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Rabat – Omar Hilale, Morocco’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations, has once more confronted the Permanent Representative of Venezuela on his continued attempts to drag the Sahara issue into General Assembly meetings.
At a meeting at the UN headquarters in New York to discuss the financing of the Sustaining Development Goals (SDG), Venezuela’s representative, Rafael Darío Ramírez Carreño stated that the realization of SDG objectives should take into consideration occupied territories such as Palestine and Western Sahara.
Omar Hilale promptly counterattacked, calling his remarks irrelevant to the discussion. “Apparently,” Hilale said, “the Venezuelan representative got it all wrong concerning the meeting and its agenda by mentioning Moroccan Sahara.”
Hilale brought up the Kingdom’s strong economic initiatives in the area, saying that “Morocco did not wait for SDG to be adopted to launch a sustainable development model in the Sahara with a budget that amounts to US 7 billion.”
The Moroccan representative explained furthermore that “investment rate in this region guarantee a sustainable development”, and that “all components of the local population” are included in the process. Hilale once again added that this not the case in Venezuela, “the last dictatorship in Latin America.”
“In the Sahara, men, women and children have all the food they need, and they do not have to cross frontiers to get food as it is the case right now in Venezuela”, said Hilale. “What is even more sorrowful is to see Venezuelan children looking for food in the garbage”.
Morocco’s representative went on with his rebuke of the Venezuelan regime saying that “the people of the richest country in the region, with all its oil and gas, are condemned to poverty and misery because its national wealth is in the hands of the authoritarian Chavezian oligarchy.”
Hilale expressed his surprise at the call of the President of Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro, to get humanitarian aid from the United Nations when the country is rich with oil and gas. The Moroccan diplomat stated that this request was blatant proof of the failure Venezuelan regime.
Last October at a meeting of the UN’s Fourth Committee, Ramírez Carreño made a comment that Western Sahara was the last colony in Africa. Hilale immediately responded that Venezuela, as Latin America’s last dictatorship, had no legitimacy to criticize Morocco, and he added that Morocco itself regained Western Sahara, which is part of his historical territories, from the Spanish colonizer.
