Naciones Unidas pide a Argelia tener un papel más positivo en la cuestión del Sahara marroquí

In a report by the United Nations Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, on the question of the Moroccan Sahara, he urged Algeria to work "constructively" to resolve the regional conflict between Algiers and Rabat.

Following the resolutions issued by the United Nations Security Council (SC) 2240 (2018), 2468 (2019) and 2494 (2019), both Algeria and Morocco must cooperate with each other. In the text, which monitors developments between 2011 and 2020, Guterres urged the SC to consider the question of the Moroccan Sahara as a regional conflict, in accordance with Chapter VI of the United Nations Charter on the peaceful settlement of disputes.

Resolution 2494 has been the reference for the Secretary General for the political process, whose final objective is a political solution. This resolution reaffirmed the supremacy of the autonomy proposal in the framework of Morocco's sovereignty and territorial integrity and established the criteria for settling this regional dispute.

"The UN Security Council has established clear criteria for progress, and in its recent Resolution 2494, the Security Council stressed the need to reach a realistic, practical and lasting political solution to the problem of the Sahara", said Youssef Al Amrani, Morocco's ambassador to South Africa. For the Moroccan ambassador, this autonomy plan opens up hope of a better future for the region's peoples.

According to the academic and political analyst, Hisham Moatadid, in a statement published in Al Arab, considered that Guterres' statements provide an important part of the geostrategic reasons behind the efforts of the Algerian leadership, which is working to prolong the conflict in the Sahara on a political and diplomatic level. The academic states that since the United Nations adopted the conflict, the Algerian government has worked to hinder the work of the UN envoys to the Sahara, referring to methods of political disinformation or concealing historical facts.

For his part, the Algerian minister of information and official spokesman for the Algerian government, Ammar Belhimer, defended his government's position and its clear intention to continue with respect for "international conventions and the decisions of the international community, to protect peoples and give them their right to decide".

In statements to the Russian press agency Spuntnik, Mr Belhimer declared that Algeria is "in favour of any initiative with a view to construction and reunification" with Morocco. "Morocco is a neighbouring and friendly country with which Algeria has historical relations and deep civilisations," the minister said. 

Since the independence of both countries in the middle of the last century, the largest nations of the Maghreb have clashed on several occasions, where the incompatibility of both political and economic ambitions has caused decades of discord. Morocco's intention to create 'Greater Morocco' includes the western part of the Algerian Sahara, an area rich in iron and hydrocarbons, which was in conflict with the Algerian territories it maintains, albeit on a smaller scale, until today.