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UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said 13 names had been submitted, but there was no agreement between the parties.
The UN chief on Friday called on Morocco and the Polisario Front to be the next special candidate for the UN special envoy to the UN conflict region of Western Sahara, after rejecting all previous candidates.
The Polisario Front has been fighting with Morocco for decades for the independence of Western Sahara, a desert region that was a Spanish colony until 1975.
“It is essential to have a mandate to relaunch the political dialogue on Western Sahara,” UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said at a news conference in Madrid with Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez.
“The difficulty is that we have already put in 13 names and so far we have not reached an agreement with the parties. It is very important … because the president needs to work with them to start a political dialogue.”
It was also critical to relaunch the dialogue on the long-term conflict “to deal with the frustrations that exist as a result of the crisis that still has no solution.”
Although Guterres did not identify the final candidate, according to UN diplomatic sources, Staffan de Mistura was a former UN special envoy to Syria. The same sources said that the Polisario had accepted his name, but that Morocco had rejected him.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken in March called on Guterres to speed up the process of appointing a new special envoy to Western Sahara, which was then a gap of nearly two years.
The post has been vacant since former German President Horst Kohler resigned in May 2019, officially for health reasons.
Morocco controls 80 percent of Western Sahara, and the rest – almost completely without enclosing the border with Mauritania – is led by the Polisario Front and is called the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic.
Rabat has granted autonomy to the vast territory but has maintained that it is part of the Kingdom of Morocco.
After 16 years of war, Rabat and the Polisario signed a ceasefire in 1991, but the UN self-determination referendum has been steadily delayed.
Western Sahara is described by the UN as a “non-self-governing territory” and the people “have not yet achieved the full measure of self-government”.
Enemies resumed in November, when the Algerian-backed Polisario announced the end of the ceasefire, after Morocco sent troops to a UN-patrolled buffer zone to reopen a key road.
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