By Matthew Russell Lee
UNITED NATIONS, April 12 -- A week after Inner City Press published the drafts of the UN's report on Western Sahara on which Morocco and France have been lobbying to exclude any human rights monitoring mechanism, the final report has still not been issued.
A meeting of the Troop Contributing Countries of the UN Mission MINURSO, scheduled for the morning of April 12, was canceled pending release of the report.
On the morning of April 12, Inner City Press asked Morocco's affable Permanent Representative Loulichki when the report would be published. “You know better than anyone,” he replied as he entered the Security Council chambers, in one room of which the Council was in closed door consultations.
On April 8, Inner City Press asked Secretary General Ban Ki-moon's spokesman Martin Nesirky to respond to statements in Moroccan state media that the Secretariat had been lobbied at the highest level to condemn as “unfortunate” the publication of the draft report, calling it an “internal working document.”
Nesirky angrily declined comment, telling Inner City Press “you've made your point.” But it was a question: how can the UN call a document it has shown to Moroccan, allowing it to lobby, an “internal document”?
When UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations chief Alain Le Roy took questions on Cote d'Ivoire on April 8, Inner City Press asked him to describe DPKO's role in the Western Sahara report. We all make proposals, Le Roy said, but the Secretary General makes the final decision.
Is DPKO proposing not a human rights mechanism but to welcome Morocco admitting special rapporteurs? “I don't have to answer that,” Le Roy said.
DPKO sources on April 12 indicate that the report is still “blocked” between Le Roy and Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, leading to the postponement of the TCC meeting. Meanwhile the so-called “Group of Friends” has started negotiation the MINURSO resolution, under the chairmanship of the United States.
France is fighting hard, sources say, to keep human rights monitoring out of the resolution -- while citing human rights as the basis of its actions in Libya and Cote d'Ivoire. Watch this site.
