By Irwin Arieff
New York - United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan urged the Security Council on Tuesday to push Morocco and Western Sahara's independence movement to agree to direct talks to end Africa's oldest territorial dispute.
Morocco and the Polisario Front guerrilla group have been at odds for three decades over whether Western Sahara gets a promised independence vote or remains part of Morocco, which annexed it in 1975.
Because the council has refused to impose a solution, there were just two options - "indefinite prolongation of the impasse, or direct negotiations between the parties", Annan said in his latest report to the council on the dispute.
Annan has previously called for direct talks but Morocco has ruled out in advance any solution allowing Western Sahara residents a referendum on independence while the Polisario Front has insisted on such a vote.
After a six-month search for possible new approaches, UN special envoy for Western Sahara Peter van Walsum concluded that direct talks without preconditions was the only way out of the impasse, Annan said.
"Based on the assessment of the activities of my personal envoy, I would like to recommend that the Security Council call on the two parties to enter into negotiations without preconditions," the UN leader said.
But talks will not succeed unless the council "makes it absolutely clear that the exercise of self-determination is the only agreed aim of the negotiations", he added.
"If either party cannot accept this open-ended approach, there will be no negotiations," he said, insisting this outcome would mark a defeat for both sides.
In the meantime, Annan said the 220 UN peacekeepers in the territory were still needed to enforce a 1991 ceasefire and recommended the UN mission be extended another six months, until April 30, 2007. If not renewed, the mission mandate would run out at the end of October.
Morocco grabbed the north-west African territory of about 260 000 people after the withdrawal of former colonial power Spain, claiming centuries-old rights over the territory rich in phosphates, fisheries and possibly offshore oil.
That triggered a low-intensity guerrilla war between the Polisario Front and Morocco that simmered on until 1991, when the United Nations brokered a cease-fire and sent in peacekeepers in anticipation of a self-determination vote.
But the vote never took place and Morocco now insists the most it will offer is regional autonomy.