The personal envoy of the United Nations Secretary-General for Western Sahara, the Italian-Swedish Staffan de Mistura, began on Sunday a two-day visit to the Sahrawi refugee camps, notably near Tindouf, in Algeria, as part of his regional tour.
For his first meeting with the Polisario Front since September 2025, Staffan de Mistura is to hold talks with the senior leaders of the SADR, the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic.
On de Mistura’s schedule are meetings with the SADR Consultative Council as well as with representatives from women’s and youth organizations and from human rights groups, which are to first gather information for the upcoming United Nations General Assembly and, more symbolically, to reassert the negotiations table led by the United States.
The objective is to engage directly with the Polisario Front as the Western Sahara negotiation process, initiated by Washington at the start of 2026, is currently at a standstill.
While Morocco, the United States and the UN have since last October chosen the Moroccan autonomy plan as a credible basis to resolve the Western Sahara conflict, the Polisario Front, supported by Algeria, only seeks guarantees of the right to self-determination.
An impasse that the UN is trying to bypass by directly engaging dialogue in the Sahrawi camps while Washington presses to find a solution as quickly as possible.
