UNITED NATIONS, United States: The United Nations has sent an overland convoy to resupply its peacekeeping mission in Polisario-controlled Western Sahara for the first time since 2020, the UN said Monday.
From April 5 to 7, two sites hosting UN peacekeepers were resupplied, in Tifariti and Mehaires, said Stephane Dujarric, spokesman for the UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres.
Both towns are east of a 1,700-mile (2,700 kilometer) sand wall separating the Moroccan-controlled portion of Western Sahara from land controlled by the Polisario Front, an armed independence movement that has been fighting and negotiating for the independence of the former Spanish colony since the 1970s.
The deliveries, brokered with the support of both Polisario and Rabat, “will enable team sites to remain operational,” Dujarric said.“It´s vital to build on this momentum and ensure that the mission can maintain the efforts on the ground and presence throughout the territory in order to create space for the political process to progress,” he added.
Previous resupplying of the UN´s peacekeeping forces, known as MINURSO, had to be carried out via airplane and helicopter. April´s convoy was the first approved since November 2020.“Because of the lack of ground convoy movements since the resumption of hostilities in 2020, MINURSO team sites east of the berm have been running out of critical supplies, especially fuel,” Dujarric said when the convoys were announced last month.
For decades, Morocco and the Polisario Front have been in a stalemate over the fate of the Western Sahara, relinquished by Madrid in 1975 and currently described by the UN as a “non-self-governing territory.”
Rabat advocates for limited autonomy for the territory, a scenario where Western Sahara would ultimately remain under Moroccan control.Morocco controls about 80% of the territory.On the other side of the berm -- built by the Moroccans in the 1980s and splitting the territory from north to south -- the Polisario Front has called for independence.
MINURSO was established more than three decades ago to monitor a 1991 cease-fire -- which has broken down in recent years -- and organize a referendum on the territory´s future, part of the peace accords reached between Rabat and Polisario.Given the tensions and disagreements between the warring parties, a vote has never materialized.