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Thursday, March 28, 2024
Foreign Activities

The Moroccan delegation arrived, on Monday at Mellieha, a town north-western Malta Island, to take part in the 6th set of informal talks on the Sahara, held under the aegis of Christopher Ross, UNSG's Personal Envoy for the Sahara.



The Moroccan delegation to this meeting, scheduled March 7-9, is made up of Foreign Minister Taïb Fassi Fihri, Director General of intelligence agency Mohamed Yassine Mansouri, and Secretary General of the Royal Advisory Council for Saharan Affairs (CORCAS) Maouelainin Khalihanna Maouelainin.

The new round of talks to be held, as usual, attended by delegates from Algeria, Mauritania and Polisario, will allow to make progress according to "innovative approaches to try to create an environment more conducive to progress "in negotiations, according to UN words.

Christopher Ross said that the sixth round of negotiations that opened in Malta, will allow the parties to "develop concrete ideas that were presented and discussed on a preliminary basis" during the last informal talks held on 21 to 23 January in Manhasset, near New York.

Morocco has never ceased to claim from the fourth round of talks last December, to make practical proposals "to facilitate and accelerate negotiations."

After the last round, Taib Fassi Fihri indicated that his delegation had submitted several "innovative" ideas "to work on specific topics, acceleration factors of negotiation."

These new ideas and proposals include the participation in negotiations of experts and representatives of the people of the Saharan provinces, as well as the consideration of the actual state of natural resources in the region and the positive way they are manipulated for local populations.

Morocco also hoped that its proposals would be taken into account for talks in Malta where it will reiterate "willingness to find a solution to this regional dispute on the basis of the legitimacy of the presence of Morocco in its Sahara and the autonomy proposal as a compromise and realism solution which are the two cardinal virtues "of the resolution of UN the Security Council.

Between the two round, the parties met last February in Geneva with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) Antonio Guterres and Mr. Christopher Ross to increase the number of beneficiaries from the program of family visits between the southern provinces and Tindouf camps by air which resumed on January 7.

Under the humanitarian part called "program of measures to restore confidence," they also decided to advance the project of transporting families by land and revive the means of communication (email and phone) on both sides.

After the failure of the four rounds of formal negotiations, Mr. Ross, who succeeded Mr. Van Walsum, who resigned by saying that the option of independence was not feasible, proposed informal talks.

The talks opened in August 2009 in Austria and prepare the 5th round of formal negotiations aimed at finding a final political solution to the regional dispute over the Moroccan Sahara.

They are part of the implementation of resolutions 1813 (2008), 1871 (2009) and 1920 (2010) of the UN Security Council, which calls on parties to enter a phase of intense and substantial negotiations. 

Before the Malta meeting, five previous meetings were held successively in August 2009 in the town of Durnstein Austria (near Vienna), in February 2010 in Armonk, near New York in November and December 2010 and finally last January in Manhasset, a suburb of New York.

Source: MAP
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