Staffan De Mistura Expected To Visit Algeria

The UN Secretary General’s Personal Envoy for Western Sahara, Staffan de Mistura, is expected to visit Algeria and Mauritania between September and October to discuss the issue of Western Sahara, the Africa Intelligence newspaper reported.

The UN envoy for Western Sahara said, after he visits Morocco last July, that he would make another visit in the coming period to visit countries neighbouring Morocco and the Sahrawi Republic, after he had only visited the Moroccan capital, Rabat, and met with Moroccan officials.

The Polisario Front’s official spokesperson to the United Nations expressed, via Twitter, “regret” that Staffan de Mistura had not visited what it described as “the desert lands”, directing its criticism to Morocco because it prevented the UN envoy from visiting those areas.

Algeria explained, in the words of Amar Belani, the special envoy in charge of the issue of Western Sahara and the Maghreb countries at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, after de Mistura visited Morocco, which was supposed to include the Western Sahara lands, that Morocco is primarily involved in sabotaging the efforts of the UN envoy for Western Sahara Staffan de Mistura.

In an interview with EchoroukOnline, Belani confirmed that the reasons are clear and well-known and Staffan de Mistura’s inability to travel to El-Ayoun and Dakhla was planned by the Makhzen.

“After great reluctance to organize Staffan de Mistura’s visit to the Western Sahara lands, the Moroccan authorities wanted to impose puppet interlocutors arbitrarily chosen by Rabat. They are in fact settlers disguised as elected or affiliated with organizations such as the famous National Council for Human Rights whose degree of independence can be gauged by reading the confusing and appalling report on the violent and brutal murder of dozens of migrants in Nador”, he added.

De Mistura’s mission faces a difficult challenge this time, represented in the new position developed by Algeria, which requires its refusal to participate in the “round tables” meetings that the United Nations had previously supervised, and (Algeria) also called for direct negotiations between the Moroccan Makhzen regime and the Polisario Front, as the sole and legitimate representative of the Sahrawi people.

The Algerian position is based on the approach that “these round tables were never considered a final formula for the conduct of the political process in Western Sahara, but rather just a transitional stage for negotiations between the Kingdom of Morocco and the Polisario Front.

This formula has proven that it is “ineffective and useless due to its exploitation by the Moroccan authorities to evade their responsibilities and distort the reality of the conflict in Western Sahara, as a matter of decolonization, according to the document that was addressed by the Algerian delegation to the President of the UN Security Council.