Autonomy plan for Western Sahara

RABAT, Apr 07 (AFP): Morocco, locked in a decades-long struggle with the Polisario independence movement for control of the Western Sahara, has offered limited self-government there-but insists Rabat must keep sovereignty.
Its 15-year-old autonomy plan last month won the backing of the desert territory's former occupier Spain, whose Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez visits Rabat on Thursday to draw a line under a year-long diplomatic dispute.
Sanchez' government broke with decades of neutrality over the Western Sahara dispute, calling the 2007 plan "the most serious, realistic and credible basis" for resolving the conflict.
The Polisario has rejected the plan, continuing to demand a referendum on full self-determination.
Morocco de facto controls 80 percent of the vast desert region, rich in phosphates and with a long Atlantic coast abutting rich fishing waters.
The kingdom sees the territory as its own "southern provinces", a region it controlled before colonial Spain seized it.
Over the past four decades, Rabat has pumped investment and people into the areas it controls, according to an October report by the International Crisis Group.
The Polisario wants a fully independent Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic, a goal for which it fought a bitter 15-year war ending in a 1991 ceasefire deal.
In late 2020, following a standoff with Moroccan forces, the movement declared the truce null and void.
The United Nations last year relaunched efforts to negotiate a deal over the territory.
But King Mohammed VI reiterated in a speech last November that Moroccan sovereignty over the territory "will never be up for negotiation".
Instead, Rabat has been pushing more countries to back its "initiative for negotiating an autonomy statute for the Sahara region".