The UN Secretary General's Personal Envoy Christopher Ross announced, on Sunday at the end of the fifth informal talks on the Sahara, that the parties will meet next March for another round to develop "concrete ideas".

Spanish Foreign Minister Trinidad Jimenez said, on Thursday, that there are other alternatives to settling the Sahara conflict rather than referendum.

The network of international African experts sent, on Monday from Dakar, a letter to the United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to advocate the relevance of the Moroccan autonomy plan for the Sahara and call for a serious commitment to negotiations in order to reach a political solution to the long-standing conflict.

In an exclusive interview, published on Sunday by The Washington Post, Mustapha Salma Ould Sidi Mouloud highlighted Morocco's proposal to grant autonomy to its southern provinces, the Sahara, as the "only logical and lasting solution" that is able to end the suffering of the population held captive in the Tindouf camps, southwestern Algeria.

The Polisario leaders are in a denial of the reality that reminds "of the last days of East Germany, in which only senior officials did not watch West German television or talk to their relatives in the prosperous West," the US investigative journalist Richard Miniter wrote.