Ten African national football teams will compete in the March qualifying play-offs for the World Cup in Qatar in November. Algeria and Morocco are in the same pot for the draw, so they will not meet. That’s a relief for everyone, fans or not. Amid growing tensions between the two countries, it reduces the chances of nationalist escalation and incidents that might even lead to war. The mood was friendly when they met in the FIFA Arab Cup in December, but then the stakes were far lower.

Relations between the two countries have been strained and mistrustful since Algeria gained independence in 1962. Border disputes (notably the October 1963 Sand War) stand in the way of normalisation, as does the disputed territory of Western Sahara, which Morocco claims, while Algeria backs a self-determination referendum for the Sahrawi people and supports the separatist Polisario Front (Popular Front for the Liberation of Saguia el-Hamra and Río de Oro). This in turn is an obstacle to the economic and political integration of the Arab Maghreb Union, which has made little progress since its creation in 1989.

There has been no real movement on Western Sahara for more than 40 years, despite a ceasefire between Morocco and the Polisario Front since 1991. Morocco proposes a compromise by which Western Sahara would have a degree of autonomy but remain under Moroccan rule; Algeria rejects this and recognises the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic, which it helped to join the Organisation of African Unity (now African Union) in 1982. Morocco left the organisation in protest in 1984, and only rejoined in 2017.

The two countries have other grievances: Algeria accuses Morocco of failing to prevent contraband and drug trafficking spreading across the border. Rabat believes Algiers’s refusal to discuss the reopening of their land border, closed since 1994, is intended to punish Morocco by isolating its eastern provinces, which have traditionally traded with western Algeria.

Cold peace hots up

In recent months, the cold peace between the two countries has gradually turned to hostility, and on 24 August 2021 Algeria’s foreign minister Ramtane Lamamra announced his country was breaking off diplomatic relations with its neighbour. This was the natural outcome of an escalation process that began on 10 December 2020, when Donald Trump announced that the US would recognise Morocco’s sovereignty over Western Sahara in return for Morocco normalising relations with Israel. Algeria considers Israel an enemy and has no diplomatic relations with it.

Never, since 1948, has a member of an Israeli government been heard threatening an Arab country from another Arab country's territory Ramtane Lamamra

Though Algeria has played down Trump’s decision, it has proved a major setback, especially as the Biden administration has not reversed it. The rapprochement between the US, Israel and Morocco, and tensions between Paris and Algiers over issues including the Sahel (1), have reinforced Algeria’s sense of isolation. This first became apparent during the 2011 Arab uprisings and has been amplified by the 2019 Hirak protests, and by some 20 African and Arab states opening consulates and trade offices in Western Sahara since the US recognised Morocco’s sovereignty.

Algiers is also angry about Morocco’s use of Israeli Pegasus spyware to hack the phones of over 6,000 Algerian politicians, members of the armed forces and intelligence services, civil servants, foreign diplomats and political (including opposition) activists. For Algiers, the fact that Israeli software enabled this espionage is an aggravating factor, and Israeli foreign minister Yair Lapid poured fuel on the fire in Casablanca last August when, in the presence of his Moroccan counterpart Nasser Bourita, he voiced concerns about ‘the role played by Algeria in the region, its rapprochement with Iran and the campaign that it led against the admission of Israel as an observer member of the African Union’.

Algeria condemned this ‘barely veiled threat’ to its border: ‘Never, since 1948, has a member of an Israeli government been heard uttering threats against an Arab country from the territory of another Arab country,’ Lamamra said, announcing the diplomatic rupture with Morocco. The security agreement between Morocco and Israel signed on 24 November, during Israeli defence minister Benny Gantz’s visit to Rabat, has only deepened Algeria’s distrust.

Rights for Kabyles and Sahrawis

Another reason for Algeria’s anger is that, during a meeting of non-aligned countries in New York on 14 July last year, Morocco’s permanent representative to the UN, Omar Hilale, circulated a note declaring his country’s support for the right of the ‘valiant Kabyle people’ to self-determination. Tit for tat: since Algeria supported self-determination for the Sahrawi people, Morocco was doing the same for the Kabyles, giving credence to the claims of the Movement for the Self-Determination of Kabylia (MAK), a political organisation Algeria now considers a terrorist group. It’s clear to Algeria that normalising relations with Israel, which has considerable influence in the US, has boosted Morocco’s confidence.

Algeria has also accused Morocco of colluding with MAK separatists, whom it blames for setting the fires that devastated northern Algeria last summer, killing more than 90 people. Blaming Morocco and the MAK reinforces the message to Algerians that their borders are under threat, and aims to persuadethem to show greater restraint inthe Hirak’s protests. But it also undermines Algeria’s image abroad: the French media, among others, have called the accusation implausible. By contrast, the Algerian government has said almost nothing of Morocco’s use of Pegasus, though many Algerians, including members of the opposition, consider this large-scale espionage grounds for war.

Morocco initially showed restraint after Algeria broke off diplomatic relations, though it called the decision ‘completely unjustified’. A foreign ministry statement condemned it as ‘escalation’ and rejected the ‘fallacious, even absurd, pretexts’ underlying it, insisting that Morocco would remain a ‘credible and loyal partner’ to the Algerian people.

Yet Morocco was quick to press home its advantage. With US support, its diplomats pressured the EU, and especially Spain, to align with Washington’s position on Western Sahara. ‘Europe just needs to get out of its comfort zone and support this international trend,’ Bourita said in January 2021. A former government minister said, ‘When Trump recognised Morocco’s sovereignty over Western Sahara, that was a great victory. Until then, the US had taken a very balanced position on the conflict although, in military terms, Morocco was always its ally, while Algeria was closer to the former East Bloc, and still is closer to Russia today.’

The Moroccan government has in no way disavowed Hilale’s provocative statement on Kabyle self-determination and has kept up the pressure at the UN. Last November Hilale told the UN General Assembly’s Fourth Committee that ‘Algeria’s primary responsibility in creating and maintaining the regional dispute over the Moroccan Sahara is proven at all political, diplomatic, military, legal and humanitarian levels ... Morocco is in its Sahara and the Sahara is in its Morocco.’ This echoed a recent televised speech by King Mohammed VI on the 46th anniversary of the 1975 Green March, when 350,000 Moroccans entered Western Sahara to claim it from Spain. The king made it clear Morocco was not ready to compromise, declaring that its sovereignty over Western Sahara would ‘never be up for negotiation’.

EU-Moroccan deals cancelled

Yet Morocco has suffered setbacks too. On 10 June last year, a European Parliament resolution rejected ‘Morocco’s use of border controls and migration — especially that of unaccompanied minors — to bring political pressure to bear on EU countries’, after thousands of Moroccans entered the Spanish enclave of Ceuta, on the Mediterranean coast, to force Spain to align with the US position. On 29 November the European Court of Justice annulled two agreements between the EU and Morocco that extended the scope of a trade deal and a sustainable fisheries agreement to cover Western Sahara, on the grounds that they were made without the consent of its people.

More importantly, it found that ‘the [Polisario Front’s] role and representativeness are capable of conferring upon it locus standi [right to appear]before the EU Courts’ because it is ‘recognised internationally as a representative of the people of Western Sahara’.

Algeria’s decision to break off diplomatic relations has not ended its power struggle with Morocco. On 22 September it closed its airspace to all Moroccan planes, and on 31 October it turned off the Maghreb-Europe gas pipeline, which had supplied gas to Spain and Portugal, via Morocco, since 1996. This deprives Morocco of nearly a billion cubic metres of gas per year (some in lieu of transit fees), equivalent to 97% of its needs.

In future, Algeria will supply Spain directly, via the Medgaz pipeline, whose capacity can be boosted from the current eight billion cubic metres per year to ten. This falls short of Spain’s total needs, but Algeria has undertaken to deliver the rest in liquefied form by ship. Spain is caught between a rock and a hard place: Morocco is trying to use the threat of uncontrolled migration to force it to recognise Western Sahara as Moroccan; Algeria is using the gas supply issue to show Spain that doing so could damage its interests.

‘Escalating just war of liberation’

Meanwhile, the security situation in Western Sahara is deteriorating. On 13 November 2020 Morocco carried out a military operation in the Guerguerat buffer zone, in the far south of Western Sahara, causing the Polisario Front to declare the 1991 ceasefire null and void. On 19 November its leader Brahim Ghali said the Sahrawi people had ‘taken the sovereign decision to escalate their just war of liberation by all legitimate means’, first and foremost by armed struggle, until they were in full control of the territory. Though it’s not certain that the Polisario Front is actually capable of conducting large-scale operations in the area controlled by Morocco, the threat of renewed fighting is heightening tensions, especially as Algeria, too, is concerned about the security situation in Western Sahara.

On 1 November, the anniversary of the start of Algeria’s war of independence, and the day after it decided to stop gas exports via Morocco, three Algerian lorry drivers returning from Zouérat in Mauritania to Ouargla in Algeria were killed in a bombing, probably by a drone, in Polisario Front-controlled territory, not far from Bir Lahlou in Western Sahara. The Algerian government blamed ‘Moroccan occupation forces’ for their ‘premeditated murder’ and promised retaliation.

Could the situation erupt into armed conflict? Recent events suggest that is a serious risk. Algeria has 130,000 active soldiers, 150,000 reservists and nearly 190,000 security forces personnel, while Morocco has 310,000 active soldiers and 150,000 reservists. The two armies are therefore of similar strength, and could be tempted to use the extensive arsenals they have built up over the last decade. Between 2010 and 2020, Algeria spent $90bn on defence equipment and Morocco $36bn.

The coming weeks will tell whether more normal relations can be restored. But without proper mediation and initiatives led by wise minds from both countries, many fear a flareup in Western Sahara will lead to armed conflict. Algerian writer Amin Khan says ‘Maghrebis should remember how Iraq and Iran destroyed each other. And who benefitted? It was certainly not the Iraqi and Iranian peoples, nor even their governments.’