Morocco playing the al-Qaida card in Western Sahara

Playing on European and US fears of expanding terrorist networks in North Africa, Morocco is seeking international backing for a new peace plan for the Western Sahara. But ownership of the vast mineral-rich territory bordering the Atlantic, controlled in theory by Rabat since the 1970s, is disputed by Algerian-backed Polisario Front separatists. They want full-blown independence, not limited autonomy.

Senior Moroccan officials have visited Washington and other western capitals in recent weeks to promote the plan, to be presented to the UN next month. In return for creating a Western Sahara regional government and parliament, Moroccan sovereignty and control of security, borders and finances would be formally acknowledged.

"We are extremely concerned about increased terrorist operations in the Sahel region," said interior minister Chakib Benmoussa after meeting the British home secretary, John Reid, and the foreign secretary, Margaret Beckett, in London last month. "It's an enormous area, scarcely populated, with a low level of controls. A whole range of illicit operations - drug trafficking, human trafficking, terrorist groups - is taking place there." Morocco was a "rampart" defending Europe, he said.
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Polisario's Algiers-based government-in-exile is unimpressed. "The occupier's plan is null and void. It's stillborn," spokesman Muhammad Salem Ould Salek said last month. Polisario wants an independence referendum for Saharawis plus settlers of Moroccan origin. Rabat says that is impractical.

The UN favours self-determination but no progress has been made since a ceasefire in 1991. The security council has demanded action before April 30, when the mandate for the UN's Western Sahara mission expires. Meanwhile, refugees remain in camps on the Algerian side of the border more than 30 years after fighting began.

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/simon_tisdall/2007/03/playing_the_alqaida_card.html