The United Nations Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, is restarting his campaign to break the deadlock over the disputed territory of Western Sahara.

The United Nations has been trying to organise a referendum on the future of Western Sahara for seven years.

Its efforts have repeatedly floundered over the same obstacle; disagreements between Morocco and the Polisario Front over who is eligible to vote.

Both sides know that the total number of voters is key to determining who wins. Morocco wants to add 65,000 names to the voter list, but Polisario charges that these are Moroccans with no links to the territory and would swing the vote in Morocco's favour.

Mr Annan visited both neighbouring Morocco and Western Sahara earlier this month before interrupting his trip because of the crisis in Iraq.

Now he is going to Algeria, starting with the desert refugee camps in the southwest of the country which house some 150,000 Saharawis.

There, he will hold talks with leaders of the Polisario Front, the organisation which, with Algeria's backing, has been fighting for independence for the territory from Morocco.

He will later travel to Algiers and Tunisia.

Mr Annan has already proposed that the referendum should be postponed by another year until December 1999.

UN pull out possible

However, he has also warned that if the deadlock continues the UN could pull out of what has proved to be an intractable and expensive peacekeeping operation with no end in sight.

Mr Annan has now put on the table proposals for speeding up the process, but it is by no means certain they will be accepted. A compromise reached last year over the contested voters failed to resolve the issue.

Sources close to the UN operation say that Morocco is dragging out the process because it is reluctant to embark on a referendum unless assured of victory.