No one can deny it: favorable winds are blowing on the sailboat from the Moroccan Sahara to bring it safely and peacefully to port. The latest United Nations meeting on the issue extends a status quo favorable to Morocco by enshrining the political solution proposed by Morocco as the framework for ending the crisis, by putting pressure on Algeria, a stakeholder in this crisis, urging people to join the UN round tables, praising Morocco’s good interaction with the UN bodies responsible for human rights issues to empty anti-Moroccan propaganda of all its substance.
This UN consecration was somewhat disrupted, at least in the media, by an unofficial proposal from the UN special envoy, Staffan de Mistura, to share the Sahara between Morocco and the Polisario front. An old idea of the Algerian regime recycled in the mouth of the UN official and which has no chance of touching reality, Morocco having already refused it several times in the past. Sovereignty cannot be shared. And it is not today, when it is collecting diplomatic victories and generating growing international unanimity on its sovereignty over the Sahara, that Morocco is going to make such a concession.
Faced with this situation, Morocco must manage two major challenges to definitively settle the diplomatic game of this Saharan question. The first is towards the European continent and the second is towards the African continent. Two asymmetric diplomatic actions which will definitively extinguish this regional discord maintained by the sole arsonist will of the Algerian regime.
For Europe, while the important countries in this space, such as France, Spain and Germany, to name just a few, openly line up behind Morocco, the challenge for Moroccan diplomacy is to to achieve a common position from the 27 countries of the European Union on the Moroccan Sahara.
This mission does not seem impossible in the current context. Recently, on the occasion of the very controversial and contested judgment of the European Court of Justice on two trade agreements between the authorities of Brussels and Morocco, the multiple levels of European decision-making (Council of Europe, European Commission, European Parliament) rushed to underline with unprecedented emphasis the immense value they attach, as the European Union, to the partnership with Morocco. What other way to celebrate this importance and set this priority in stone than to produce a common European Union position on the Moroccan nature of the Sahara? This is how these European countries can respond to a regular request from diplomacy to protect the precious relationship between the European Union and Morocco.
While working to convince Europe to formulate a common political position on the Sahara, which would definitively close the doors to hostile forces seeking to pollute their relations, Moroccan diplomacy must take up the great African challenge. That of convincing the influential members of the African Union that it is time to exclude from their ranks the SADR, a structure without any legal existence which has been embedded in African institutions with the handful of briefcases of Algerian petrodollars. The presence of the Polisario within the African Union has become anachronistic and disabling for the African Union, seeing the numerous hiccups that it causes in the cooperation dialogue between the countries of the African Union and other international powers.
For both the European Union and the African Union, Moroccan diplomacy works with the legendary discretion that characterizes it. His mission is to convince his friends and allies that the time has come to adopt the big decisions that will leave their mark and make a difference. And if there is a major turning point to expect from this diplomatic sequence, it is to see a summit of the European Union position itself with the greatest solemnity on the sovereignty of Morocco over its Sahara and a summit of the Union African pronounce the expulsion of the ghostly SADR. A double victory which will allow the Maghreb region, long torn and paralyzed by this conflict, to envisage a more promising political, diplomatic and economic sequence.
