ALGIERS -- The representative of the Polisario Front to the UN and coordinator with MINURSO, Sidi Mohamed Omar, who is currently in the Tindouf refugee camps as part of the visit there of the Personal Envoy of the Secretary General of the United Nations for Western Sahara, Staffan de Mistura, is a man with a very busy schedule.

 Nevertheless, he was kind enough to find time to give Italian Insider his first comment to focus on the political meaning to be given to this first contact of Mr. De Mistura with the two parties concerned, Polisario and Morocco and subsequently with the two observer countries, Algeria and Mauritania.

 "First of all, our government made a point of stressing the attachment of the Sahrawi people to the International Law, the only way able to orient the solutions on still unresolved questions. We reminded our host that the Sahrawis accept the referendum as a middle solution between a legitimate claim through the struggle to establish sovereignty over the entire territory of the Sahrawi Republic, on the one hand, and the illegitimate Moroccan proposal for the annexation of the Sahrawi territories, on the other".

 Regarding the visit of veteran Italo-Swedish diplomat de Mistura to Tindouf, it will have allowed, according to Sidi Omar Mohamed, the envoy to meet the protagonists of Sahrawi civil society, women and students, to supervise school and medical structures in this period of pandemic and to inquire about the living conditions of Sahrawi refugees more than 40 years after the Moroccan invasion.

 And during all his meetings, the unique and constant demand which was formulated to Mr. De Mistura was to be able to accede to national independence and finally free the energies of the Saharawi people from the constraints of the Moroccan occupation.

 Thus, by meeting President Brahim Ghali, the Polisario Prime Minister, the Speaker of Parliament and the team of negotiators within the framework of the United Nations, the message which was transmitted to Mr. De Mistura, was that the Polisario is committed to continuing the diplomatic process of settling the conflict with Morocco and to honouring its commitments, under the auspices of the United Nations Security Council; “this path provided for by international law guarantees us to be able to achieve our independence, while calling on the international community to exert pressure on the Moroccan party, whose attitude proves that it refute all the solutions with a view to a settlement by referendum of this conflict.”

 “Our support for the diplomatic solution is part of our attachment to independence and if we continue to defend our citizens from recurrent Moroccan attacks, we do so by also undertaking all the legal steps to access our self-determination by all the means provided by the international law.”

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