Mauritania y Marruecos reafirman su cooperación
In an official statement, the Moroccan government informed that "King Mohammed VI made a phone call on Friday to his brother Mohamed Ould Cheikh al-Ghazouani, the President of the Islamic Republic of Mauritania".
During this call, the two heads of state expressed their great satisfaction at the rapid development of bilateral cooperation between the two countries.
Furthermore, they also spoke of the great desire of both leaders to consolidate and raise this relationship "to a level that will allow this cooperation between the two neighbouring countries to deepen, broaden their perspectives and diversify their domains".
This phone call was also an occasion for recent regional events. The conflict in Guerguerat, with the Polisario Front cutting off traffic, has disrupted trade relations between Morocco and Mauritania.
On this occasion, Mohamed VI expressed his willingness to pay an official visit to Mauritania, while inviting his counterpart to visit his country.
The Moroccan government began work on Tuesday to build a road at the controversial Guerguerat pass, at the southern tip of Western Sahara, in an area that until a week ago was blocked by a group of Polisario Front militants who were evicted by the Moroccan army.
The news programme of the first Moroccan television channel showed images of several bulldozers paving the ground before proceeding to asphalting, according to an announcement on the channel by a Moroccan official named Youssef Amrah, head of the Equipment Department in the province of Auserd, to which Guerguerat belongs.
The four or five kilometres that link the Moroccan customs post of Guerguerat to the Mauritanian border are crossed by a track that is crossed daily by 200 international TIR trucks and 200 private vehicles, which cost about an hour to cross this short distance.
Half of this track has been tarmac since 2017, in the course of construction work that was also interrupted at the time by the Polisario Front, which contests the legality of this crossing and its commercial character, since according to them it is a border without legal validity and only the UN has the right to transit it.
It was precisely the continuity of road traffic and its growing pace between Morocco and sub-Saharan Africa that led Polisario to embark on a new blockade this year, which was finally broken by the Moroccan armed forces last Friday, giving rise to a series of hostilities and exchange of fire.
The Moroccan government has not yet officially announced that it intends to complete this road but was going to protect traffic safety, nor has it clarified whether the armed forces are going to remain in the place, which is a demilitarised zone under the terms of the ceasefire signed by Morocco and Polisario in 1991.
