Global Policy Forum

By Kim Gamel

Secretary-General Kofi Annan on Tuesday urged the Security Council not to give up on the peace process in Western Sahara, saying member nations have two choices: to withdraw from the territory after 13 years and a cost of more than $600 million or to try again with negotiations. Annan recommended that the 15-nation council extend the U.N. peacekeeping mandate in mineral-rich Western Sahara for 10 months to give the sides more time to work with each other. But a draft resolution circulated to council members Tuesday would only extend the mission for six months.

The plan, drafted by former U.S. Secretary of State James A. Baker III, would give Western Sahara immediate self-government and schedule a referendum for within five years to decide if the desert territory on Africa's Atlantic coast should be independent or part of Morocco. "It is my view and that of my personal envoy that the peace plan still constitutes the best political solution to the conflict," the secretary-general said in a report to the council.

Baker has been working for some seven years as Annan's personal envoy trying unsuccessfully to negotiate an end to the dispute between the Polisario Front rebel movement and Morocco, which both claim the region. The Polisario Front has accepted the plan, but Morocco has rejected it. Annan said the Security Council had to choose whether to terminate the force or "to try once again to get the parties to work towards acceptance and implementation of the peace plan." The latest mandate for the peacekeeping force, which consists of nearly 230 U.N. military observers and troops, expires Friday.

Western Sahara's Spanish colonizers left the territory in 1975, and Morocco and Mauritania split it between them. Full-scale war broke out the following year, and Morocco took over the whole of Western Sahara after Mauritania pulled out in 1979. Some 200,000 local Saharawi people fled into exile and still live in refugee camps in Algeria. The fighting, which pitted 15,000 Polisario guerrillas against Morocco's U.S.-equipped army, ended in 1991 with a U.N.-negotiated cease-fire that called for a referendum on the region's fate.