Settlement plan stuck, Says UN envoy

The UN Special Envoy of the Secretary-General for Western Sahara, James Baker, said on Wednesday as he ended a four-day tour to the region that a territorial settlement plan over the disputed land was stuck but not dead. "It is very much still alive but it is in the ditch," he said, in a news conference in Madrid, Spain. Bakar, a former US secretary of state, toured Western Sahara, Morocco and Algeria to try and nudge the parties to a referendum on whether Western Sahara should become independent or be part of Morocco. Algeria backs the Polisario, a Western Saharan guerrilla force that has been fighting Morocco for independence of the former Spanish colony which Rabat annexed in 1975. One of the major obstacles to holding the referendum is agreement on the eligibility of voters. In a report released on 18 February, Secretary-General Kofi Annan said the UN Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara, MINURSO, had in addition to 79,000 appeals from people wishing to vote, the prospect of receiving 60,000 more. In December 1999, Annan said the appeals process could delay the referendum beyond 2002 and asked Baker to consult the parties on ways of resolving their differences.