UN peace keeping official to visit North Africa over Sahara issue

The United Nations assistant secretary general for peace keeping operations, Bernard Miyet, will visit the Maghreb for talks on the Sahara issue, it was officially announced in New York.

The UN secretary-general's spokesman, Fred Eckhard, said Kofi Annan asked his assistant for peacekeeping operations to undertake a tour in the Maghreb region together with Charles Dunbar, Annan's special representative for Western Sahara.

This visit is likely to take place next week, following which the UN secretary-general will submit his next report to the Security Council.

The spokesman said that the initial date (October 18) for the publication of the UN secretary-general's report on the issue will probably be delayed to October 26, recalling that the mandate of the UN mission supervising a referendum in the Sahara (MINURSO) will expire this October 31.

The Security Council decided last month to extend the mandate of the MINURSO (acronym in French for the UN mission for the referendum in the Sahara) until October 31 after Annan informed the council that with the identification of 147,000 applicants wishing to take part in the referendum, the identification is completed, except for the contested tribes H41, H61 and J51/52 (groups that fled the Spanish occupation and that are denied eligibility by the Polisario).

The identification process, which first started in 1994, was interrupted in December 1995 and resumed two years later, following the signing of (UN special envoy) James Baker's brokered Houston accords in September 1997.

Other aspects still need to be finalized before deciding on arrangements for the referendum that will decide whether this former Spanish colony retrieved by Morocco in 1975 under the Madrid accords would stand on its own, as claimed by the Algeria-backed Polisario guerilla movement or incorporate with Morocco.

The MINURSO's identification commission still has to convoke hundreds of applicants living abroad, identify members of the contested tribes and examine the appeals by those who already appeared before the commission which had offices in Tindouf (stronghold of the polisario in south-eastern Algeria), Morocco and Mauritania.

The MINURSO, which supervises a ceasefire in force since September 1991, comprises 203 military observers, 10 staff officers, 248 troopers and 80 civilian police observers.

Initially set for next December 7, the vote is facing serious problems due to the Polisario's attempts to limit the electorate to persons included in a census conducted by the Spanish colonial authorities.