UN Secretary General’s Personal Envoy Staffan de Mistura is once again drawing sharp criticism for what observers see as a glaring imbalance in his handling of the Sahara file.
In his recent briefing, De Mistura targeted the Polisario Front while carefully shielding Algeria, the movement’s main backer and a party to the conflict according to the UN Secretary-General’s own latest report.
In a closed-door briefing to the Security Council on October 8, de Mistura acknowledged the deadlock in negotiations, cited ongoing ceasefire violations and a lack of trust between the parties, and faulted the Polisario for refusing to seriously examine Morocco’s autonomy plan.
Notably absent from the known passages of his presentation was any direct criticism of Algeria.
This selective approach is not new. In October 2024, de Mistura angered Rabat by reviving the long-discarded idea of partitioning the Sahara – a proposal originally floated in the early 2000s by former envoy James Baker at Algeria’s suggestion. Morocco’s Foreign Minister Nasser Bourita firmly rejected the idea, describing it as “reheated” and demanding that de Mistura identify who had pushed it back onto the table and for what purpose.
Rabat has never accepted any discussion that would compromise its territorial integrity.
Two years later, the same pattern of indulgence toward Algiers is on full display. While de Mistura now calls for strong international guarantees for any future autonomy status and meaningful consultation of local populations, he places no comparable obligations on Algeria – the state that has hosted, armed and diplomatically backed the Polisario since 1975, maintains the Tindouf camps, and publicly rejects Morocco’s autonomy initiative as the basis for talks.
Algerian officials have repeatedly made their position clear.
Foreign Minister Ahmed Attaf has dismissed the Moroccan plan, while President Abdelmadjid Tebboune has described it as a choice between “the bad and the worse.”
The latest report by Secretary-General António Guterres, dated October 1, explicitly lists Algeria among the parties to the conflict and notes the resumption of direct dialogue with Algiers for the first time in nearly seven years.
Algerian delegations have participated in recent meetings in Washington and Madrid alongside Morocco, Mauritania and the Polisario.
By focusing pressure almost exclusively on the Polisario proxies while leaving Algeria free of accountability, de Mistura risks repeating the fate of previous envoys – James Baker, Peter van Walsum, Christopher Ross and Horst Köhler – all of whom ultimately failed when they could not secure genuine engagement from the actor with the real leverage over the separatist movement.
With Resolution 2797 having established Morocco’s autonomy plan as the realistic basis for negotiations, and with the United States actively supporting that framework, the Italian-Swedish diplomat still possesses tools his predecessors lacked.