Algeria after the UN resolution on the autonomy of the Moroccan Sahara

I would like to refer solely to Algeria, Morocco's neighbor, which decided not to vote on the historic Resolution 2797 (2025) of the United Nations Security Council on Friday, October 31, where 11 votes were counted in favor of autonomy for Western Sahara, out of the 15 states that make up the Council, including the United States, France, and the United Kingdom, three of its five permanent members, and with no votes against, as China and Russia, which complete the Council, abstained, paving the way. 

Its sole political and legal significance has been to enshrine the proposal for autonomy—the prerogative of administrative self-government—for this territory, the southernmost part of the Kingdom of Morocco, which was put forward in 2007 by King Mohammed VI before the UN itself, constituting from now on the exclusive and exclusive framework for substantive negotiations towards a definitive solution to the question of Western Sahara.

This extraordinary turning point comes just a few days before the 50th anniversary of the historic Green March, in which some 350,000 Moroccan citizens peacefully moved into Western Sahara, blending in with the Sahrawi populations, all members of a single homeland: Morocco.

Algeria's attempts to wrest Morocco from its Sahara during the past half-century (1975-2025) have been in vain.Seeing that Spain had ended its status as the occupying power in Western Sahara, Algiers quickly constructed a pseudo-strategy to frustrate the historical connection between the Moroccan king and the Sahrawis—the International Court of Justice, in its Advisory Opinion, identified this connection as the very strong link of Sahrawi subordination to the monarch— and in pursuit of this reprehensible goal, it used the Polisario Front and invented the self-proclaimed “Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic” in its delusion to find a route to the Atlantic and, in passing, to gain control of the rich phosphate deposits in the Moroccan Sahara.

All its conspiratorial efforts, typical of a poorly thought-out strategy, were exposed to the world by Morocco's highly skilled diplomacy, and as a result, the international community overwhelmingly sided with Morocco, recognizing its sovereignty over Western Sahara and supporting, like an avalanche, the autonomy that the Security Council has just fully endorsed.

Thus, Algeria has been left alone, without influence or standing, and now diminished with its artificial dossier in hand, unable to continue surprising the few UN states that once believed it, and where the recent abstention of Russia and China has been almost the same as turning their backs on it or demanding that it come to terms with reality.

Algeria, lacking reflexes and unable even to vote against, has not hidden its frustration, and its absence from the vote should be a moment of reflection. In light of the new and only scenario for negotiations on autonomy, which is about to begin, it should accept this as riding the best wave, where there are no winners or losers, as His Majesty Mohamed VI said in his intelligent and balanced message yesterday, befitting his stature as a statesman.

Miguel Ángel Rodríguez Mackay. Former Foreign Minister of Peru and Internationalist

Article published in the Peruvian newspaper Expresso