Sahrawi state seems only alternative for Algeria
Morocco-Algeria, Politics, 8/5/1998

The Moroccan Minister of Environment, Urbanism and Housing said that Algerian officials act as if they will accept no solution to the Sahara issue other than the establishment of a state in the region.

The Algerian officials "act as if they do not accept any alternative other than the establishment of a state in the region, contrary to what is exacted by the nature of relations between the two peoples...," El Yazghi said, hinting at Algiers' backing of the Polisario's self-proclaimed Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic.

El Yazghi made the statement in an interview with the London-based Al-Hayat daily after he attended in Tunis the convention of the Tunisian ruling party, the Democratic Constitutional Rally (RCD), as assistant first secretary of the Socialist Union of Popular Forces (USFP).

Algeria's direct involvement in the Sahara issue through political and financial backing to the Polisario, which claims sovereignty over Morocco's southern provinces, is one of the causes of tension between the two Maghreban countries.

The Moroccan official also dwelt on the latest summit of the Organization of African Unity (OAU), held last June in the Burkina Faso capital, Ouagadougou. He said the conclusions of the summit were "afflicting for Moroccans."

During this summit, "The OAU had to freeze the membership of the Polisario pending the referendum" in the Sahara, he said.

A heated debate on the status of the self-proclaimed Sadr, whose admission sparked a walk-out by founder member Morocco in the early 80s, took place during the Ouagadougou Summit.

As the issue divided the participants into three blocks: the first calling for the Sadr expulsion, the second backing its maintaining and a silent majority, the African heads of state entrusted the OAU Foreign Ministers Council with debating the issue, early next year.

The OAU will wait for the foreign ministers to refer the issue back to the Pan-African body to take a decision, President Blaise Compaore, who currently chairs the OAU, had said at the end of the summit.

The Polisario self-proclaimed "republic" was admitted to the OAU in 1984 with the political backing of neighboring Algeria and the leverage of former OAU Secretary-General, Edem Kodjo (Togo).

Touching on the identification of would-be voters for the self-determination referendum the U.N. plans to hold in the Sahara, El Yazghi accused the Polisario of hampering the sound unfolding of the operation by rejecting the registration of genuine Sahrawis on the voters' lists.

The U.N. mission for the referendum in the Sahara (Minurso) has identified since last December 3 some 83,310 would-be voters in the referendum.

The new figure brings to 143,422 the total number of persons identified since the operation first began in 1994.

El Yazghi added that the Polisario refuses to apply the 4th and 5th criteria decided by the U.N. for the identification of would-be voters.

The vote is designed to determine whether the Sahara, a former Spanish colony retrieved by Morocco in 1975, sets up on its own or be definitively incorporated into Morocco.

The Houston accords, concluded in 1997 between Morocco and the Polisario under the aegis of the United Nations, provide for five criteria to identify voters in the referendum.

Under these criteria, the persons entitled to vote are those whose names appear in the revised list of the 1974 census, persons who lived in the territory as members of a Sahrawi tribe at the time the 1974 census was conducted, but who were not covered by the census, close relatives of the two first groups (father, mother and children), persons whose father is sahrawi born in the territory, members of sahrawi tribes from the territory and who have lived there for 6 consecutive years or by intermittence for a cumulative period of 12 years before December 1, 1974.

Previous Stories:
  Rabat ready to return to African fold if OAU makes correction   (7/17/1998)
  Algeria renews backing to U.N. settlement plan for Sahara   (6/30/1998)
  Morocco advances cause on Sahrawi-Sadr issue   (6/11/1998)

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