https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16852/nobel-peace-prize-trump-king-mohammed
Salmi Gailani, who was born in 1991, the year of the ceasefire, “blames the U.N. for the fact that for 30 years, Western Sahara has been a frozen conflict…. ’30 years is long enough to place ballot boxes,’ he said.” — Euronews, November 17, 2020.
The international community has been trying to broker a peace for the Western Sahara for 30 years. Some observers, however, suggest that “if the Polisario Front were to have sovereignty over the Western Sahara, it would mean that Algeria was effectively surrounding Morocco.”
Along with last week’s the triumph for President Trump and King Mohammed VI, there have also been charges that Morocco could have joined the Abraham Accords without the US recognizing Morocco’s sovereignty over the Western Sahara. So far, however, no one has quite said how.
Last week, US President Donald J. Trump and His Majesty King Mohammed VI of Morocco, in a move that immediately prompted calls for a Nobel Peace Prize, agreed that Morocco would be the fourth Arab country — joining the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Sudan — in establishing a solid peace with Israel this year. A felicitous reciprocity is that Morocco was the first country to recognize the United States.
Since 1975, when Spain gave up its colony in the Western Sahara, the sovereignty of the territory has been under dispute. The area, about the size of Britain, wedged between Morocco and Mauritania, runs southward along the Atlantic Ocean. The territory and its waters are rich with phosphates, bauxite, fish, and possibly offshore oil reserves. Although Morocco has officially administered the area for the last 30 years, it has been claimed by the Polisario Front, (an abbreviation for “Popular Front for the Liberation of Saguia el-Hamra and Rio de Oro”), an Algerian-backed group composed of a nomadic people, the Sahrawis.