France Once Again Confirms Its Centrist Tendency On The Sahrawi Issue

The French position on the Sahrawi issue is an indication of the temperature of Algerian-French relations, and therefore the last session of the UN Security Council last week, which was dedicated to the extension of the mission of the United Nations Mission for the organization of the referendum in Western Sahara (MINURSO), is considered a station to examine the French position on this sensitive issue.
Over the past decades, France, the veto-holder, has remained the main protector and defender of the Moroccan Makhzen regime’s positions on the Sahrawi question at the level of the UN Security Council. Since 2007, the year in which the Moroccan regime launched the so-called “autonomy plan”, Paris has turned into a fierce defender of this plan, and there are sources who say that this initiative was formulated under the eyes and guidance of the former French president, Nicolas Sarkozy.
Although France has continued to extend its mission every year since the creation of the United Nations Mission for Self-Determination in Western Sahara (MINURSO), its position has changed in the last two years in a way that the Moroccan regime no longer likes. It used to praise the Moroccan “autonomy plan” every time.
According to the United Nations Press Service’s coverage of the recent UN Security Council meeting on the Sahrawi issue, the Permanent Representative of France to the United Nations merely “expressed France’s concern about the violation of the ceasefire agreement. Paris also called on “the authorities to implement it,” but without holding any of the warring parties responsible for this violation.
In the international press coverage of this meeting, there is no reference to the so-called “autonomy plan” presented by the Moroccan Makhzen regime. This is a remarkable development in the French position, which is seen as an extension of last year’s position at the same meeting, when the French party refused to comment after the vote to extend the mandate of the “MINURSO” mission. When he was given the floor to avoid embarrassment, in a situation that came as a shock to the Moroccan regime, which was accustomed to hearing from the permanent representative of France in such an international forum, when it heard praise for the so-called “autonomy plan”.
It is interesting to note that at a time when Paris was refraining from supporting the Moroccan autonomy plan, the United Nations Press Service published statements attributed to the representative of the United Arab Emirates in the UN body, talking about France’s support for the Moroccan initiative, which contradicts reality. Paris has not declared its support for the so-called “autonomy plan” for at least three years, despite pressure from the Moroccan Makhzen regime, which has made the Sahrawi issue a “prism”, as Moroccan King Mohammed VI said, through which it views Rabat’s relations with other countries.
Nevertheless, it seems that Paris did not pay any attention to the conditions of the Moroccan king. On the contrary, the French president, Emmanuel Macron, deliberately insulted the Moroccan king and threw the phone in his face while King Mohammed VI was trying to exonerate his country from involvement in the scandal of spying on the French president’s phone.
The French President, his senior aides and his government ministers were targeted in the so-called “Pegasus” scandal. These words were spoken by the intellectual of the Moroccan royal court, Taher Benjelloun, to the Zionist channel “i24” and confirmed by another source, the French newspaper “Le Monde”.
The unprecedented French position on the Sahrawi issue coincides with Moroccan accusations that refuse to stop criticizing the French president’s policy of rapprochement with Algeria at the expense of the Moroccan regime, a trend that has shocked many political elites in Morocco, who believed that Paris was considered a strategic ally of Rabat.