What is going on between Algeria and Morocco?

Algeria ,Morocco

Published on Tuesday, 26 July 2016 Back to articles

AU logo (c) Embassy of Equitorial Guinea CC 2.0 flikr (httpswww.flickr.comphotosequatorial_guinea5893999448)

This article was taken from Menas Associates’ Algeria Politics & Security publication.

One of the biggest stories of the month, not just in Algeria but in the Maghreb and Africa, and one which is likely to become more significant if things develop further, concerns Morocco’s apparent attempt to rejoin the African Union (AU). It originally left 32 years ago because of the AU’s recognition of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR). Since then the SADR has had a permanent seat on the AU, while Morocco has maintained an ‘empty chair’ policy and observer status. It is the only African country which is not a member of the organisation.

Algerians, and perhaps even the government itself, only became aware of what was afoot on 15 July, when King Mohammed VI’s envoy, Morocco’s Minister Delegate for Foreign Affairs Nacer Bourita arrived in Algiers with a message from the Moroccan king for President Bouteflika. Bourita was accompanied by Morocco’s intelligence chief, Yacine El Mansouri, who is the head of the Directorate General for Research and Documentation (DGED).

Algeria’s official statements suggest that Bourita and El Mansouri met with Prime Minister Abdelmalek Sellal, who usually stands in for Bouteflika on such occasions, and General Athman ‘Bashir’ Tartag.  Details of the meeting have not been disclosed.

However, also on 15 July, another Moroccan envoy, Taib Fassi Fihri, met Kenya’s President Uhuru Kenyatta in Nairobi to lobby African leaders and to say that Rabat wanted to re-join the AU without any preconditions. The AU summit was being held in Rwanda’s capital, Kigali, on 17-18 July.

Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame apparently met King Mohammed VI and invited him to personally start the reintegration process with a speech at the Kigali summit. The incumbent AU president, Chad’s President Idriss Déby, agreed with this approach.

Déby was quoted on the sidelines of the summit as saying: ‘Morocco is an African country and a founding member of the OAU, which it left 32 years ago for reasons of its own. Morocco has the right to return to the family of the AU when and how it wants. Nobody has the right to stop it. It is a country of the continent. […] Only seizures of power by illegal means can lead to the suspension of a country.’

The timing of the meeting in Algiers and the events in Nairobi and Kigali were clearly not coincidental.  Local speculation is that the envoy’s visit to Algiers was to brief the government on Morocco’s intention regarding the AU and to sound out Algeria, an influential member of the AU, on the move.

A former Algerian diplomat, Abdelaziz Rahabi, gave a press interview in which he said that, if Morocco wanted to return to the AU, it was because it realised that its policy had been counter-productive. Significantly, Rahabi implied that, if Morocco did return to the AU, it would be seen as a victory for the Sahrawi cause because it would effectively mean that Morocco had acknowledged the SADR and the Western Sahara as a state.

Sellal, along with Foreign Minister Ramtane Lamamra and the Minister for Maghreb Affairs, the African Union and the Arab League, Abdelkader Messahel, all issued press statements on 21 July broadly supporting Morocco’s return to the AU. All three stressed that Morocco’s membership could not be conditional, and that it could not affect the SADR’s membership. However, they gave no inkling of what had been discussed in Algiers on 15 July, and least of all why the two intelligence chiefs had been present.

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