At the height of the holiday season, the UN Security Council will discuss the situation in Western Sahara on August the 8th. The meeting is taking place only two months before the October deadline, which will be dedicated to the MINURSO mandate. The presidency of the UN Security Council (United Kingdom) has scheduled the holding of a meeting on the Western Sahara issue, on the 8th of August. The session will be the first of the fifteen ones dedicated to the territorial conflict, since the adoption of the 2414 resolution. The latter extended the MINURSO's mandate to 6 months with 12 votes and three abstentions (China, Ethiopia and Russia). The above-mentioned meeting is expected to be an opportunity for the UN Personal Envoy Horst Köhler to discuss the outcomes of his recent tour to the region. The German official visited in June Morocco (Rabat, Laayoune, Smara, Boujdour and Dakhla), Algiers, the Tindouf camps and the Mauritanian capital. A meeting requested by Horst Köhler «During the meeting, the UN personal envoy to Western Sahara will not submit proposals to solve the conflict, but will instead give an overview of his last visit» to the region, a well-informed source told Yabiladi on Thursday. The same source explained to Yabiladi, that the session to be held next week was reportedly requested by Horst Köhler. The UN mediator, therefore, shows his commitment to the file by including it in the Security Council's calendar. The meeting, moreover, will give Köhler a chance to present his observations on the regional conflict. In October, the Security Council's round table will meet to discuss the extension of the MINURSO's mandate that will end on the 31st of October. For the record, Russia urged members of the council to extend the mission's term to six months in April instead of one year, which has been applied for the last eight years.
