Inside the secret US-led talks to solve the Western Sahara conflict
Submitted by Ignacio Cembrero on Fri, 03/06/2026 - 15:07
Back-door diplomatic efforts between Morocco and pro-independence Polisario Front show no sign of progress
US and Moroccan flags appear next to a US State Department-authorised map of Morocco that includes the-disputed territory of Western Sahara, December 2020 (AFP) Off The United States has intensified its efforts to resolve the long-standing conflict between Morocco and Western Sahara independence supporters since last autumn, organising three secret meetings that brought together the main protagonists for the first time in years.
However, according to Middle East Eye's diplomatic sources, the task is proving more difficult than initially thought.
As with conflicts between Israelis and Palestinians in Gaza, Armenia and Azerbaijan or Thailand and Cambodia, US President Donald Trump wants to cast himself as a peacemaker on African soil as well.
Washington is keen to resolve the Western Sahara conflict in a way that satisfies Morocco without humiliating Algeria, a key backer of the Polisario Front, the armed Sahrawi liberation movement that has fought for Western Sahara’s independence since 1973.
In the last month alone, three rounds of negotiations have been convened at the foreign minister level, but with little result.
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According to sources who spoke to MEE, Washington wants to move quickly but is encountering major divergences between the main actors, especially on the degree of autonomy granted to the region and the involvement of the Sahrawi people in the final settlement of the issue.
The conflict in Western Sahara erupted over half a century ago when Spain withdrew from its last African colony in 1975. The United Nations designate the region as a non-self-governing territory. Since a 1991 ceasefire, 80 percent of the territory is controlled by Morocco up to a defensive wall it built in the 1980s, while the rest is held by the Polisario Front.
The 266,000 sqkm desert is sparsely populated. The vast majority of the around 600,000 inhabitants are Moroccans, many of them soldiers, while the indigenous Sahrawi population numbers fewer than 50,000. Some 165,000 Sahrawis live as refugees in camps in neighbouring Algeria.
Face-to-face meeting
The conflict between Morocco and the Polisario Front has remained largely frozen over the past decades, as plans to hold a referendum on independence, requested by the UN and Sahrawi independence activists, were never realised.
In the meantime, Morocco has cemented its presence in the region, suppressed Sahrawi activism, lobbied states to recognise its sovereignty there and presented a new plan in 2007 to settle the conflict by offering Western Sahara a degree of autonomy.
At the end of his first term, in December 2020, Trump recognised Moroccan claims of sovereignty over Western Sahara in a post on X. In return, the kingdom joined the Abraham Accords and restored diplomatic ties with Israel. The US was the first western state to take that step.
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In July 2024, French President Emmanuel Macron followed suit, leading to a serious diplomatic crisis with Algeria.
After returning to the White House for a second term last year, Trump waited for 10 months before reiterating his support for Morocco’s claims of sovereignty over Western Sahara.
He pushed for it at the UN through Resolution 2797, which states that “genuine autonomy under Moroccan sovereignty could constitute a most feasible solution” for Western Sahara and that negotiations should therefore be based on “Morocco’s Autonomy Proposal”. The text was adopted on 31 October, with Russia and China abstaining.
The resolution marked an unprecedented level of support for Morocco within the UN Security Council.
First drafted in 2007, Morocco’s autonomy plan originally ran to just three brief pages. Even so, numerous European countries, including Spain, the former colonial power, have backed it in recent years.
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Rabat had long refused to flesh out the proposal until the Trump administration urged it last autumn to produce a more substantive offer. Three royal advisers - Fouad Ali El Himma, Taieb Fassi-Fihri and Omar Azziman - expanded it to 38 pages in January.
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Armed with that plan, Massad Boulos, Trump’s envoy for Africa, has convened three secret rounds of talks in less than a month, between late January and late February.
Two were held in Washington and one in Madrid. All were attended by the heads of diplomacy from Morocco and the Polisario Front, as well as those of neighbouring Algeria and Mauritania. The latest meeting, held in Washington on 23 and 24 February, took place during the middle of Ramadan - timing the delegations did not appreciate, according to UN sources who spoke to MEE.
Moroccan and Sahrawi representatives had not met face-to-face since March 2019 in Geneva, under UN auspices. The mere fact that all parties responded to Boulos’ summons constitutes a diplomatic success for Washington. The UN has been sidelined, although Staffan de Mistura, the secretary-general’s envoy for Western Sahara, has been attending the talks.
While Moroccan media outlets routinely brand the Polisario Front a terrorist organisation and applaud efforts by US lawmakers to place the Sahrawi movement on a blacklist alongside the Palestinian Hamas and Lebanese Hezbollah, Moroccan Foreign Minister Nasser Bourita now sits across the table from Mohamed Yeslem Beissat, the foreign minister of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic run by the Polisario Front.
The two are the negotiators, as Boulos has made clear. The Sahrawi delegation, however, operates under Algerian tutelage.
Limited autonomy
The pace of the meetings underscores the urgency of US diplomacy. Washington has set its sights on reaching an agreement by spring.
Beyond claiming another diplomatic victory, the Trump administration is keen to please Morocco. Relations between Washington and Rabat have long been strong, but the kingdom has now become the US’ leading ally in Africa alongside Egypt.
‘[Morocco’s] aim is to leave not the slightest opening that could allow the region to move toward self-determination’
- Veteran diplomat
King Mohammed VI was the first, on 19 January, to accept Trump’s invitation to join the “Board of Peace” created to govern post-war Gaza. The Moroccan army will also serve alongside Indonesia’s as one of the two most important pillars of the future International Stabilisation Force that the US plans to deploy in the Gaza Strip.
However, negotiations had barely begun when Boulos acknowledged the difficulty of wrapping them up quickly.
In remarks to Deutsche Welle TV after the Madrid meeting, he said: “It takes time, but it is already on the path toward resolution.” The process could be “more or less long,” he added. That was his only public comment.
The four Arab delegations have remained silent, following his instructions, though the tone at the negotiating table has been heated. The delegations were barely polite, according to MEE sources.
Excerpts of the revised autonomy plan have leaked through the Moroccan’ pro-government press, but they are partial and lack credibility, appearing to have been embellished. They mention, for instance, the creation of a technical committee to fine-tune the Moroccan proposal without the Polisario Front's participation - an unlikely scenario.
No reliable information on the plan’s content is currently available. From what little has emerged, the talks focus on the autonomy offer that the Polisario Front refused to discuss just months ago, as it considers any solution that excludes a referendum on self-determination for the Sahrawi people unacceptable.
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In theory, Rabat’s proposal would grant Western Sahara, under Moroccan sovereignty, a degree of self-rule comparable to that of some Spanish regions.
Morocco’s text is full of safeguards aimed at ensuring the maintenance of its authority. Rabat is determined to ensure that autonomy does not slip beyond its control.
“The aim is to leave not the slightest opening that could allow the region to move toward self-determination,” a veteran diplomat with experience in the Maghreb told MEE.
For instance, the draft provides that the future president of the Sahara region would be appointed by the king rather than elected by the local parliament.
By contrast, the Polisario Front seeks a looser relationship with Morocco, according to the same source. It hopes to turn Western Sahara into a free associated state, akin to Puerto Rico or the Northern Mariana Islands in their ties to the United States.
The territory could even have its own constitution.
No sign of Morocco-Algeria reconciliation
The Polisario Front delegation also insists that the new status agreed at the end of the negotiations must be approved at the ballot box by the Sahrawi people dispersed between Western Sahara and the refugee camps, and by no one else.
It considers its stance supported by Resolution 2797, which mentions the objective of “achieving a final and mutually acceptable political solution that provides for the self-determination of the people of Western Sahara”.
Rabat categorically rejects this option. It wants the agreement to result in a reform of its constitution to accommodate regional autonomy, which would be voted on not only by the Sahrawis but also by all 37 million Moroccans, most of whom support their government on this issue.
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The Sahrawi delegation also doubts that a centralised and authoritarian state such as Morocco can incorporate and respect genuine autonomy.
Were the experiment to succeed in the Sahara, it could prove attractive to other Moroccan regions, such as the Rif in the country’s north, where economic and cultural demands were suppressed in 2017. The four leaders of that peaceful uprising are serving prison sentences ranging from 15 to 20 years.
Royal adviser Azziman, Morocco’s former ambassador to Madrid, was summoned back to Rabat in 2010 by King Mohammed VI to draft an “advanced regionalisation” plan drawing on his experience in Spain. He proposed transferring powers and budget authority from the capital to the regions, whose presidents could be directly elected.
However, the plan was shelved for fear that the authority of the central government would be diluted.
These points of contention between the parties, coupled with the Moroccan plan’s exclusion of any official recognition of Sahrawi identity - including a flag and an anthem - make the US task particularly difficult.
In Washington’s view, resolving the Western Sahara conflict is only a first step. Next would come reconciliation between the two Maghreb heavyweights, Algeria and Morocco, who severed relations in 2021, notably over the Western Sahara issue.
“We’re working on Algeria and Morocco right now, our team,” Trump’s Middle East envoy, Steven Witkoff, told CBS in October.
“And there’s going to be a peace deal there in the next, in my view, 60 days,” he added.
The White House hopes to rely on both countries to counter China’s influence in Africa. More than four months have passed since then, and there is still no sign of rapprochement.
Meanwhile, no date has been set for a possible fourth meeting between the parties involved in the Western Sahara conflict, according to the sources.
Western Sahara Madrid News Post Date Override 0 Update Date Mon, 05/04/2020 - 21:19
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