How the UN C24 became a pro-Sahara autonomy plan Forum

At the UN C24 forum, Morocco has received steady support in recent years despite Algeria’s attempt to use the UN forum to serve its separatist agenda in southern Morocco, or the Sahara.

Morocco was the first to list the Sahara issue in the UN’s Special Committee on Decolonization, known as C24, in 1975 when it was struggling to retrieve the territory from Spanish occupation.

But after Morocco retrieved its territory, Algeria hosted, armed and backed diplomatically a group of rebels, or the Polisario- whose leaders had no separatist agenda in the onset- and instigated them to claim separatism, while helping them self-declare a Sahrawi state.

Every year, Algeria spends its taxpayers’ money to bring in Polisario members and advocates to make the case for a separatist cause.

But since the end of the cold war and in recent years more precisely, the C24 has rather become a forum where Morocco has been receiving growing support for its territorial integrity.

This year, 100 states backed Morocco’s autonomy plan for the Sahara territory at the ten-day C24 event, which closes on June 21.

The growing support for Morocco was expressed by most African states, the GCC members and other countries that see in the autonomy plan a compromise-based and a lasting political solution to the conflict.

During the event, Algeria was also put before its responsibility in perpetuating the conflict and was asked by many states to return to the negotiation table. This vindicates Morocco’s position which considers that no solution is possible without Algeria’s participation as the real party to the conflict it imposed on Morocco through the Polisario proxies.