Polisario Confidential
Khalid Ibrahim Khaled
Morocco made a big move in Kigali. In deciding to return to the African Union, Rabat has maybe activated a process that could undo all what Algeria has fabricated to support the Polisario and its pseudo-republic within the AU.
King Mohammed VI got straight to the point in the message he addressed to the AU Summit, opened on July 17 in the Rwandan capital. If Morocco walked out and withdrew from the OAU over three decades ago, it was because the recognition of a pseudo state of the Polisario was too hard for the Moroccan people to accept.
“Indeed, it is difficult to admit that the Kingdom – a nation steeped in history – could somehow be compared to an entity that meets none of the attributes of sovereignty and that is deprived of any representativeness or effectiveness,” insisted Mohammed VI.
Today, things have changed since at least 34 AU countries have never recognized or no longer recognize the State upheld by the Polisario and Algeria. Even among the 26 countries that had yielded to the pressure of Boumedienne and Gaddafi in 1984, only a small minority of some ten countries remains.
Mohammed VI has thus raised the key question: Will the AU remain out of step with its own Member States’ national stances? Such an attitude on the part of the AU is all the more anachronistic that the Polisario’s Republic is recognized by neither the UN nor the Arab League or the OIC (Organization of Islamic Cooperation) or by any international or regional organization.
Henceforth, the King’s call to the AU to restore legality and correct errors and to let the UN continue the settlement process of the Sahara issue is judicious and raises the question of the future of the Polisario’s Republic in the pan-African organization. Especially so, that Morocco which is returning to the AU, at the request of many African countries, will no longer let Algeria and South Africa have it their way in the Sahara issue that is so sensitive for the Kingdom.
