The Polisario Front recalled this Tuesday, regarding France’s turn to openly support the Morocco’s autonomy plan for Western Sahara, that it is “the Sahrawi people, not France or any other country, who decide the present and future of Western Sahara.”

In a statement by Polisario Ambassador to the UN, Sidi Mohamed Omar, he recalled that “Neither France nor Morocco can bend the will of the Sahrawi people”and promised that it will continue to fight for its independence “by all legitimate means.”

For Omar, the France’s position is contrary to international lawand more specifically to its obligations as a permanent member of the Security Council, since it openly supports “the illegal occupation of Western Sahara when it is a territory pending decolonization.”

With the step taken today by President Emmanuel Macron in favor of Morocco, by declaring the autonomy plan for the Sahara as the “only basis” for resolving this conflict, France “has excluded itself from international efforts to “decolonize Western Sahara”Omar concluded.

With his statements, Omar alludes to the fact that the Western Sahara conflict falls within the competence of the Security Councilwhich annually renews the UN mission in the territory, which arrived in 1991 to theoretically organize a referendum and which now limits itself to monitoring a ceasefire broken by Polisario in 2020 with a low-intensity war.

Within the Council, France has always discreetly defended Moroccan interestswithout any clear opposition from any other power, and over the years the Council’s resolutions are gradually leaning towards the Moroccan position. The change of direction made today by France has already had other diplomatic effects: today, Algiers, a great international supporter of the Polisario Front, announced that it was withdrawing its ambassador in Paris with immediate effect.