French Culture Minister Rachida Dati began a visit on Monday to disputed Western Sahara where she will meet officials and open a French cultural center in a show of support for Moroccan sovereignty over the desert territory.
Rachida Dati © Mena Today
French Culture Minister Rachida Dati began a visit on Monday to disputed Western Sahara where she will meet officials and open a French cultural center in a show of support for Moroccan sovereignty over the desert territory.
The long-frozen conflict, dating back to 1975, pits Morocco, which considers the region its own, against the Algerian-backed Polisario Front independence movement.
"This is a strong symbolic and political moment," Dati told Moroccan reporters. Her nation in July became the second permanent U.N. Security Council member after the U.S. to back Morocco's position.
French President Emmanuel Macron visited Rabat in October telling parliament that Western Sahara was Moroccan, while his foreign minister promised to expand France’s consular presence to the territory.
Economic deals worth over $10 billion were signed during the presidential visit, following which Morocco mediated the release of four French spies held in Burkina Faso.
French support for Rabat over Western Sahara irks Algiers.
Morocco has also won backing from Western Sahara's former colonial power Spain, as well as Israel and more than two dozen African and Arab nations.
The Polisario in 2020 withdrew from a U.N.-brokered truce but the conflict remains of low intensity.
By Ahmed Eljechtimi
Human Rights Watch has accused an Abu Dhabi-based security company of recruiting Colombian private military contractors and deploying them to fight alongside Sudan's Rapid Support Forces (RSF) between 2024 and 2025, adding to what the rights group describes as a growing body of evidence of Emirati military support for the paramilitary group.
Farmers across Sudan say the hike in global fuel and fertilizer costs resulting from the Iran conflict will force them to cut back on planting this summer, restricting food production in a country where war has caused acute hunger.
At least nine people were killed and six others injured when a four-storey building collapsed overnight in the Moroccan city of Fez, about 200 kilometres (124 miles) east of Rabat, local authorities said on Thursday.
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