Only a month into his tenure as the new Permanent Representative of Algeria to the United Nations, Amar Bendjama has already faced his first significant setback.
In his address, at the 24th annual conference held in Bali, Indonesia, Bendjama repeated Algeria’s stale and tiresome discourse about Morocco’s alleged “colonization of Western Sahara,” “ending colonization in Africa,” and “last colony in Africa,” among others.
Omar Hilale, the Permanent Representative of Morocco to the United Nations, oppugned his Algerian counterpart when answering Bendjama’s provocations.
Hilale reasserted the fact that “the decolonization of the Moroccan Sahara had been definitively completed in 1975 under the Madrid Agreement.”
“To those who still talk about ending colonialism, we tell them that the decolonization in the Moroccan Sahara has been completed. It was completed in 1975 under the Madrid Agreement, which was deposited to the Secretary-General of the United Nations and endorsed by the General Assembly of the United Nations in the same year”, noting that the Moroccan Sahara issue “is a matter of territorial integrity of the Kingdom and is not, in any circumstances, related to ending colonialism.”
He further reiterated Morocco’s commitment to the United Nations political process to solve this ongoing issue and expressed a desire for a practical and lasting solution to the regional dispute.
He went on to say, “To those who support the United Nations political process and the Personal Envoy of the Secretary-General, Staffan de Mistura, I reaffirm Morocco’s firm commitment to this process in order to reach a realistic, practical, permanent, and consensus-based solution to this regional dispute, in accordance with the decisions of the Security Council, including Resolution 2654.”
The Moroccan Times.
