Just before the consulting of the Security Council for the renewal of the MINURSO mandate, many American congressmen have addressed a letter to the UNO Secretary General. In their letter, the US elected representatives have called Ban Ki-moon to “support the present political process (…) taking into consideration the Moroccan autonomy initiative as a basis for any settlement” of the Western Sahara issue.
The autonomy plan proposed by Morocco is « in conformity with the international right and the self-determination principle in particular » insist the Members of the American Congress. It is thanks to this proposal that the process of negotiations was re-launched in 2007. For the congressmen, the autonomy plan is founded on two key-principles: it “guarantees to the Sahrawi populations the right to self-determination, preserves the dignity of all the involved parties, gathers the separated families”, on the one hand, and on the other hand, it satisfies the objectives of the Security Council to reach a fair political solution, sustainable and mutually acceptable for this Sahara conflict.
Since more than 35 years, thousands of persons have been suffering in Tindouf camps, put under firm control of Polisario in the South-West of Algeria. Their “rights to dignity, freedom of movement, employment and freedom of expression are daily flouted”, said indignantly the American Members of the Congress. It is to put an end to this unacceptable situation on the humanitarian and political plans that Morocco has submitted to the UNO the autonomy proposal. For all that, the American Congress Members did not show less cautious and called the UN Secretary General to observe “an extreme carefulness so as not to act as a guarantor to the attempts to deviate the political process of its actual course”. Such tendencies would only aggravate the dangers of destabilization in the region, and at the head of all, “the increasing threatening of Al-Qaida” in all the Sahelo-Saharan area.
The declaration of the American Congressmen was preceded by the support granted to the autonomy option by the president of the foreign affairs committee at the American House of Representatives, and, more recently, by the State Secretary, Hillary Clinton.