saying autonomy is the most it will offer.

Morocco published 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.

"They condemn these negotiations to failure in advance if they insist on this project as the starting point," said Khadad.

"The Moroccan plan can be summed up as legalising the accomplished fact of a colonial Moroccan occupation that we reject. There”s nothing in that to negotiate."

The Western Sahara dispute is also the main cause of friction between Morocco and Algeria, whose land borders, closed in 1994 amid security tensions, remain shut.

Algeria, which supports Polisario”s call for a resolution on the basis of self-determination, has been in competition with Morocco for influence in the Maghreb and beyond for years.

The talks are being held as a result of a U.N. Security Council resolution that calls upon Morocco and Polisario to negotiate a solution providing for self-determination.

Khadad said self-determination could only happen under international law though the mechanism of a referendum.

"Self-determination belongs to the people. No one can make a concession on this question because it belongs to the people to decide," he said, adding the plan imposed Rabat”s sovereignty.

"The passage of three decades has shown that a unilateral, imposed solution cannot succeed," he said.

Moroccan "repression" in the territory called into question its good faith in the run-up to the talks, Khadad said.

Rights campaigners in Morocco have said that Moroccan police have beaten and imprisoned dozens of independence activists demonstrating on university campuses in recent weeks.

The government has denied that police used excessive force to break up the demonstrations, saying they had intervened each time to separate rival gangs of students.