Historical Dictionary of Western Sahara Third ... - Scarecrow Press

INTRODUCTION • lxi
of Conduct during the run-up to the planned referendum. Some degree
of optimism was generated by this agreement, and indeed, MINURSO’s
Identification Commission was able to resume its activity during late
1997 and 1998, qualifying over 86,000 voters before the process broke
down again, this time over the UN mission’s disqualification of another
130,000 or so Saharawis and Morocco’s threat that it would lodge appeals
with the UN against this negative action. This implied many more
months of work by the UN, with no assurance either that Rabat would
not repeat its prior conduct with regard to appeals or that the Polisario
Front would not behave in much the same manner, by way of response.
Meanwhile, charges made by international human rights organizations,
as well as such former UN employees as Charles Dunbar and Frank
Ruddy, that MINURSO had been largely supine in the face of persistent
Moroccan intimidation of the Saharawi population (and even of UN
peacekeepers themselves) during the 1990s could only lead to more
questioning of the world body’s sincerity and determination to bring the
Western Sahara dispute to a fair conclusion.
In October 2000, with the Identification Commission in full shutdown
and with less than 200 MINURSO troops policing the cease-fire
in the territory, Kofi Annan proposed that James Baker once again attempt
to reconcile the parties, this time by going outside the original
1990–91 referendum plan entirely, instead formulating a proposal that
would offer “some devolution of governmental authority” on the part of
Morocco that would be “genuine, substantial, and in keeping with international
norms.” In other words, this represented the first time that
the United Nations had explicitly embraced the concept of possibly
granting internal autonomy to Western Sahara under overall Moroccan
rule, either permanently or (as turned out to be the case) for an interim
period preparatory to a decision on the desert territory’s final status. After
an extensive series of consultations, Baker presented a so-called
Framework Agreement Proposal to the UN Security Council in June
2001, which would set up a transitional Western Sahara Authority to
handle purely local administrative affairs, while leaving foreign relations,
defense, and other key attributes of territorial sovereignty to Rabat’s
government. The proposal, which covered less than two pages,
was vague on whether the UN would have any role in this process, provided
for significantly different (and more lenient) voter-eligibility criteria
than Javier Pérez de Cuéllar’s 1990–91 referendum plan, and also