At least on one of the fronts on which Algeria is currently embroiled in conflict, the situation could calm down somewhat. Not immediately, of course, but in the future, if a negotiated solution or at least an approximation can be achieved. On Thursday, UN Secretary General António Guterres appointed Staffan de Mistura as the new special envoy for the Western Sahara conflict, the post has been vacant since German ex-President Horst Köhler resigned it in 2019 for health reasons.
De Mistura is a seasoned negotiator, but in his previous position as UN Representative for Syria, he could only watch a hot conflict escalate. And yet there are hopes that the diplomat could set something in motion in the Western Sahara conflict that has led to a cold war between Algeria and Morocco since the mid-1970s: At that time, the kingdom occupied the former Spanish colonial area on its southern border, the republic Since then, Algeria has hosted the West Saharan independence movement Polisario. To this day, the rival neighbors are on the lookout for each other, get caught up in the arms race and in diplomatic feuds – Algiers reacted to Moroccan military exercises at the end of August by blocking its airspace for aircraft from the neighboring country.
But even if De Mistura succeeds in immediately reviving “especially the round table talks”, as the Foreign Office in Berlin hopes, the sky over North Africa will continue to resemble a gigantic roundabout. as commentators joked on Twitter: Not only Moroccan machines that want to go east currently have to avoid the large landmass of Algeria, also some aircraft that want to go from north to south fly a detour: In response to statements by French President Emmanuel Macron, Algiers has military machines Former colonial power withdrawn the right to fly over at the beginning of the week. Supply flights for the up to 5,000 soldiers from France stationed in the Sahel zone to fight terrorism now take significantly longer.
Macron strongly criticizes the “politico-military system” of Algeria
The sentences from Paris, which so aroused the leadership in Algiers, linked poorly healed wounds from the past with faults from the present. At the end of September Macron was a guest at a working group of young people on the Algerian war, and quotations were soon in Le Monde to read. In a nutshell, the President accused Algeria’s “politico-military system” of failing to do its homework and still using colonialism to excuse its own failure. “The Algerian nation has been living on a memory since 1962 that says: France is the problem,” Macron is quoted as saying.
Macron’s words certainly contain uncomfortable truths for Algiers, the government under President Abdelmajid Tebboune, who came into office in 2019, has so far not presented any idea how it could calm the troubled domestic political situation. The protest movement Hirak, which mobilized hundreds of thousands of demonstrators week after week in 2019 and 2020, is still active because, after the departure of permanent president Abdelaziz Bouteflika, the people at the top of the state were exchanged, but the opaque system of military clanships remains , Secret services and industrial tycoons rule. Other statements by Macron, according to Algiers, question the Algerian nation as a whole, for example when he said that the Ottomans had colonized the country long before the French.
Algeria’s press spoke of an “unprecedented crisis”, the government of “irresponsible statements” and dismissed its Paris ambassador. The fact that Macron shortly afterwards sent more conciliatory tones to the south contributed just as little to the relaxation as his efforts to come to terms with the Algerian war, at least in some aspects. Apart from debates about the past, there is a current issue that is burdening relations: France has announced that it will cut the number of visas for applicants from the Maghreb states in half because they did not cooperate sufficiently in the withdrawal of rejected citizens.
That may help Macron to show strength against right-wing competitors in the looming election campaign – the announcement certainly does not solve another problem: never before have so many Algerians tried to flee via the Mediterranean route as this year.