AU : South Africa’s request to hold a Western Sahara troika meeting rejected

Members of the Western Sahara troika did not meet on the sidelines of the 34th African Union extraordinary summit, Moroccan foreign Minister Nasser Bourita said Sunday in a press release.

According to the minister, the meeting did not take place because other members felt that «a meeting under the South African presidency was going to be counterproductive». He believes that a new session of the troika under the previous South African presidency «was not appropriate because of its partial and non-objective position».

The head of diplomacy recalled that the mission of the AU presidential troika on the Sahara consists essentially of «supporting and accompanying the exclusive efforts of the United Nations in strict compliance with resolution 693», adopted during the Nouakchott summit in July 2018. Since its creation, this mechanism has held only one informal meeting in the Ethiopian capital on the sidelines of the AU Conference of Heads of State in February 2019.

Nasser Bourita the mechanism «will be balanced, since it will be composed from today of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Senegal and South Africa for one year, while from 2022 it will be headed by the DRC, Senegal and the Comoros Islands». Three countries, which support Morocco’s sovereignty over the Sahara.