Mission des Nations Unies pour l'organization d'un référendum au Sahara occidental

MINURSO
operation area	Western Sahara
German name	United Nations mission for the referendum in Western Sahara
English name	United Nations Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara
French name	Mission des Nations Unies pour l'organization d'un référendum au Sahara occidental
Based on UN resolution	690 (April 29 1991)
Other UN resolutions	2152 (April 29, 2014) 2218 (April 28, 2015) 2285 (April 29, 2016) 2351 (April 28, 2017) 2414 (April 27, 2018) 2440 (October 31, 2018) 2468 (April 30, 2019) 2494 (October 30, 2019)
Type of mission	Peace mission
Beginning	April 1991
The End	ongoing
management	Colin Stewart Canada
Military out
Police off
Deaths	16 (as of January 1, 2020)
costs	$ 52,519,000  (July 1, 2017 - June 30, 2018)
Location of the operational area

On the right a post of the Polisario Front, on the left behind a vehicle of the UN mission; in the south of Western Sahara (2017)

The Mission des Nations Unies pour l'organization d'un référendum au Sahara occidental , MINURSO for short ( English : United Nations Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara ) is a United Nations mission and was founded in April 1991 on the recommendation of the UN Secretary General of UN Security Council established ; the mandate includes monitoring the ceasefire in Western Sahara and holding a referendum to choose between integration into the Moroccan state and independence .

organization

View of the headquarters of the UN mission in El Aaiun in Western Sahara taken in July 2012

The maximum strength of the observer mission is 245 authorized military personnel (as of October 8, 2017), as well as 457 civilian employees and 15 UN volunteers.

The mandate of the mission, which has been regularly renewed due to the lack of a referendum and the still unresolved status of the territory, was last extended to April 30, 2019 on October 31, 2018 with UN Security Council resolution 2440 . Until 2018, the mandates had been extended by 1 year each - this now shorter time limit can be seen as a sign of the pressure on the conflicting parties to return to direct talks after the recent escalations in the buffer zone and a stagnating status quo.

The German Wolfgang Weisbrod-Weber was appointed on June 15, 2012 by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon as the new Special Representative for Western Sahara and Head of MINURSO. On July 31, 2014, the Canadian Kim Bolduc , most recently the United Nations Development Program Coordinator ( UNDP ) in Panama and Deputy Special Representative at the United Nations in Haiti ( MINUSTAH ), succeeded him. She was followed on December 1, 2017 by the Canadian Colin Stewart .

The authorized for the mission 12-month budget from July 2019 is 60,453,700  dollars .

Force Commander

No.	Surname	nationality	Beginning of the appointment	End of appointment
1.	Major General Armand Roy	Canada	1991	1992
2.	interim: Brigadier General Luis Block Urban	Peru	Apr 1992	Oct 1992
3.	Brigadier General Andre Van Baelen	Belgium	Oct 1992	Apr 1996
4th	Major General Jose Garcia Leandro	Portugal	Apr 1996	Nov 1996
5.	Major General Jorge Barroso de Moura	Portugal	1996	1997
6th	Brigadier General Bernd S. Lubenik	Austria	1997	1999
7th	Brigadier General Claude Buze	Belgium	1999	2002
8th.	Major General Gyorgy Szaraz	Hungary	2002	2005
9.	Major General Kurt Mosgaard	Denmark	Sep 2005	2007
10.	Major General Zhao Jingmin	People's Republic of China	2007	July 2011
11.	Major General Abdul Hafiz	Bangladesh	July 2011	July 2013
12.	Major General Imam Edy Mulyono	Indonesia	Aug 2013	Sep 2015
13.	Major General Tayyab Azam	Pakistan	Sep 2015	Nov 2016
14th	Major General Wang Xiaojun	People's Republic of China	March 2017	Apr. 2019
15th	Major General Zia Ur Rehman	Pakistan	Apr. 2019

German participation

The federal government has the participation of up to 16 October 2013, four officers of the Armed Forces decided and a UN request met on 16 September, 2013. The cabinet decision is valid until the end of the mission.

Swiss participation

The Swiss Army participated in MINURSO from November 1991 to August 1994 with a Swiss Medical Unit (SMU) with a maximum of 85 members. On November 10, 1993, the Federal Council decided to extend the mandate of the SMU one last time to June 30, 1994. While the majority of the SMU returned to Switzerland at the end of June 1994, individual SMU members stayed on site until August 1994 to ensure the handover to South Korea, which was the medical successor to the SMU. Since July 2011, the mission has been supported by Switzerland with two demining specialists. In July 2014, the UN asked Switzerland to send unarmed military observers. The investigations by the DDPS have shown that the Swiss army has the military observers it is looking for. The Federal Council has therefore decided to support MINURSO with a maximum of six unarmed members of the army.

swell

1. ↑ MINURSO Fact sheet. United Nations Peacekeeping Force , accessed January 1, 2020 . 
2. ↑ MINURSO Fact Sheet. Retrieved October 19, 2018 . 
3. ↑ Article in the Maghreb Post of April 28, 2018
4. ↑ Ban appoints UN official as head of mission on referendum in Western Sahara. UN, June 15, 2012, accessed June 23, 2016 . 
5. ↑ Secretary-General Appoints Kim Bolduc of Canada Special Representative, Head of United Nations Mission for Referendum in Western Sahara. UN, May 12, 2014, accessed on June 23, 2016 (English, press release SG / A / 1469-BIO / 4591-PKO / 400). 
6. ↑ UN Secretary-General statement of December 1, 2017
7. ↑ UN Peacekeeping Fact Sheet , accessed June 21, 2020
8. ↑ Current situation in the areas of operation of the Bundeswehr 42/2013. (PDF; 256 kB) Bundeswehr, accessed on June 23, 2016 . 
9. ↑ As a military observer in the Western Sahara. Bundeswehr, November 6, 2013, accessed on June 23, 2016 . 
10. ↑ admin.ch : MINURSO (West-Sahara) ( Memento from August 13, 2016 in the Internet Archive )
11. ↑ Swiss military observer for the UN mission in Western Sahara. August 20, 2014, accessed June 23, 2016 . 

See also

• Western Sahara
• Western Sahara Conflict

Web links

Commons : MINURSO  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Official MINURSO page (English)
• UN map of the conflict area (PDF file; 158 kB)
• Overview of all UN resolutions on Western Sahara since 1995