WESTERN SAHARA: U.N. Mission Shows Frustration

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

UNITED NATIONS, Jun 5 1995 (IPS) - The dispatch last weekend of a U.N. Security Council mission to Western Sahara is the latest sign that the world body’s plans for a referendum there are in deep trouble.

Two weeks ago, the Security Council spent two days asking U.N. officials why the referendum is taking so long to prepare.

Then the Council extended the U.N. peacekeeping mission (MINURSO) there — but only for one month, instead of the four sought by U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali.

On Sunday, a delegation of Council ambassadors, led by Botswana’s Joseph Legwaila, arrived in the Moroccan capital, Rabat, to begin their own review of MINURSO and the referendum. On Monday, they visited Algeria before heading to the Western Sahara itself and then, later this week, to Mauritania.

For observers of the troubled mission, the Council’s moves reflect a deepening distrust of how the United Nations has gone about determining the region’s sovereign status.

Frank Ruddy, a U.S. diplomat who resigned last year as MINURSO’s deputy director for preparing the voting rolls, says the Council mission shows that Boutros-Ghali’s own recent report on the Sahara failed to convince the Council.

“This step rejects completely the secretary-general’s report,” he says. “What the Security Council is saying is, ‘It’s nonsense — we’re going to have to look at (the situation on the ground) ourselves’.”

U.N. spokesman Joe Sills concedes that “there is concern” about the delays, and that “a lot of slippage” has occurred in the peace process.

Former Council President Jean-Bernard Merimee of France ordered the mission to “assess progress and identify problems in the identification process, bearing in mind the deadline for the referendum of January 1996.”

Given the current rate of identifying voters, few Council diplomats believe the United Nations can meet that target. As of mid-May, fewer than 36,000 Sahrawi had been determined elible to vote to decide whether the Sahara should gain independence, or accede to the occupying power, Morocco.

Although the Council is concerned about the delays, its members are also growing worried that the process itself has been hijacked by Morocco, Ruddy contends.

“The United Nations doesn’t control the referendum; Morocco does,” Ruddy argues. By the time he left MINURSO, Rabat was allowed to dominate the voting process, intimidating potential voters and posting a presence outside all U.N. voter identification centres, he says.

That is why the Security Council took two days to question Erik Jensen, the deputy U.N. special representative in Western Sahara, and then extended MINURSO only until the end of June, according to Ruddy.

One Council ambassador, Emilio Cardenas of Argentina, referred to the “tell-tales” coming out of MINURSO about its success registering voters.

But Sills counters that the 288-soldier MINURSO has done some of its task very well.

The complex process of determining which residents are legitimately part of the nomadic Sahrawi “is going ahead at close to the rate of 1,000 (potential voters) a day,” Sills notes. “We hope very strongly that this (mission) will stay on track.”

The snags have sparked fears here that, regardless of any vote, Morocco will not leave Western Sahara, which it divided up with Mauritania after Spain ended its colonial rule there in 1976. Rabat annexed the territory in its entirety in 1979.

The Polisario Front, a Sahrawi liberation group supported by Algeria, has held out against Morocco since then, proclaiming a Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR) that has been recognised by the Organisation of African Unity.

The two sides maintained their standoff until 1990, when they agreed to a settlement plan under which the United Nations would organise a referendum to determine Western Sahara’s status.

But Polisario has accused the United Nations of bias. It has charged former U.N. Secretary-General Javier Perez de Cuellar with concluding business deals after leaving office with the Moroccan government.

The rebel front has argued that MINURSO has turned a blind eye to Morocco’s strong-arm tactics to intimidate voters and has set criteria for voter eligibility which may allow Rabat to rig the ballot by including thousands of Moroccans who claim to be Sahrawi in the voting rolls.

Morocco, in turn, has noted that much of Polisario’s support is drawn from the Sahrawi camps based in Tindouf, Algeria.

The signs that MINURSO has failed after five years to guarantee a fair referendum have brought many Council members to consider abandoning the mission. The United States has indicated that the mission is one of several U.N. operations which is marked for elimination if it fails to show results soon.

Despite that, Ruddy says, MINURSO’s mission is simple: “All they have to do is to ensure that the referendum is free and fair, that Moroccans stop terrorising the population and that the United Nations controls the referendum.”

The crucial thing, he adds, is for MINURSO to complete its task. “If they just cut this project off, Morocco wins,” he says.