After two days of intense informal negotiations with a very tight lid kept on what was said, Morocco and the Polisario Front agreed to meet again on a date not yet set. Algeria and Mauritania, observers of this negotiation, should also be present during the next session. According to different press sources, the two delegations shared a meal on Wednesday 11 February, even if the Polisario Front delegation had been somehow late. For the Moroccan side, the position remains more or less the same, as the Kingdom still excludes the referendum with “extreme choices” as a basis for negotiations, emphasizing that this practice remains an exception in the UNO annals. In fact, the Moroccan officials, headed by the Minister of Foreign Affairs Taïeb Fassi Fihri, estimated that it was henceforth time to get concentrated on the only realistic proposal to get out of the deadlock, namely the wide autonomy plan proposed by Morocco to the United Nations in 2007. It should be noted that it is this new dynamic that stands behind the ongoing negotiation rounds, as the UNO had affirmed in many of its resolutions the “serious and credible” character of the Moroccan initiative, and that many important powers had adjusted it. Yet, there is still this nagging attitude of Algeria about the issue, and its continuous refusal to consider Morocco’s efforts as well as the new regional state of affairs, imposing a rapid solution for the crisis.

At another level, we can also emphasize that the human rights issue in Tindouf camps was evoked during these informal negotiations, and Morocco called strongly for the spreading of the conclusions of the investigation carried out by the European Anti-Fraud Office, as their report had been mysteriously “buried”, due to Algeria’s pressures as gas owner.